My website has a lot to do with creativity and art as products and processes and their potential to support healing, increase awareness and facilitate other processes. However, as I was thinking about this recently I realised that I have also used creativity and art in other areas of my life and for other purposes. It has, for instance, facilitated language learning and increased the engagement of students.  When I first started teaching English I realised that the least popular subject for many students was writing; however, some capacity to write was necessary in order to pass official exams and gain certificates, which is a great part of what language teachers and schools are asked to do. Also, often the students that had failed the exams had failed the writing section. I also noticed that when I encouraged the younger children to illustrate their written work there was more enthusiasm to do the work. More exercise books arrived on my desk. I remembered how innate the desire to draw and make things is in young children and how little creativity is encouraged in elementary school and in many homes. So when I started teaching in my own school I decided to try and incorporate art making in our writing classes at least for the first four or five years when the children’s other school obligations were not so pressing. So from the first writing assignments, which involved making word cards or writing their name under their photo to much more ambitious projects I tried to incorporate some kind of art making. Then I made sure that all their work was displayed on the walls of the school irrespectively of the quality. At the end of term we would hand all the work back to the students and make space for new projects and displays. Even though it required more work on the teachers’ part it paid off in the long run contributing to increasing exam success rates beyond my own expectations and the expected general success rate. It didn’t only motivate more students to write more and more often, but inserting creativity made both the language and the learning process more attractive to them. As I mentioned above, both my website and this path that I have been walking on, these last several years, has been made possible and has been deeply intertwined with my inclination to be creative and do art. Along with meditation and mindfulness practices, art processes and practices have, in my case, probably been two important elements of the whole journey that also helped me stay connected and visible during the backlash and lack of support in my community.

You may like to listen to an interesting podcast about art and neuroplasticity from the University of Sydney

Art and neuroplasticity: are they linked? https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/sydney-ideas/2018/art-and-neuroplasticity-are-they-linked.html