The theoretical part of this master’s thesis, The Silent Book as a Starting Point for
Encouraging Creativity in Visual Arts, begins with an exploration of creativity in the
context of education, with particular emphasis on its role in visual arts. It includes an
overview of the developmental characteristics of children’s visual expression, the factors
that influence the creative process, and the teacher’s role in fostering it. Special attention
is given to visual storytelling and the features of the silent book; a wordless picture book
that invites imagination, visual interpretation, and independent narrative construction.
The didactic potential of the silent book as a stimulus for visual art creation is also
highlighted.
The central part of the thesis presents the process of creating my own silent book,
designed as a tool for the empirical part of the research. I describe how the book served
as a creative prompt for art-making tasks in three groups: the control group worked
without additional prompts, while the two experimental groups were given creative
constraints and unexpected interventions.
In the empirical part, I conducted a comparative analysis of students’ artworks, evaluated
by three independent reviewers based on predefined criteria (originality of idea, use of
materials, experimentation with materials, composition, colour harmony and contrast, and
complexity of artistic solution). The findings are supported by both descriptive and
statistical analysis, as well as visual examples that illustrate differences between the
groups.
The results indicate that the silent book can effectively stimulate students’ creativity,
particularly when combined with thoughtful teacher guidance and carefully designed
creative stimuli.
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