“It’s not perfect - I need to start again!”: Exploring the relationship between self-compassion and creativity in a high school art environment

This action research study examines the relationship between self-compassion and creativity amongst high school art students in order to determine if self-compassion plays a positive or negative role in the creative process. This inquiry was undertaken to inform and enrich the researcher’s teaching practice and to lay the foundation for future research. The study took place in the researcher’s classroom with her art students volunteering as subjects. Relying on multiple sources of evidence, this study was designed with a mixed methods approach to capture both quantitative and qualitative data in order to generate significant and accurate results. This researcher had a strong interest in learning how creativity could be measured amongst individuals and to what extent that number could be influenced by levels of self-compassion. This researcher was also interested in hearing the voices of her students to discover if their perceptions and ideas on creativity and self-compassion correlated with the statistical data. Forty five (twenty-seven female and eighteen male) students, aged fifteen to eighteen, volunteered to participate in this inquiry by taking the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Thinking Creatively with Pictures), the Kristen Neff Self-Compassion Scale: short form and by answering two closed and four open-ended interview questions. These tests were administered in the classroom during class time. Data were collected from both tests along with the students’ perception of their own level of perfectionism and level of frustration, and the data were analysed using statistical tools including the Pearson Correlation Analysis, and Minitab Scatterplots. These two statistical tools were chosen to represent the findings from a number of different viewpoints and to answer the two questions that guide this study: do lower levels of self-compassion inhibit creativity in the art making process amongst high school art students?; and do higher levels of self-compassion facilitate creativity in the art making process amongst high school art students? While the study was limited to a small number of participants, the results strongly suggest there is a correlation between self-compassion and creativity. Students who suffer from low self-compassion exhibited low creativity scores and students with higher levels of self-compassion exhibited higher creativity scores. If self-compassion is understood to be an important component of the creative process, ultimately its nurture should alleviate self-critical tendencies and promote a free approach to creative expression. This research study may contribute insight into this compelling subject in which to date there has been little formal research. It may also provide a starting point for further research into possible interventions that would aid self-compassion amongst art students, thus encouraging creativity to flourish.