We make creativity center to the way we teach, learn, and express at Roberts Field because we believe our students' capacity to imagine and create is the one innate asset that is and will always be their most powerful tool of consciousness in life. We want for students as learners to build and strengthen their creativity, and to understand that each of their creative outcomes is unique to each one of them--like snowflakes--that might seem similar but are impossible to replicate exactly. We would never stand in front of any one child and say, based on what we see, that they were exactly the same as another child. Likewise, it is true that what we can't see within a person, that "invisible" part of them, is a billion times more complex and not like any other. For sure, all children are distinctly and inimitably carved and woven.
Roberts Field is founded on the union of academics and creative practice because with creativity threaded through all questions, answers, and modes of expression there is an unlimited scope of possibility. Through a creative approach in the midst of any project, the quests and outcomes can continuously be built and extrapolated upon. The strength and endurance needed to confidently pursue more knowledge and the ability to remain open to varied outcomes is always being further developed.
For this reason, at RFS we erect the visual and visceral landscape of the classroom, develop our educational language and approach, and continuously investigate solutions to problems dealing with time, curriculum, professional collaborations, individual relationships, training and development, and, most importantly, teaching. We do so with ardent enthusiasm, patience, care, and utmost creativity. This is how much we believe in the crux of our mission: if we are creative in our processes of development, by remaining open and by keeping a creative lens center to the heart of the exploration, that with time and patience, those tremendous answers too shall come.
For the students, this is the full intention of Still Quiet Place in The Day in The Field and the breaths that we take each morning as a classroom community. In Still Quiet Place, each student has a weekly period of time when they go to sit alone in a place in nature. Through the nurture of solitude, and deep breaths taken in that reflective stillness, each student can be present to however they feel, what they perceive, and what they want to express. It takes patience and perseverance to meditate and to allow oneself that time alone without any specific goal or focus, and to believe that from our very foundations of consciousness we are being strengthened and fulfilled in that stillness.
How do we learn patience and perseverance? One way is by being surrounded by family, community, guides, and educators who are able to meet us where we are in our process of learning, to both challenge us to new heights, practices, and awarenesses, but to also reserve the time to allow us to find our way through. We must be taught by those who believe in us as creative beings. They must believe that while we are being nurtured creatively that we will be well angled, well directed, intuitive, and definitely accomplished as we grow and assume other roles. There is a deeper, primordial type of learning when we are given the gift of being able to find our way through, to show the teacher how ignited and excited we are about what we've written, drawn, calculated, found, or researched and why. The why we do things as is important as the how, as well as the what something eventually becomes.
Children must also be seen and understood as children, and not projected as adults who deeply fear falling short of success in their lives. There is no greater way to take value away from one's childhood, and of their most joyful experience, their play and creativity, than to not allow them their process. We don't get our childhoods back. Children have time--they are children, not adults.
Whoever we are and whatever we are to become, creativity will only take us further, deeper, and stronger into life. If we aren't patiently nurturing the omniscience of creativity in education, we are denying the process of learning its most valuable wellspring of magic and transcendence.
We must always seek to explore and to wonder--yes, just for the sake of it--and for the sake of what is to come, that which we never knew before it's exact moment of arrival but always deeply believed in.
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