For my final project in my Issues in Art Education course I wanted to explore the topic of creativity.  How do we define and discern which of our students demonstrate creativity?  How to we define and assess it?  How can we nurture creativity in ourselves as artists and in our students?  These are questions that I hoped to address in my research.  Scholars define creativity in multiple ways.  According to Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi in Milbrant & Milbrant, 2011), creative individuals are domain-changing, offering ideas that change the field to which they are contributing.  Experts, or gate keepers, in the field are the ones who decide if individual contributions are truly original and capable of altering the domain.  However, when I think about creativity in the classroom and as an artist, I appreciate Ken Robinson's definition of creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value" (Robinson, 2006).

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As art educators, we can promote creativity among our students by exploring areas of interest.  This motivates artists to investigate and create in new ways (Gardner, 2019; Csikszentmihalyi in Freedman 2007).  We can also nurture creativity by building upon previous knowledge.  The more experience and background knowledge we have, the more we can identify problems or potential for change (Freedman, 2007).

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For my art project addressing the topic of creativity, I chose to create a work of ceramic art.  This is an area that interests and excites me.  I have a large collect of ceramic mugs and love studying the styles and techniques of contemporary ceramic artists and potters.  My goal for this project was to create a mug that has some of the functional features I like most handmade mugs, yet is creative and unique from anything I have seen or made before. I ended up making matching a plate as well.