What kind of movements are called creative and why

Not only are students sharing a physical space and moving together, but are learning the many different responses to different movement ideas. Students are able to experience participating in a group and engage in defining oneself and their confidence within the classroom. Both sides of the brain are engaged during creative movement class that helps to increase memory and communication skills. Motor and rhythmic skills, strength, flexibility, coordination and endurance flourish when children are given the opportunity to practice them.

Children are introduced to concentration and must determine when it is appropriate to move in certain situations. Not only are they practicing respecting the space of others, but respecting the differences of those around them. Students will explore movement forms as more than just physical activity; they will appreciate movement as an art form, means of self expression, a vital aspect of culture, and an opportunity to explore new perspectives and understandings of oneself and world.

This course will give students practice in designing movement learning experiences for persons of all ages. Text: Schrader, C. Also many activities are linked to written assignments.

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Children react to the world in physical ways. By the time they get to elementary school, they still feel comfortable in that nonverbal language: creative movement. To ignore this natural resource is a waste, a barrier to the process of education.

In his book Frames of Mind , Howard Gardner documented seven kinds of intelligences common to human beings. In my work I seek not only to expand on one of those modes of intelligence—bodily-kinesthetic—but to use it to reach other intelligences as well. The arts and education are truly inseparable: You cannot study the arts without learning concepts of math, science, history, and problem solving, nor can you be truly educated if you are ignorant of the role of the arts in culture and history.

When we consciously integrate the arts and education, the benefits of each are magnified. Increased comprehension. Interpreting a concept through physical means like the lesson on sound waves helps children—especially those at the elementary level—to grasp, internalize, and maintain abstract information. In mathematics, for example, children can explore geometric shapes by stretching their bodies and long pieces of elastic and discovering the relationship of one shape to another.

To help with fractions, children can make complicated rhythm charts that govern the timing of their dancing—for example, eight runs take the same time as four skips or two body swings, or one circle ending in a pivot turn.

By linking different combinations of these movements, children can practice adding mixed fractions. Many science lessons, too, can be taught by incorporating kinesthetic activities. The principles governing light waves, animal adaptation, kinetic energy, body systems, simple machines, and even aspects of molecular energy can all be graphically and experientially demonstrated through children's bodies.

The child who is Venus will be the only one rotating clockwise; Mercury will revolve around the Sun four times faster than Earth. Whole language. Why not expand the concept of whole language to include movement? Because it is expressive, informative, and analytical, creative movement can heighten these language arts. For example, by improvising creative movement to explore the feelings and themes in stories, children do a nonverbal character analysis and experience the cause-and-effect of events, which they can then verbalize.

Creative movement can also help them remember sequences of events or fill in details of a story's setting. Let them bring the movements together into an autobiographical dance, and have the other kids respond and interact. Specifically, following non-linear pedagogy approaches, an intervention called movement improvisation is introduced. Ecological dynamics principles are used to explain how improvising with movement in a risk-friendly environment can lead to cognitive, affective, social, and cultural repertoire expansion.

To interrogate this argument further, the review concludes with possible solutions to withstand research challenges and raises future study questions. Overall, combining creativity and movement sciences in this review demonstrates the potential for well-designed movement interventions to ignite creative potential for individuals and overcome the tendency to remain anchored in a state of inertia.

To adapt to this ever-changing world and solve the problems that changes might engender from daily hassles to wicked societal issues, creativity has been identified by organizations around the world e. Consequently, a growing number of scholars are studying this skill to better capture its antecedents, components, and mechanisms Hennessey and Amabile, ; Choi et al.

As a result of this research endeavor, creativity developed from being defined as the generation of ideas, insights, or solutions that are new and meant to be useful Sternberg and Lubart, , p. It is this holistic, embodied, and interactive conceptualization of creativity that raises some challenges when it comes to building effective interventions designed to nurture creative potential Vaughan et al.

In fact, scientists have not yet clearly identified which pedagogical practices lead to creative potential enhancement Barbot et al. Empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of interventions targeting a holistic interplay between the external world and the internal one is lacking Torrents et al. Moreover, the intertwined connection between the body, the mind, and the environment has been overlooked excluding the role of the body or its physical context from most creativity enhancement interventions Malinin, To address these limitations, this paper critically reviews the creativity and movement sciences literature to suggest future development in the field of creativity enhancement interventions.

By combining existing creativity and movement theories, the goal is to provide researchers and practitioners a framework to influence the actor-environment interactions through enriched movement activities. When thoughtfully designed, these movement activities could help people explore, unfold, and better exploit their creative potential at the everyday level see creative potential elements section next to reach higher psychological functioning and overall wellbeing.

To achieve these goals, the first section defines relevant terms and reviews mainstream creativity theories, concepts, and frameworks to connect the interacting actor and environmental elements underpinning creative potential.

To build a strong argument supporting the benefits of movement interventions on these elements, the second section reviews movement sciences literature to highlight the principles underlying the design of enriched movement activities. The third section introduces movement improvisation to exemplify how enriched movement activities can ignite creative potential growth while the fourth section explains the mechanisms of change occurring when one engages in such activities.

Finally, the fifth section raises challenges and future research directions. The term creative potential is key in this review and must be carefully defined to situate and focus our perspective. In this conceptualization, the potential for originality and effectiveness of an actor is intertwined with a sociocultural context.

It is thus multifaceted and presents a unique combination of resources that interact together within the creative phenomenon Barbot et al.

According to the 4Cs framework Kaufman and Beghetto, , creative achievements can be distributed along a developmental continuum starting from mini-c personally novel and meaningful interpretation of experiences, actions, ideas , to little-c everyday creative achievements and pro-c professional creative achievements and innovations , ending rarely with Big-C eminent creative contribution.

Before we explore in depth how enriched movement activities can provide opportunities for these creative endeavors, it is essential to pinpoint the key elements that constitute the embedded individual creative potential. By gathering various theories, concepts, and evidence into a framework, we aim to expand the horizon of intervention and provide a holistic foundation for the design of enriched movement activities intended at fostering creative potential.

As such, the role of the environment is over-simplified as a conditioning factor experienced by the actor. This relational perspective makes the notion of affordances relevant to the design of creativity enhancement interventions. Environmental manipulation thus impacts on what behavior is performed in a certain setting e. Yet, affordances are more than mere opportunity provided by the material world. That is, the experiential knowledge we have as humans, of what objects and spaces are for, is influenced by cultural norms and social interactions.

This means that an affordance can be perceived or not differently by individuals coming from different sociocultural backgrounds and possessing a distinct set of skills and thus invite distinct behaviors which influence the likelihood of creative outputs.

To better exploit the relational and resourceful nature of affordances in the design of creativity intervention, the next section highlights the bidirectional transaction between actors and their cultural, social, and material context. Consider for example the oversimplified conceptualization of collectivist versus individualistic cultures and the role of the latter over the former in creative-product outcomes see Runco, , for a review.

Beyond this, often-stereotyped, impact of culture on creativity at the societal level i. More precisely, research have shown that cultural values oriented toward freedom, autonomy, risk taking, and playfulness are conducive of creativity enhancement in various domains Hennessey and Amabile, ; Davies et al. Yet, to translate into optimal environments, these values must be carefully instilled and accepted by people within each micro-culture e.

For example, a systematic review of educational research articles showed that creativity is enhanced when students are given some control over their learning and are encouraged to take risks within an environment that provides a balance between structure and freedom Davies et al. A similar tension must be maintained for risk-permissive cultural norms to lead to creative behaviors.

Finally, reasonable evidence supports the role of playful environments, at all ages, for the development of creative skills e. Although we are certainly products of the various macro and micro cultures we daily navigate Runco, , cultures are produced and reproduced.

Therefore, how creative values are developed, shared, transmitted, and transformed through social interactions is a question that deserves further attention. So, what actor-audience interactions are favorable for everyday creativity to happen? Cultural values and practices encouraging freedom, autonomy, risk taking, and playfulness entail variable challenges for everyone actively part of that creativity supportive culture.

For someone to perceive and positively navigate these challenges, the quality of the social interaction matters greatly. According to Edmondson and Mogelof , the role of interpersonal relationships throughout the creative development process is crucial to help actors cope with perceived risk of failure, novelty, and ambiguity.

Although risk-taking is promoted within a group, some individuals might need extra support from their leaders or peers to deal with their initial fear of making mistakes, losing their landmark, or feeling uncomfortable. Specifically, interpersonal climate, characterized by psychological safety, has been shown to lead to increased creativity in a number of different contexts including the workplace Edmondson, ; Edmondson and Mogelof, , the classroom Davies et al.

Psychological safety describes interactional spaces that are safe for interpersonal risk taking and where speaking up about concerns, reporting mistakes, exposing thoughts, or suggesting new ideas is positively received.

It stems from mutual respect and trust among group members providing to all, the confidence that they will not be ridiculed, rejected, or reprimanded for expressing different thoughts or behaviors Edmondson, ; Edmondson and Mogelof, Interpersonal trust, a core element of psychological safety, is of particular interest when it comes to enhancing creativity.

These authors showed that trust was indeed linked to innovative work behaviors through connectivity and thriving i. Amongst other behaviors, frequent verbal interactions showing support, encouragement or appreciation within team settings was associated to increased connectivity hence broadening possibilities for actions and creativity Losada and Heaphy, In addition to relationships with peers, whether individuals feel safe to express their creativity has frequently been associated with leadership behaviors Edmondson and Lei, For instance, inclusive leadership manifested by openness and availability, was positively related to psychological safety leading to increased involvement in creative work Carmeli et al.

Similarly, creative growth was made possible in newcomers when trust in leadership was rated as high in the workplace Harris et al. In the classroom, teachers instilling trust by showing respect, care and tolerance for differences Richardson and Mishra, as well as responsiveness i.

Therefore, both parties must invest effort to establish trusting, connected and vulnerable relationships.

Watson et al. To circumvent the limiting impact of the cultural and social influences on the perception of materiality, some individuals have re-claimed public spaces and objects by using them in unorthodox manners. For instance, an experienced traceur may perceive a fence as an opportunity for testing a new vault to express agency whereas a businessman might perceive it as an obstacle that will make him late to his meeting.

The relationship between affordances, perceptions and action is an important mechanism underlying creative potential fulfilment. On the one hand, creativity supportive cultural values make people more inclined to explore their environments, while social interactions make them feel safe to take risks, make mistakes and express their idiosyncrasies. Instead of focusing uniquely on developing creativity related skills in actors, practitioners and researchers should also assess the current state of an environment and adapt or manipulate certain elements to make it a risk-friendly one.

For instance, the Componential Model of Creativity Amabile, ; Amabile and Pratt, posits that domain-relevant skills e. Similarly, the Investment Theory of Creativity Sternberg, holds that creativity requires a confluence of six distinct, but interrelated, resources grouped under three umbrellas; cognitive resources i. Following an embodied conceptualization of creativity, we consider these three variables as being closely if not fully intertwined. However, because creative potential is frequently associated with affective states and cognitive skills in the literature while the role of the body is ignored, we create distinct sections to review existing frameworks as a heuristic strategy, one that is not intended to imply there are separate elements.

We aim at reuniting these variables in our suggested framework. To navigate risk-friendly environments effectively, possessing or developing certain affective attributes and states can be helpful. In contemporary use, affect refers to the mental states that involve judgment and the conscious experience of feeling Ekkekakis, ; Barrett and Russell, It encompasses a range of general, dispositional, time independent characteristics, to more time constrained concepts Janelle et al.

Early in the history of creativity research, scholars were interested in the association between dispositional characteristics and creative potential Choi et al. For instance, results of a meta-analysis revealed that creative artists and scientists tend to be open to new experiences, self-accepting, hostile, and impulsive Feist, More recently, building on the Big Two model of personality Digman, , plasticity — i.

Because open-minded individuals are more inclined to explore, adapt to novel situations, question social norms, and seek out stimulating experiences, this disposition might facilitate the usage of affordances in creative ways. Yet, the openness-creativity relationship is not strictly direct. Indeed, intrinsic motivation was found to play a mediating role in this relationship in undergraduate management students Prabhu et al.

In other words, it requires a strong drive and will to bring up new ideas or solutions in most socio-cultural contexts. In this vein, it was shown that the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity was mediated by the willingness to take risk in research and development employees Dewett, Accordingly, the Triangular Theory of Creativity Sternberg, stipulates that optimal levels of creativity result from a willingness to defy the crowd e.

This willingness to defy the status quo also comes hand in hand with the capacity of an individual to tolerate ambiguity. The mood-creativity relationships has been extensively studied because mood often serves as a mediating state between situational and personality predictors and creative performance Baas et al.

According to the circumplex model of affect Russell, , mood can be classified based on two dimensions: activation and valence. Activation refers to the level of energy sensed while valence underlies the level of pleasantness experienced Russell, The impact of the four mood categories i.

The impact of both pleasant and unpleasant moods on creativity can also be facilitated by supportive social interactions George and Zhou, On the other hand, because both pleasant and unpleasant deactivating moods such as calm and sadness lead to inaction and disengagement with the environment, they are less conducive to creativity Baas et al.

The impact of cognitive processes on creativity are explained more in depth in the following section.

Among the cognitive skills associated with creativity, divergent thinking DT is a reliable and reasonably valid predictor of creative potential Runco and Acar, and is the central construct behind most creativity tests e.

Specifically, facing an open-ended problem, DT encompasses the capacity of an individual to generate many ideas or solutions i. According to this framework, persistent and flexible thinking represents two functional ways to generate creative solutions. Specifically, to come up with novel associations, one must show persistence to focus and explore in depth a limited number of potential solutions De Dreu et al. The fact that unpleasant moods such as anxiety signal a problematic situation, and thus force people to deploy additional effort to solve the challenge at hand, supports the positive link between unpleasant mood and creative solutions through persistence George and Zhou, On the other hand, the same level of creativity might be achieved through flexible mind wandering.

In this instance, a pleasant mood might signal a problem free situation facilitating effortless thinking and openness to ideas coming from diverse areas Fredrickson, Perspective taking has also been shown to be an important cognitive skill to unlock team creativity Grant and Berry, ; Hoever et al.

Importantly, a distinction must be acknowledged between divergent thinking theories and perspectival approaches to creativity. As described above, the former assume that ideas come to mind through pre-existing knowledge association.

However, the latter considers the origin and dynamic of ideas as fundamentally social. Accordingly, generating fluid, flexible, and original thoughts is not sufficient to become creative.

One must possess or develop the confidence to take action on those thoughts and share them with others. The Creative Behavior as Agentic Action CBAA posits that this decision to act creatively is influenced by two keys factors: creative confidence and perceived value of creativity Karwowski and Beghetto, Creative confidence encompasses two types of self-beliefs.

Finally, perceiving creative activities as worthwhile is essential. In a series of studies, Karwowski and Beghetto confirmed that creative potential works through creative confidence to influence creative behavior and that valuing creativity moderate both the creative potential-behavior relationship and the creative confidence-behavior one. In fact, the role of physical expression has been either ignored or only indirectly addressed by most actor-oriented frameworks presented above underlying their dualistic tendencies which prevent them to address the complex interactions linking the mind-body-environment.

To adopt an embodied perspective, a deeper dive into the physicality of creativity is needed. In synergy with affects and cognitions, the body participates in the emergence of creative actions.

Accordingly, a recent framework developed by Creely et al. Embodiment is based on the premise that the brain and body are intrinsically coupled Gallagher, When considered as a corporeal connection with others and the material world, embodied creativity often relates to domains such as music, painting, sculpture, and performing arts where senses, feelings, and the totality of the environment of things are engaged through the body Creely et al.

In this vein, over the last decades, researchers from various branches of movement sciences have been exploring the body as a vehicle to express creativity. It can support the resolution of pre-established problems or the expression of an idea or an emotion by the means of the human body Wyrick, ; Bournelli et al.

Motor creativity has thus been linked to various types of creative artifacts from the emergence of novel dance movements Torrents et al. Although motor creativity research is contributing to deepening the understanding of creativity as an embodied concept, the fact that creative movement and performance have mainly been considered as end points leaves underexplored the potential of moving creatively as a means for people to reach their full creative potential Rasmussen et al.

The goal of the first section was to review the elements that have been linked to creative potential fulfilment. Hence, compared to unidimensional approaches adopted by many studies aiming at enhancing creativity Scott et al.

To facilitate the emergence of creative actions, interventions should favor activities that integrate a combination of multiple elements of the system. We thus suggest that creative potential can be nurtured through a systemic approach because it captures interactions between various elements while providing different levels of explanation and perspectives which predict the emergence of creative actions Poutanen, Whereas the review divided the elements in distinct sections, Figure 1 reunites them to emphasize a holistic and embodied perspective of creativity.

Both strands are intertwined to support creative actions through these interactions influencing the perception of affordances. Of course, not all systems initially present facilitating interacting elements.

Each element act as rate limiters on the emergence of creative actions Renshaw et al. This can be exemplified by actors exhibiting cognitive rigidity or environments governed by an authoritarian culture limiting the creative potential of the system. In this latter case, well designed creativity enhancement interventions could potentially improve the system or provide additional resources to provoke or accelerate the growth of creative potential.

As mentioned previously, the transformational potential of using creative movement to nurture the creative potential system has been underexplored. Hence, using philosophical, theoretical, and empirical movement science perspectives, the second section of this paper sheds light on the potential of movement-based activities to design creativity enhancement interventions.

Embodied activities thus have the potential to stimulate simultaneously many aspects of the creative potential system intrinsic dynamics. Following this perspective, the few embodied creativity training programs that were empirically tested have used action-oriented activities Byrge and Tang, We believe that there are additional benefits in adopting a motile embodied perspective to enhance creative potential.

In this vein, some studies tested the impact of various movement activities on creative potential. For instance, a min aerobic dancing session significantly impacted DT scores in female college students Gondola, Similarly, findings revealed that aerobic exercise jogging, swimming, fast walking, stationary biking, or stair climbing , enhanced DT in physically fit students, both immediately and 2 h after completing the workout Blanchette et al.

These findings are mainly explained in terms of the physiological impact of exercising on creative cognition, ignoring the wholeness of movement activities as well as all other element associated with creative potential. To circumvent these limitations, we explore how embodied activities can become enriched experiences.

One way of thinking about embodied movement is through the lens of what scholars in physical education refer to as physical literacy Dudley et al.

Activities recruiting physical literacy can thus be conceived as enriched multidimensional learning experiences Roetert et al. Not only is moving essential for health and increasing movement proficiency, but it can also alter cognitive, affective, social, and cultural repertoires.

For instance, a community-based movement skill and preliteracy program produced synergistic gains in both gross-motor and preliteracy skills in preschool-aged children in addition to facilitating the engagement of parents in such activities at home Bedard et al. In a cross-sectional study conducted on children aged 9—12 years old, physical literacy was found to be a predictor of resilience.

These studies support the assumption that physical literacy provides insight into creating optimal physical-psycho-social environments that could foster the development of key processes underlying creativity Jefferies et al. To achieve this goal though, some principles must be followed to design enriched movement experiences.

Specifically, NLP is informed by non-proportionality i. To design enriched movement experiences and inspire creativity, the manipulation of key constraints is central to NLP Chow et al.

Organismic constraints refer to personal characteristics that are either structural meaning they remain relatively stable over time e. Environmental constraints encompass all those outside of the person such as climate, apparatus, material, and sociocultural factors.