Creativity & Educating for Personal & Social Responsibility

This past weekend, the EthicsTalk crew attended and presented at a conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The experience was incredible and transformational. The conference, entitled, Educating for Personal & Social Responsibility, was sponsored by the Association of American Colleges & Universities where hundreds of university faculty, administrators and students shared ideas about the university’s role in cultivating character and promoting moral development. We discuss our presentation and how and why preparing and presenting at this conference transformed our ideas and relationship with each other. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s views on creativity, expressed in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, will ground our discussion and we will discuss how Csikszentmihalyi’s views on creativity are applicable to both the creation of the Self and the ecology by which the Self is nurtured. Csikszentmihalyi makes the point that removing oneself from the usual surroundings in which one practices the daily rituals responsible for creativity, and placing oneself in a different environment, infuses and strengthens creativity. We discuss how this point is no less true for the Self and the community by which one is nurtured.