Educational Creativity - Bolivia

Program

  • Type of Program: Alternative education in the school system
  • Age Served: 3 to 14 years
  • Funding Sources: Foundations, donations and commercialization of materials produced in our institution
  • Presenter: Maria Carmen Schulze
  • Address: Av. Sanchez Lima Nº 2340, Casilla Postal 5549
    La Paz, Casilla de Correos, Bolivia 5549
  • Telephone: (591)2-2417303
  • Email: [email protected]

Program Purpose

The purpose of the program Educational Creativity is to offer a methodological model of intervention in order to incorporate creativity in education, and to generate educational processes that help in the construction of a more just and democratic society.

Program Description

There are three complimentary projects

  • Training of socio-cultural beings that are part of the conception of training period as transformation of forms in thinking, doing, and making connections between humans, allowing to generate educational creativity, spaces and requests of reflection, analysis, and constructions of understandings.
  • Ludotecas is carried out in plazas and avenues where hundreds of children, young adults, and adults without age limits and in heterogeneous groups participate spontaneously in diverse playful activities. The principal beneficiaries are kids and young adults in street situations.
  • Workshops of creativity and free expression where expressive activities are a way of testing, discoveries and construction of understandings making it possible to develop potential creativity. The beneficial section is kids 3-14 years that meet a dangerous situation from the poverty in which they are living. They are carried out in the preferred areas where great scarcities exist, and in which they respect health, education, recreation and security.

This program looks to give alternatives of change and raises us to a new way to see, interpret, work, and recreate the world. The part of conception in the expressive process is where one experiences learning. Therefore, the game is used as a generation tool of knowledge, because it allows to experiment, prove, investigate and transfer living understandings in protagonism of that same game, where its purpose is reduced to give exit to an animated state, a feeling, an idea.

It works as a cross-sectional: the communication, personal relations, human rights, honor, violence, participation, leadership, local ability, alcoholism, drug addiction, fairness, etc., at the same time artistic cultural languages are approached by integrating them through game, creating a confident atmosphere. They plan situations where making the imagination soar is the key, dreams are made and in order then to materialize that dream in learnings that are never forgotten and that are able to transfer to resolve the problems in school and daily life.

We believe: the painting, drawing, music, song, sculpture, writing, ballet, dance, narration, drama, theatre, puppetry, etc. they aren’t more than concretion of spontaneous expression of play with; colors, light intensity, texture, sound, rhythm, times, silences, verses, objects, clay, words, phrases, speeches, movement, passages, displacement, intonations, voice, history, stories, legends, etc. Every human being has an artist inside and therefore is capable of experimenting and drawing out their feelings, their states of spirit, and to expose themselves before the sight, sound and other senses producing remaining resonance impregnated of the social thing that produces communication.

Taking into account these principles they have organized activities where one can pass through diverse states of being, one can work with all of the senses and lives the experiences of learning that implies all of being. Possibly the process of getting to know yourself and the others and of this form allows the discovery of potentials, capacities of creation and invention, and also their limitations, fears and inhibitions that paralyze us and don’t allow us to be authentic/original. Therefore we develop more creative, autonomous, and free, personalities, capable to improve their conditions of life.

Edited by Michael Kalinowski
Translated by Talia Glesner