Inquiry into Creative and Innovative Processes: An Experiential, Whole-Person Approach to Teaching Creativity

Abstract

This article highlights the transformative nature of an online master’s level course titled, Inquiry into Creative and Innovative Processes. The authors emphasize the importance of whole-person, imaginative, and intuitive experiences in adult students’ unique, scholarly development. They describe their process of adapting intuitive inquiry, a transpersonal research method, as a supportive structure for this online course on creativity. A creative and innovative approach to teaching in itself, the course facilitated a flexible learning container, where students were guided toward integrating their academic learning and personal discovery in embodied and deeply conscious ways. Examples of students’ work and assessments demonstrated how they experienced meaningful and purposeful shifts in the ways they perceived and processed newly acquired knowledge. Students broadened and deepened their intuitive and rational ways of knowing in mindful, embodied, and creatively informed manner.