Michelle Korenfeld - A story of creativity
Creative education has been in my soul for years of working with children, parents, teachers and grandparents. My partner is a creative person who creates homemade waterfalls and stem slice tables. My daughters teach me lessons in creative thinking every day. My mother believes in the possibility of a refreshing creative education for all children. At the Museum of Man and Animals I was encouraged to write stories through which one learns about nature. When I needed aids to tell my stories, I drew and created. I told my mom that the kids loved what I made. She suggested that I learn to draw, so that I could make coloring pages for the children. The wave of painting washed over me for several years. I exhibited at the Amalia Arbel gallery, and my paintings were presented at the exhibition and at the Winter Salon in Paris. This is after I insisted since I was a child that I would never be able to draw. Someone must have commented on my drawing once. Everyone has a story like that. Imagine if this had happened to Michelangelo, and he would have stopped painting and sculpting.
Working at the Dr. Erica Landau Institute for the Advancement of Youth to Excellence and Creativity, a special connection bonded me with Dr. Landau. She advised I’d add science to my artistic and literary learning content. The next family dinner, I sat at my mom’s veranda with my uncle, Dr. Moshe Rishpon. He established the Clore Garden of Science and the Science Oriented Youth Department in the Weizmann Institute. I asked him what he saw in my paintings. A new world was revealed to me. My peacock paintings suggest symmetry and structural coloration, for example. For years I read about science, especially Richard Feynmann’s books. My vision became a reality by publishing a book summing up my teaching on Amazon. Then came 10 more books.
I received feedback that my paintings inspire creativity. I am an autodidact, so I delved into creativity research, arriving at the Creative Education Foundation’s Creative Problem-Solving conferences at the University of Buffalo, New York. For 4 years I led workshops there, and my daughters participated in their Youthwize program. Based on these workshops and my experience in other creative leaders’ sessions, I developed The Michelangelo in the 21st Century lecture.
At the Florida Creativity Conference, I learned about STEAM education, whose aim is to weave STEM with Art. I realized my learning contents can serve for such teaching from early age – acquiring multidisciplinary thinking together with literacy and social-emotional skills. At ETAI winter 2019 the room was packed in my presentation about creative, caring, and communicative learning environments. Then I served as leader of the forum on learner autonomy and the 21st century skills in their international conference. I also very much enjoyed taking part in developing a leadership curriculum for elementary students and writing literary content for youth with special needs. Presenting for The World Education Summit 2024 was a great delight. I presented my book Michelangelo in the 21st Century, as part of its launtch on Amazon, and the Creativity Wheel model for supporting creativity in the classroom by policy makers, school principals and the communities around schools. I am honored to be a founding member in the Human Intelligence (HI) movement, aimed to foster students' humane creative skills to leverage the use of Articifial Intelligence (AI). It is also a great honor to be dean's excellenge for the second time in Educational Leadership, Policy and Administration M.A.
I believe every child is creative, and that in every grown-up there is a creative child. I think that a lot of aggressions could have been spared if children were directed to fulfill their creative gifts. My life is devoted to creating tools and contents to facilitate such education. My vision is that at the age of accelerated use of AI, our children, who are the generation most affected by that, gain the most effective tools for creative problem-solving.
My book, Michelangelo in the 21st Century gives practical tools to train students to think creatively, so they will know how to leverage accurate and rich prompts. That way they will become the great influential leaders of the years to come. The lecture is a rich experience of art, nature, science and sustainability. It gives not only energies for creativity, but also tools and fresh teaching ideas. It gives a strategy – an anchor, to lead the way from the child’s inner voice to success and achievement. It supports not only the whole child, but also the whole teacher.
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