Wadas Kelir creative house in Purwokerto is a place promoting literacy and creativity among children of Banyumas regency of Central Java and the surrounding. It runs on developing children’s creativity especially in language, literature, and arts. Creativity logic and awareness are built through education pattern and games of numbers, logic, language, colour, and motions that are interesting. The language creativity process has the role to construct children’s self-identity that proved to have changed before and after the establishment of the creative house.
This has been proven with the development of creativity and personality of the children. After three years, the rural children who were previously shy, inferior, inconfident, and pessimistic were turned to be little poets and writers whose works have been published in national and local newspapers, print media and books, such as Kompas, Suara Merdeka, Kedaulatan Rakyat, Satelitpost, and Jawapos. Also there are many invitations sent to them for making performances both locally and nationally.
This construction of childen’s self-identity is interesting to be studied as a model of self-development, personality, creativity, and character building. The education system in the creative house can be made an alternative to progressive education, making a breakthrough and being the answer to formal education deadlocks in the country.
“Development of identity and creativity logic needs to be studied to undercover the role and model of self-identity development in children that engages narratives, story, or language creativity of a community. This research adopts narrative psychological perspective to understands the significance that is constructed by individuals as part of a cultural system through study of human personality development through narrative or story that can eventually form human lives,” said Rahadian Rizal Akmal, Psychology student of UGM, on Wednesday (12/7).
Along with fellow students Oom Qomariyah (Psychology), Mochammad Lathif A (Philosophy), and Fika Rizki NF (Economics), Akmal joined Student Creativity Programme of UGM on socio-humanities research. They constructed the children’s self-identity.
Their research found that the establishment of creativity logic in children is done by instilling the values of love, dream, and insanity. Self-identity construction starts with propragating the significance of life that consists of creative value, experiential values, and attitude values.
“The process of self-building runs through explorative phase by self-understanding, talent search through creative games, activities and experience enrichment. The commitment phase as the phase towards identity maturity runs through the belief in dreams, future optimism, and impartation value of borderless creativity as a response to deadlocks and life challenges,” said Rahadian.