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3. Discover the revolutionary learning approach of JUICE and how it relates to the Creativity Process

This section will be of particular interest to all educators, teachers and trainers.

There’s a revolutionary new and cutting edge approach to infusing creativity into any curriculum – whether it’s the teaching of English, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Science, History, Engineering, Humanities, or Management!

The Juxtaerobix Unusually Innovative & Creative Edvantage
It’s called JUICE or Juxtaerobix Unusually Innovative & Creative Edvantage (where “Edvantage” stands for Educational Advantage) and it is a simple and practical approach to real-life creative thinking, creative learning, creative problem-solving and creative living.

JUICE employs the power of Juxtaerobix workouts.

Its value as a learning and thinking tool is simply remarkable: JUICE mirrors the real-life creative thinking process and empowers an educator to infuse creativity seamlessly into the learning process!

Why JUICE?
Learning is most fundamentally a mental process. It's basically a brain transfer. It involves the brain and all its senses.

However, most learning in the classroom is obsessed with finding the right answer. JUICE turns this quest for a definite "solution to a problem" completely on its head- upside-down!

It was Neil Postman, an educator, who lamented, "Children enter schools as question marks and leave as periods."

The Approach honors the process of thinking and views it as much more important than the search for an "answer". After all, it's in our journey of self-discovery - thinking, learning, solving problems, and living life itself - that we discover who we are, why we are who we are, what we want to do, how we want to do, and where we want to go.

JUICE provides a simplistic and yet practical real-life environment in which we can flourish creatively in the way we think, learn, solve problems and enjoy life.

The result: A more creative thinker in every one of us! Better yet, we become true practitioners of creativity!

It's a model of experiential learning or "real-life living" (we prefer to call it) where the process of discovery or learning is the very process of creativity itself. This indeed is the real power of JUICE!

JUICE Epitomizes The Creativity Process

Juxtaerobix will change the way we look at creativity and problem-solving! From it, you will learn and realize that the creative process is not at all a mysterious one which is practiced only by those who are blessed with natural creative talents. You will get to experience, perhaps for the first time, the practical steps of creativity used by great thinkers to come up with great ideas.

In order to appreciate the value of an approach to learning and teaching like JUICE, we need to understand the stages or process of creativity itself.

It’s now generally accepted by almost all creativity experts and practitioners that the creativity process can be distilled down to a few steps or phases.

Phase 1: Problem Identification/Definition

The primary impetus of creativity is the realization of a problem. That there’s a problem at hand and you need a creative solution to it. This stage of the creative problem solving process is called the Problem Identification or Definition phase.

It’s when you size up the problem before and attempt to define it by establishing its parameters. Here you immerse yourself in the problem, searching out any information that might be relevant. It’s when you let your imagination roam free, open yourself to anything that is even vaguely relevant to the problem. The idea is to gather a broad range of data so that unusual and unlikely elements can begin to juxtapose themselves. Being receptive, being able to listen openly and well, is a crucial skill here.

Phase 2: Idea Generation

Here, you generate a large number of ideas. This stage of the creative thinking process should be freeing and characterized by inspiration, spontaneity, experimentation, intuition and without fear.

It is at this stage that you want to be careful about not judging the validity or feasibility of your ideas. Let your ideas flow and suspend judgment or self-censorship for the moment.

Great thinkers have discovered that they can only achieve their full creative potential by learning how to separate idea generation from idea evaluation. They know how to generate as many ideas as possible way before analyzing them.

Phase 3: Incubation

This is the “sleeping on the problem” stage.
Once you have mulled over all the relevant information, you leave the problem to simmer. At this Incubation stage, you chew on all the data you have collated and wait almost passively. You will have to trust your subconscious mind to do all the work. You literally let your mind “sleep on the problem.”

Phase 4: Illumination

This is probably the most exciting phase. It’s that part of the creativity process that seemingly makes all the effort and work worthwhile.

In this Illumination phase, you’ll experience the sudden bubbling up of the answer. The creative solution or solutions seem to come to you out of the blue. The Illumination stage is generally described as the “Eureka!” moment.

Phase 5: Verification

This is the final stage of the dynamic creativity process. Called the Verification stage, here you look back over the other phases and evaluate your progress.

Summary Of The Creativity Process

 

Here’s How JUICE Works
In JUICE, the starting point is a specially conceptualized Juxtaerobix workout.

This teaser serves as the catalyst to spark off the users on a journey of creative self-discovery: it provides the "problem" or situation, motivates the users to free associate to discover for themselves the possible "solutions", helps them document all their free-flowing ideas along the way, takes them through the step-by-step process of creative thinking, brings them to a stage called "Eureka!" and aids them to arrive at the possible or suggested "answers" to the initial problem.

Put simply, here's how it works:
- There's a beginning called the "Problem" (represented by a Juxtaerobix workout)
- The creative thinking process (Idea generation, Incubation, Illumination)
- The end or the Verification (represented by the answer to the Juxtaerobix)
- Juxtaerobix models the very process of day-to-day creative thinking and replicates it in the classroom setting!

JUICE works with the user, rides on the current brain-ware of the user, and customizes a creativity process that fits him or her. It harnesses the power of self-paced learning according to the mental capabilities of each individual user - observing the fundamental and sacred rule that every on has his unique DNA.

Talk about having the exact right software that runs optimally on a particular piece of hardware!

The Ten Guiding Principles Of The JUICE
#1. There is no one right answer.
#2. The virtue is the thinking and free-associating.
#3. Whole brain means WHOLE brain creativity - always harness the power of your whole (not half) brain.
#4. Suspend judgment - especially during the idea generation phase.
#5. Let there be FUN!
#6. Learning is must fundamentally a MENTAL process.
#7. If at first you can't think of it, think again. And again. And again.
#8. The best way to get good ideas is to have lots of them.
#9. Involve as many senses as possible.
#10. For sense of security of completeness, most people need things to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Who Is JUICE For?
For a start, JUICE is for anybody who "thinks" that he has a brain! If you think that you have a brain and you want (you arrive at this conclusion after some self-discovery) to sharpen your thinking skills, then welcome to the world of Juxtaerobix!

More seriously, JUICE is perfect for any learner (whether he learns best through visualizing (V), hearing (A) or involving his hands and feelings (K) or a combination of these VAK modes). It appeals to left-brainers and right-brainers as well. People of all personality types - sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, choleric or a blend of any of these four types - will find this creative approach very suitable. (After all, no matter what type or blend we are, we all have been putting up with uninspiring and boring classroom teaching for so long.)

I want to be very bold (I'm a known risk-taker) to tell you that the "J" in Juxtaerobix stands for "Jump start one's brain". For many learners who have been unjustly labeled by others including their mentors as "dumb" or "stupid", Juxtaerobix may just empower them by jump starting their God-given built-in supercomputer and grant them their last laugh. More specifically, their close encounter with Juxtaerobix may be the spark - and the only spark they would ever need of creativity that propels them to a lifetime of excellence!

JUICE is for ANYONE who wants to be FREE - free to think, free to dream, free to associate, free to live and even free to make mistakes. And this class of people includes the educator and the like.

The Educational Genius Of JUICE
The value of JUICE as a learning, thinking and teaching tool is simply remarkable. It epitomizes all the fundamental elements of creativity, creative thinking and creative learning:
1. JUICE takes the user through a journey of self-discovery.
2. JUICE promotes "safe" risk-taking.
3. JUICE offers opportunities for seizing.
4. JUICE encourages the challenging of entrenched assumptions.
5. JUICE compels the user to look at problems from a new perspective.
6. JUICE enhances ambiguous thinking.
7. JUICE gives permission for people to engage in blue-sky thinking (or daydreaming).
8. JUICE increases the mental capacity for one to recall information.
9. JUICE workouts track the progress of the user's development in thinking skills.
10. JUICE teaches one to suspend judgment during idea generation.
11. JUICE is fun and mentally stimulating.
12. JUICE opens the world for the Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK) learners.
13. JUICE develops "big picture" vision by showing the connectivity of diverse elements.
14. JUICE creates creative thinkers almost stealthily.
15. Most of all, JUICE works!

This cutting edge approach - which is in short a real-life creative learning technique - serves as an effective means of infusing creative thinking into various subject matters when applied to them.

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