Sylvan and soulful

[30 July 2004 - The Hindu Business Line] The Krishnamurti Centre, at Brockwood Park in Hampshire, is a shared home away from home — across gender, cultures and continents. -- Nothing in my experience had prepared me for meeting a Hindu Inspector of Police in London — no, I don't mean a turbaned Sikh or an Indian but a white Anglo Saxon Hindu. He went on to teach me a thing, or two, about spirituality, which were reinforced by my three-day stay in the Shangri La in the south of England that is the Krishnamurti Centre at Brockwood Park. During the self-introductions session in the three-day workshop on creative problem solving, which was the main excuse for my visiting the UK this summer, one of the participants identified himself as a Detective Inspector of the Military Police, and added most casually and without any outward sign of embarrassment, "and I am almost a Hindu". This was from a man who had the measured and cultivated tones you would expect from an Inspector Morse saying "and anything you say may be taken down and used as evidence against you in court". More

Vital Visionaries Program: ‘Serious Fun’ that Improves Medical Students Attitudes towards Older People

[27 July 2004 - National Institutes of Health] Creating art with older 'teammates' made first-year medical students more sensitive to older people, according to results of the Vital Visionaries Collaboration (VV), a pilot program developed by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore, MD. More

Innovation: Time Pressure and Creativity: Why Time is Not on Your Side

[29 July 2002 - HBS Working Knowledge] Even as time pressures increase in corporate life, the need for creative thinking has never been greater, says Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile. More

Teach Children Creativity With a Smile: Kalam

[23 July 2004 - New Kerala] President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Friday called on parents and teachers to teach children creativity with a smile to shape them as responsible citizens. Opening a national conference on 'Enhancing Learning in Elementary Schools', Kalam said it was the responsibility of parents and elementary or primary schoolteachers to ensure children did not lose their smiles and innocence when they entered the higher education system. ... 'Towards this end, I will be working with state governments, social organisations and the human resource development ministry to decrease the load of books and to increase creativity of the students,' Kalam said. ... Stressing the importance of elementary and primary education in making India a developed country by 2020, he said on an average, children spend about 25,000 hours in schooling, the most important part of their life and the only phase where they were in an environment that could foster creativity with joy. 'We have to ensure continuity of education while kindling creativity in the children as they are the future of our society, state and the country,' Kalam noted. More

Lawyers Who Heal?

[21 July 2004 - The Christian Science Monitor] Maurine Holland's transformation has led her to join a small but growing group of lawyers, judges, and educators who practice law holistically - working to empower and heal themselves and their clients and to spread civility and good will. In the world of holistic law, the minds and bodies of the clients are as important as their pocketbooks; losing sometimes means winning in the long run; and words like blame, right, and wrong have no home. ... While each holistic lawyer works in a different way, they draw common inspiration from Eastern traditions, New Age writers, and native American spirituality. Much like holistic doctors who seek to treat the whole patient instead of the symptoms, explains Holland, holistic lawyers think of their clients as complex people in need of counseling, not entities with narrow legal problems. More

Handouts and Resources About Creativity

Handouts are available from two recent conferences:
* The Creative Education Founation's 50th Annual Creative Problem Solving Institute 2004

* HOW Design Conference