1. Effects of meditations with explicit purposes on Creative Potential, Mindfulness and Awareness of Responsibility of Middle School Students: a cluster randomized controlled trial
- Author
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Rebecchi, Kevin, Hagège, Hélène, Lubart, Todd, and Shankland, Rebecca
- Subjects
Creativity ,States of consciousness ,Meditation ,Responsibility ,Educational Psychology ,Educational Methods ,Secondary Education ,Psychosocial skills ,Creative Potential ,Mindfulness ,Education - Abstract
Artistic devices and technological and digital media are the ways favored by school programs for the development of creativity. But teaching professionals are working to put in place alternatives such as step-by-step methods or more direct training in the processes involved in creativity, and researchers are working to discover new ways to increase the creativity of individuals. Recently, they have started to explore the links between creativity and states of consciousness (including mind wandering, flow and mindfulness) in adults in professional, artistic and therapeutic environments. However, although a growing number of authors and researchers are questioning and studying the effects of mindfulness in education, their focus is on well-being and mental health, and so there does not appear to be any research focusing specifically on the effects of meditation on the development of creativity in the school context. We therefore do not know whether this absence is due to the very recent emergence of a new way of developing creativity or to an ineffectiveness of this practice in the development of creativity in schools. On the other hand, Robert B. McLaren wrote that "we tend to ignore the fact that much of human creative effort has been in the service of devious and violent schemes" (1993, p. 137) and it is thus necessary to imagine the establishment of safeguards to avoid this and develop awareness of responsibility at the same time as creativity. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a project on the future of education by 2030 and indicated that “creativity and the ability to solve problems presupposes taking into account the future consequences of one's actions, evaluating them. risks and benefits, and to accept responsibility for the results of one's work”(OECD, 2018, p. 7). The current trial was therefore set up to assess the possible influence of a classroom meditation practice on creativity, mindfulness and responsibility. The relevance of using a randomized controlled trial by clusters is justified by the field of research (a middle-school where students are grouped by level class) and the purpose of the research (an educational intervention). Due to the results of other research on adults, even if they are still embryonic, it would seem plausible that meditation (seen as mindfulness training) could develop divergent thinking and mindfulness traits in middle school students and that one of the meditation programs put in place could also develop the responsibility of these middle-school pupils. The aim of the study is therefore to assess the effects of a 11-week meditation program on adolescents' creative potential, mindfulness and awareness of their responsibility. We are therefore going to test the hypothesis according to which the establishment of a meditation practice with an explicit purpose in middle-school could make it possible, on the one hand, to increase the creative potential of college students and more precisely divergent-exploratory thinking at the individual level in the graphic and word fields, but also awareness of their responsibility. The originality of this study is also found in the implementation of structural equation models that will allow a better understanding of the results.
- Published
- 2022
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