An intercultural model of creativity and reflective practice: challenging distractions between reality and imagination

Creativity and reflective practice for transformative learning are activated through a wide range of Arts-based inquiry approaches—from contemplative breathing to poetry to meditation. These intercultural activities are designed to calm the learner, and shift the habitual chatter of the mind, to cultivate deepened awareness, concentration, and insights. The Intercultural Model use Chinese Sumi Ink-splash processes as a stimulus for starting the workshop sessions and generating innovative ideas. We found there is a need in these innovative environments for guidance from spaces they know and feel comfortable with to transforming their learning and depth of understanding to provoke creativity, problem-solving, and self-reflective activities. Learning as experience, happens through interactive dialogue, serves as the medium through which to exchange and broaden perspectives through radical questioning. Whereas contemplative knowing seems to be the missing link, one that affects student performance, character, personality and depth of understanding. In this workshop, participants are provoked to experience contemplative knowing through the Arts to discover a “void full of potential fantasies of existence” (Dubuffet, 1985) and to explore the art of non-places in literary landscapes.