Personal self-improvement. What does it give?
Self-improvement requires a high degree of awareness and consistency. It’s not without reason that they say that in order to stay in one place you need to run, and in order to move you need to run as hard as you can. It is continuous self-improvement that allows a person to achieve his goals through developing his skills, abilities and inclinations, and increasing knowledge.
A person can improve thanks to the ability of our nervous system to adapt, as well as our ability to reflect and self-esteem. And if the motives for development can be completely different, then understanding the need for constant development is a prerequisite for any person.
Acmeology studies issues of self-improvement - a science that studies existing mechanisms, as well as patterns that provide the opportunity to achieve the maximum high level of personal development of each person. Acmeology postulates that the main growth of a person is his creative abilities and professionalism or the ability to creatively comprehend his activities.
Personal development covers several areas:
- Self-knowledge - a person dives into himself, studies what he does best and what he does worse, realizes his individuality. There is an awareness of the reasons why certain events in life occurred, and an understanding also comes of what conclusions can be drawn from them;
- Self-affirmation is the process of accepting oneself and one’s position in society. If a person has valuable qualities and skills, it will be much easier to gain approval than if the desire to assert oneself has no objective basis;
- Self-development is a person’s desire to realize his own goals and dreams, combined with the desire to develop and grow;
- Self-actualization is a person’s search for his niche in society, awareness of the purpose of existence. The most difficult stage of the process of self-improvement, since it is at this stage that the concept of personality is formed.
- Self-realization is one of the highest degrees of personal development, implying a formed idea of one’s place in life, rational and appropriate use of skills and abilities, the ability and desire to share experience and knowledge.
There are two ways to improve yourself.
The first is to find and eradicate your own shortcomings, the second method involves accepting yourself and developing your strengths. Both methods have both their pros and cons.
Finding and eradicating deficiencies requires a very precise definition of what is a deficiency - what quality requires reworking? After all, each person is individual and what is unacceptable for one will be the key to a long and happy life for another. So one must be careful and constantly monitor whether the fundamental part of the personality is being destroyed under the guise of a false goal. But this method helps to develop remarkable willpower.
The second method is based on awareness of the value of the whole person. Therefore, not a single quality requires destruction, but it is only necessary to develop new abilities and skills. Each new desire of a person contains the energy for its implementation, therefore, by doing everything to achieve it, a person will experience an emotional upsurge. The peculiarity of this method is that you can always become even better, which means you cannot reach the end point of development.
Svetlana,
Creative people, who are they?
Aliens from other worlds or ordinary people?
It is sometimes very difficult to answer unambiguously. One thing is for sure. These are far from normal people. They are different from everyone else. Creative people are people who outside the box . They see many things differently. Their views very often differ from the views of people of other professions and lifestyles. Creative people are always full of different ideas, they come up with something on the fly, improvise and entertain those around them. They are very often easy-going, fantasizing and drive you crazy with their sense of humor. It's always interesting, unforgettable and fun with them. Creative people are needed to create something new, something beautiful. Without them, the world would be painfully boring and gray. Creative people bring bright colors into everyday life.
The whole life of a creative person is continuous events, discoveries and creations for the benefit of improving the world.
For their non-standard vision of the surrounding world, many (if not all) creative people are considered abnormal or even crazy. Why do they think so? Because a creatively thinking person always refuses stereotypes and standards imposed by society. He is independent of general opinion, he lives differently from the masses, from the crowd. He creates something new and improves the world. And who can boast of this in their daily life? Only they are creative people.
#2.Creativity helps you grow
This may sound like an abstract concept, and it probably is to some extent. However, the importance of creativity in young children is something that most of us understand, at least to some extent.
Kids are playing. They spend countless hours researching everyday things and coming up with new ways to use them.
Watching my daughter play, nothing makes me happier than seeing her come up with completely new ways to use objects that we don't even think twice about. Like when she makes play dough cookies and places them under the coffee table (which she thinks is in the oven) to bake. This is a whole thing, there are imaginary buttons, timers, and kitchen gloves. She takes random objects and uses them, doing what mom does in the kitchen. She looks at something and imagines a new possibility.
And the best part is that such games are so natural for children. They don't think about creativity, they just do it unconsciously.
What happens as we get older?
There is a famous study that began in 1968 when George Land gave 1,600 children aged 5 a creativity test (the same test that NASA used to select innovative engineers) to see how creative they were. He tested the same children again at 10 and 15 years of age.
Results? At the age of 5, 98% of children showed high creative abilities. At age 10, only 30% had the same score, and at age 15, only 12%.
To make matters worse, in the eighties Land tested 280,000 adults using the same test. Only 2% scored high on creativity.
How? How can it be? How can so much of our creativity get lost as we get older? This topic is worth writing a separate article for, so I won't even try to find the answer right now.
So how does creativity help us grow?
As shocking as these results may be, there is something to be learned from them. These results show that creativity really does help you grow. At a time when we learn so much every day, our level of creativity is at its highest.
Think about it. We go from helpless babies to toddlers who talk, draw, play and do all sorts of crazy things.
This is where creativity is crucial. Because creativity encourages us to experiment, discover new possibilities and explore. By doing this, we become more aware, we come to new revelations. We learn and by learning we grow.
“Education of a creatively active personality”
"Education of a creatively active personality."
Kovaleva Galina Nikolaevna
MAU DO "Chernyakhov Art School named after Tenisheva"
Annotation.
Raising a child’s creatively active personality is one of the most important tasks of education in general. In the modern world, every person must be an individual, capable of self-design and self-development, of freely defining himself in a profession, in society, in culture. He must be competitive and, above all, be able to introduce something new into his field of activity, look for new approaches to the implementation of a particular task. It is the development of creative activity that can realize this.
Introduction.
Creative activity is the most important character trait of a person, contributing to changing the world around us. In our modern society, new demands have been placed on modern man, related to entering society with a certain set of social qualities and the ability to understand modern cultural life. At the moment, people are in demand who are constantly striving to update their knowledge and skills, acquire new opportunities, to self-realize their creative orientation, and who have the ability to combine their activities in a non-standard way.
This paper examines how a teacher can properly educate a creatively active personality on the basis of an art school, what mechanisms will contribute to this, and what conditions for the implementation of student activity.
Main text.
“In order to educate a person to think and feel, he should, first of all, be educated aesthetically.” Friedrich Schiller.
Raising a creatively active personality is a task, first of all, of aesthetic education.
“Aesthetic education is a purposeful process of forming a creatively active personality of a child, capable of perceiving and appreciating the beautiful, tragic, comic, and ugly in life and art, living and creating according to the laws of beauty” K. Marx.
Aesthetic education is one of the most important means of qualitative improvement of human nature. Being surrounded by creativity, beauty and art, the child, one way or another, develops aesthetically. But at the same time, the child is not aware of the aesthetic essence of objects, and development is often determined by the desire for entertainment; moreover, without outside intervention, the child may develop distorted ideas about life, values, and ideals. D. B. Likhachev, like many other teachers and psychologists, believes that involving a child in various artistic activities contributes to the development of their sensory sphere. The teacher must organize his activities in such a way that the student rises to an understanding of true art, the beauty of reality and the beautiful in the human personality.
Art is the core and main means of aesthetic education, which is carried out through the aesthetic aspects of various forms of activity that carry aesthetic content. A child engaged in creativity makes discoveries in himself, develops imagination, space for self-realization and self-development, and receives motivation that traditional education cannot fully provide.
A child’s artistic education is the revelation of his potential, his experience of seeing the world, his capabilities, and the presentation of his ideas. Art classes also contribute to faster mastery of other sciences, increase the level of intellectual abilities of students in secondary schools, and enrich the child’s personality. Creativity shapes the personality, directs the student’s thinking towards learning something new, unique, and creative in his worldview. The personality of a modern person must have mobile thinking, flexibility of consciousness, must be in demand in many modern professional fields, and be active. It is creative activity that is an indispensable condition for the development of such qualities.
Human activity represents the ability for self-change, self-development and self-motion, constantly changing its forms and levels of development. This process contributes to changing our world and its state. For its changes, the development of material and spiritual culture, the creative activity of the individual acts.
Social and creative activity of a person is distinguished. Social activity is the ability of an individual to consciously interact with the surrounding world, society, mastering this environment, and transforming it. This is the activity of people united in a system of relationships and capable of transforming the surrounding reality together. Creative activity also includes various types of human activities. This is a productive activity, a form of activity of a person or group aimed at transforming the environment and society. Creative activity, one might say, is an educational system that provides a combination of processes of mutual transformation and development of both the system itself and the educational environment.
Considering the above, we can distinguish the following concept:
A creatively active personality is the result of the educational process, where the subject is the holistic personality of the student, focused on using the mechanism of creative self-knowledge and development of this personality.
Raising a creatively active personality is a joint, purposeful work of the teacher and the student’s personality, which is based on the student’s motivation to choose and use methods and forms of their activity, which will ensure the social, creative, development of the personality, its need for self-realization.
In this regard, the aesthetic education of the student through their communication with the world of art in the learning process acquires a special role in pedagogical activity. This is not just teaching creativity, but a purposeful process of forming a creatively active personality of a student who will be able to perceive, evaluate, see beauty, appreciate and create.
On the basis of an art school, the following mechanisms for nurturing a student’s creatively active personality can be distinguished:
1. Development of an aesthetic attitude towards the phenomena of surrounding life and art in general.
2. Nurturing artistic interests, artistic taste and ideals.
3. Development of artistic and imaginative thinking.
4. Development of creative perception of the world, expansion of worldview and enrichment of artistic and aesthetic experience.
5. Formation of communication skills.
6. Formation of a system of knowledge and ideas about art, genres and types.
7. Application of artistic skills in practical activities.
One of the most important things for raising a creatively active personality is the development of intuitively creative thinking and imagination in a child. Improving the student’s intuitive vision of the problem and independent solution of the task. The teacher must correctly guide the child through the means of art, use special techniques when working with the student, and create a number of creative tasks that require the manifestation of certain creative abilities. Pedagogical activities should also be varied.
We will consider the issues of raising a creatively active personality using the example of the academic subject at the art school “Engraving”. This subject, in the process of forming a child’s personality, contributes to the development of the best aesthetic and moral qualities in the student. Engraving is a most interesting means of art pedagogy, opening up wide opportunities for teachers and students.
One of the most important aspects of artistic culture is graphics; it brings together the child’s personal experience and artistic and creative heritage in a single process of his practical knowledge, as happens in engraving. In art pedagogy, printed graphics remain an extremely rare teaching tool. As a result, the educational potential of engraving remains practically unclaimed; the possibilities of teaching printmaking to children of secondary school age remain a little-studied area of teaching methods for fine arts.
The specifics of printing art require great attention not only to the artistic and expressive capabilities of a particular technique, and the technology of execution. The student is given quite complex technical tasks that he must complete. The process of creating an engraving teaches the ability to work purposefully, to perceive it holistically, to consciously approach work in the material, and develops the ability to analyze and see the result in advance. Printed graphics allow you to expand the student’s opportunities for productive self-realization.
The subject is structured in such a way that students become familiar with the different stages of printing art. Children first become familiar with the material by doing line monotype. At this stage of work, the child decides for himself what exactly he will depict; a certain topic of the lesson is given, but he himself chooses how to depict it. This develops creative thinking and allows him to make his own choices, and contributes to the individualization of the student’s development.
The next stage of acquaintance with the art of printing is black and white engraving on cardboard. Even when creating a sketch for an engraving, the child consistently solves compositional, plastic, tone problems, learns to think, as artists say, either from the “spot” or from the “line”, from the general to the particular. The teacher teaches the child to adapt to the material, think through a form for printing, and solve the problem of equality between black and white in work. A lot of preliminary work is carried out before the moment of rolling the paint onto the printing form and in a few minutes turns into an image, this is one of the important things for the interest of the guys.
The most interesting thing for students is to make color engravings on cardboard. To perform such an engraving, analytical-synthetic volumetric-spatial thinking is necessary. In conjunction with the regular implementation of tasks related to color solutions, its perception in nature and embodiment in engraving, students’ spatial and coloristic ideas develop. Long-term training in cardboard engraving, as well as knowledge of printing technology, allows one to achieve the development of such abilities. It is thanks to the practice of engraving on cardboard that one can solve the problem of the ability to create a completed work and the related problem of self-confidence - important tasks in the artistic and pedagogical process.
This subject can be considered as a promising educational space for the disclosure and pedagogically appropriate development of conditions for stimulating the creative activity of a child’s personality, contributing to the formation of his readiness for creative self-realization. The teacher must use methodological techniques to interest the student, such as advice, wishes, calls to activate conscious and subconscious mechanisms. Stimulation of creative activity also occurs during the joint activity of the teacher and the student, which is an integral part during engraving classes. It can also be noted that the variety of materials, various drawings, paintings, artists, everything that allows us to involve the child in the atmosphere of the lesson, pushes the boundaries of the child’s worldview. The use of the listed means and techniques in combination will ensure positive dynamics in their intellectual and creative development, aimed at activating the student’s creative potential.
In the modern world, a creative person is a decisive force, since for our society a flexible mind, creativity, the ability to think freely, and have imagination are some of the most important and main qualities for progress. Raising a creatively active personality in the context of aesthetic education is a pressing pedagogical problem that can be solved in the process of consistent education of the child. An effective solution to this issue is the work of a modern teacher, who must organize his teaching process in such a way as to activate the student and stimulate the student’s creative activity.
Bibliography.
- Alekseeva V.V. Fine arts and school. M., 1968.
- Vygotsky L.S. Imagination and creativity in childhood: psychol. essay: book. for the teacher. M.: Education, 1991.
- Graphics in fine arts lessons. Manual for teachers. M.: Education, 1965.
- Enin A.V., Lysenko E.V., Kazantseva E.G. Creatively active personality as a pedagogical concept, Voronezh, 1998.
- Likhachev D.B. Theory of aesthetic education of schoolchildren. M.: Education, 2000.
- Pronina N.I. Development of the creative imagination of students in an art class at an art school. Fine arts at school. 2001
- Churkin V. Engraving on cardboard. Practical advice. 1988.
#1.Creativity pushes you forward
As dramatic as it may sound, without creativity we would not be here today. And when I say “we,” I mean us, the human species.
Think about it. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors weren't too worried about themselves when faced with countless wild beasts chasing them. The animals were stronger, bigger, faster.
However, as Gerard Puccio, Ph.D., of the International Center for Research on Creativity at Buffalo State, points out in his amazing TEDx talk, they had one important competitive advantage.
As you may have guessed, it was creativity. Once upon a time in human history, someone saw a stone and made a tool out of it. Why is this surprising? The man looked at something he had seen hundreds of times before and imagined another possibility .
The importance of creativity for evolution is enormous. First there were tools, then weapons, body jewelry, clothing, cave paintings, and so on. And later in history came the steam engine, electricity, the Internet and the iPhone.
The history of mankind proves that we are born to be creative.
Creativity works on different scales
Of course, not all of us are smart enough to invent the next revolutionary thing, but creativity works on a smaller scale.
Even if you don't know it, you've probably made some progress using your creativity. Maybe you've figured out a much more efficient way to fill out those monthly Excel sheets at work, and now you're getting them done a lot faster. You may have figured out how to assemble this Ikea cabinet without instructions (it can be done). Or you found a way to remove the remaining paste from the tube.
As silly as these examples may be, they are a great illustration of how creativity can help us in our daily lives. Creativity means progress. Big or small progress is still progress.
