Expressing emotions through creativity: an exemple of land art

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in everyday life as well as in the training context. Recently, several studies have focused on the link between emotions and learning in a creative context (Audrin et al., 2020, Capron Puozzo et Botella, 2018). According to Lubart’s multivariate approach, creativity is the result of several factors: cognitive, conative, environmental, and emotional (Lubart et al., 2015). In this research, we are interested in studying how experiential learning may foster creativity in pre-service teacher training. More specifically, 10 master students were invited to participate in an interactive exercise using land art, an artistic movement in which nature is used as material (wood, stone, leaves, etc.). We collected students’ emotions (using a self-reported questionnaire, Pekrun et al., 2017), engagement, motivation (using a semi-structured interviews). Moreover, students reported the creative process they went through during the land art exercise using creative process report diary (Botella et al.,2019). Both quantitative and qualitative results suggest such interactive exercise fosters positive emotions as well as creativity. Drawing on experiential learning, this project is evaluating the use of an interactive exercise, such as land art, as a way to impact student engagement and motivation as well as examining the creative processes brought into play and the emotions felt by the participants, future teachers. More specifically, this article deals with this link between emotion and learning by contextualizing it within a pedagogy of creativity (Puozzo Capron, 2013). Both quantitative and qualitative results support mostly a positive relationship between creativity and emotions felt, such as curiosity, enthusiasm and satisfaction.