The idea that working with intrinsic motivation best stimulates and sustains creativity is fundamental to our practice of learning and teaching within Higher Art and Design Education.
Despite achieving a highly competitive place within a course at Glasgow School of Art, we have observed within our discipline that some students have appeared to be underachieving, losing motivation and not working to their strengths. Our action research project sets out to address the issue that as students progress toward the awarding of a degree, some will become, in this environment with its externally defined goals, “more self-motivated, energised and integrated,” while others will find themselves “apathetic, alienated and lacking in responsibility” under the same conditions. (Ryan, R.M and Deci, E.L., 2000 Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist 55 (1), p.68 )
Initially inspired by Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’ and Sir Ken Robinson’s ‘The Element’ and ‘Out of Our Minds’, we put together a package of five workshops with a combination of approaches; presentation of evidence based research from the work of Deci, Ryan, Lepper, Greene, Nisbett, Csikszentmihalyi, and Dweck and its influence on education and business; reflection on learning theories, Kolb’s Learning Cycle, Seligman’s Positive Psychology, and Clifton Strengthfinders; speculation and musings of writers, artists, analytical psychologists, and the focussing movement; compassionate mindfulness; and play.
We included an activity or project, discussion and reflective writing in each workshop; students explored how experiences of intrinsic motivation in childhood might refresh their current work, identified unnecessary rules and broke them, visualised their inner critics and reconsidered their internal dialogue with them, used Clifton Strengthsfinder to utilise their strengths, and played with the idea of the Muse as part of their creative relationship with themselves.
In this presentation we will give a brief description of the material presented to the students and a selection of their responses to the workshops, visual, spoken and written.