Date of Completion

5-31-2004

Document Type

Open Access Capstone

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

First Advisor

Nina Greenwald

Abstract

This is a personal narrative of how I applied Critical and Creative Thinking skills to photography and, in the process, found my artistic self. As a young girl, I was an emerging artist under the tutelage of creative parents. I took photographs of my family and of the beautiful landscape where we lived. Tragedy struck my child’s world twice; first, when my father died, and a second time when developers destroyed the natural areas where I played. These events shut down my inner awareness, stunted my growth as a risk taker and the artist in me went dormant. The Critical and Creative Thinking program has opened up a new universe through a progression of learning about my personality traits, thinking dispositions, and multiple intelligences. I learned that I was a convergent and divergent thinker, a problem-solver and that I was extremely capable of transferring information from one domain to another. My metacognition, now activated, monitored my thought process and helped me initiate critical and creative thinking. I applied the CCT techniques and thinking process to photographing the land and people of Scituate. I followed a process-cycle of creating a vision, conducting research, applying the research, and reflecting on the results in comparison with the vision. I became more consciously self-aware so that I better understood my actions. My self was reflected and revealed in my photographs. My photographic project was now less about Scituate, and more about my sense of self. My creative self, along with my skills as a critical thinker was re-emerging. I have learned that, at any given time, I may be in my interpersonal self, empathizing and collaborating, or in my naturalist self, observing, studying, and integrating. I may be behind the camera conceptualizing, altering perspectives and images. Or maybe I am just being introspective, reflecting and dreaming. After all, “. . . creative persons are characterized not so much by single traits, as by their ability to operate through the entire spectrum of personality dimensions” (Csikszentmihalyi 1999, 331). I am a photographer, and an artist, this personal narrative is about my journey of self discovery through the application of Critical and Creative Thinking.

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