I am passionate about Art and Design. I believe that creativity in education, and creative experiences can make a profound difference to our inner and outer world. I also believe that creativity is innate to everyone and that it can make a profound difference to children’s education and development. More importantly, this creative thinking is not only vital for kids on a skills level, but it also improves life-long learning skills such as problem-solving, flexibility, imagination, sociability and adaptability.

I envision that encouraging self-expression through art and design education can facilitate students not only expressing themselves uniquely, but also developing problem solving skills. It also plays an important role in fostering a mindset to think in innovative ways and look at issues from different angles; these are vital skills in lifelong learning.

I love to create an environment that can evoke an atmosphere in which people are actively involved and stimulated with anticipation. I advocate that theatrical environment can draw the audience into a certain hypothetical space where they can easily be stimulated and moved, as they are being immersed in the entire performance, and being kept apart from reality temporarily. It not only gives the audience a great feeling of relaxation and emotional satisfaction, but it also simply diverts them temporarily from daily life issues.

It is this stimulation, I also want to bring to a learning environment. Within this setting, students are encouraged to follow their creative impulse to explore and learn. I claim that a safe learning environment for students is exploring without judgment, without boundaries and without inhibitions. Students take charge in this space; it means they dare to dream, dare to take risk and dare to make mistakes. These traits are all part of creative thinking. Hence, a good education environment can act as an incubator for developing student’s self-directed learning and nurturing their creativity.

With my knowledge in the field of Theatre Stage Design, my interest lies in studying how expressive art and design-based experiences can coincide and impact people’s lives. I am also interested in designing environments that stimulate the child’s creativity or arouse the learning impulse and generate healing purposes.

Furthermore, my dissertation: Facilitating emotional expression in a latency age child from divorced family: Integrating expressive arts therapy and theatrical environment stimulation, is based on a framework which composed out of expressive arts therapy and hero’s journey into an immersive environment, which uses technology and theatrical elements, without jeopardizing the free play and therapeutic function, to generate multi-sensory stimulation and healing purposes as an alternative medicine for children in clinical setting.

With the belief that the expressive arts therapy can serve as a vehicle for “self-healing”, creativity can serve as a type of “vaccine” that can prevent harm to a child’s developmental growth and the environment as a type of “incubator” to foster the nurturing process of people’s creativity and self-expression.

Angelica