Narratives of Creativity and Well-Being in the Russian Pedagogical Discourse During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The chapter is devoted to the study of the theories of creativityCreativity and psychological well-being and their development in the pedagogical discourse in the period of forced distance learningDistance learning in Russia’s higher education institutionsHigher Education Institutions in 2020–early 2023. Developing students’ creative thinking has long been one of the current global trends in higher educationHigher education. Active research into the psychology of creativityCreativity began in the second half of the twentieth century. At that time, the seminal works by J.P. Guilford and E.P. Torrance were published. They defined creativity as the ability of the intellect to find problems and offer extraordinary ways to solve them, a necessary condition for scientific creation, social progress, and technological innovationsInnovation. According to M. A. Runco, between 1960 and 1991, more than 9000 articles devoted to the study of creativityCreativity have been published. In recent years, interest in creativity has not decreased. In 2010–2020, on the www.sciencedirect.com platform, the number of articles related to creativityCreativity in one way or another (search by the keyword “creativity”) exceeds 35,000. In the time of the global pandemic, many researchers confirmed the importance of creativityCreativity for the sake of stress alleviation. It was found that students with a higher creative potential easier coped with periods of social restrictionsRestrictions, felt less anxious, and were better satisfied with the distance learning processChange process. This study adopted a descriptive analytical approach to the pedagogical discourse on the interpretation of the concepts of mental well-being, creativity, creative thinking, and creative abilities, as well as the use of creative tasks for the purpose of stress relief and well-being promotion. At the first stage, we created a theoretical framework for our research by briefly describing the main foundations of the theories of well-being and creativityCreativity. Later we applied the bibliometric and content analysis methods to the 2020–early 2023 research articles centered around educationalists’ experience of tackling well-being and creativity in class during the period of forced distance learningDistance learning due to the pandemic. The research covering a wide geography of Russia’s higher educationHigher education institutions confirmed the importance of creativityCreativity as an essential resource for enhancing academicsAcademics’ and studentsStudents’ well-being in stressful situations during the COVID-19COVID-19 pandemicPandemic. Students with higher levels of creativity and imagination were found to have a more positive outlook, more open to self-study options, less emotionally tense, and actively searching for new effective ways of studying and communicating online. The teaching personnel in Russian universities, who experienced chronic professional stress during the COVID-19 pandemicOnline education Covid-19 pandemic’, engaged their internal resources, including participation in creative activities, as a way to improve their psychological, social, and emotional well-being. The inverse dependence was also found: improvement of professors’ well-being led to more innovative and creative activities practiced by them. Our last finding concerns the development of the InternetInternet communicationCommunication during the period in question as a manifestation of the collective effort to promote common well-being under stressful circumstances through verbal and visual creativityCreativity.