Putting the Flow into Aesthetic Education

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly
The Evolving Self: A Psychology For The Third Millennium
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s The Evolving Self is a follow-up to his popular Flow, and in this work he provides further insight into the cultivation of engaging, challenging experiences which he, over his more than 30 years as a researcher and psychologist, has called flow. I believe what he speaks of as flow describes the aesthetic experiences we at Lincoln Center Institute wish to create for our students in workshops and in the viewing works of art, but his writing in this book also leads me to a further connection: I believe that when we are teaching optimally we, too, are engaged in flow.

A central thesis of this book is that cultivating flow experiences will lead to a complex evolution of the self, and also of our culture. Csikszentmihalyi’s commitment to flow and the language he uses in discussion borders on religious—I can see that individuals, depending on their individual preferences, could find this language zealous. Either way, this book offers useful tools for cultivating flow which I believe, if heeded, will allow us to be better teaching artists and facilitators of flow experiences, and will possibly also allow us to better embrace the flow possibilities in our own experiences.

A big idea in Csikszentmihalyi’s work is that complex activities are pleasurable, and this belief is based on research that has included interviews with an enormous range of individuals about when they feel most present, content, and fully-engaged in their own lives. He notes that almost any activity can produce flow as long as certain conditions are present. He lists concentration, absorption, deep involvement, joy, and a sense of accomplishment as ways his subjects have described their own flow experiences. Csikszentmihalyi’s states, “Flow makes us receptive to the entire world as a source of new challenges, as an arena for creativity” (181). To me, these ideas about flow mesh with our belief in the importance of making connections between works of art and our outside lives, and the “wide awakeness” that Maxine Greene talks about cultivating.

The book is divided into two parts (“The Allure of the Past” and “The Power of the Future”), and each of these contains five chapters. The first half of the book looks at our minds from an evolutionary standpoint, and he examines the ideas of self and reality within this framework. He argues that instincts that were once vital for evolutionary survival are no longer necessary, and presents ideas about how to deal with the challenge our instincts, our culture, and our selves pose to further evolution. Though he seems to believe that much of the past bodes ill for the possibility of a content and flow-filled future, he believes we can find meaning within evolution in the increasing complexity of our materials, inventions and information systems.

The second half of the book, which looks toward the future and cultivating flow, holds the most allure for me and is the most useful for my work as a teaching artist. Chapter seven, “Evolution and Flow,” seems the crux of the work. Ultimately, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that finding enjoyment in flow activities can lead to better society and consciousness, and he proposes a flow society of sorts, which values this concept. At the end of the introduction, he states: “when the self consciously accepts its role in the process of evolution, life acquires a transcendent meaning” (xviii). Every chapter ends with some guiding questions which are intended to awaken one’s own experiences. While some are very thought-provoking, I am more likely to use his suggestions as a jumping off point than to take them literally as exercises for myself.

One of the most exciting things I discovered was in this second half of the work, where Csikszentmihalyi identifies commonalities within flow experiences, and finds eight common conditions that should be present for flow to occur. I immediately began connecting these eight conditions to the conditions in our classrooms, and realized that addressing these conditions could be a new and very relevant way to create the optimal space for AE to happen in each of our classrooms.

The research is fascinating, but in the end it is Csikszentmihalyi’s specific suggestions for cultivating flow that I think I’ll take away to my own teaching. They seem tangible and relevant and they make me think about how I can structure activities with a specific AE lesson, and about the importance of giving clear instructions and even goals within which there is plenty of room to play and solve problems. In AE we strive to awaken and engage the imagination, and we do tend to give clear parameters within which to explore, but Csikszentmihalyi’s research and arguments make me wonder if I provide enough feedback about expectations. He has found that knowing the purpose and how their progress is doing correlates to flow experiences, and he states that the “value of a goal is simply that it offers an opportunity to use and refine one’s abilities” (180).

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