ART, CREATIVITY, AND TEACHING: WHAT HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHERS THINK?

Abstract

This article aims to discuss some of the meanings attributed to creative teaching in higher education. The contributions of psychology to the understanding of this theme will be brought, notably from the studies on art, creativity and aesthetic education carried out by the belarusian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. We adopted the psychosocial perspective of the theory of social representations, to understand these meanings associated with creative teaching. This is a research excerpt from a doctoral thesis, which was developed with one hundred and twenty-three higher education teachers. Regarding the methodology, we applied the word association questionnaire, QALP, designed to understand the meanings alluding to creative teaching, with questions related to the profile of the participants and inducing terms. We adopted the Iramuteq software to treat the corpus of free word association, based on prototypical analysis. In the results, art composed the social representations of teaching and creativity, in its central core. Through this study, we promote debate on the importance of aesthetic education in higher education, an “education through the senses”, developed through art, involves practices that favor the growth and learning of students.