Respecting Instructions

The voluntary or involuntary transgression of instructions, often creative, if not considered as an error, becomes a source of enrichment and learning, opening the way to a pedagogy based on welcoming the unexpected and respecting others.

An Amazing Discovery

A teacher who had participated in a training session I was facilitating thanked me afterwards, confiding that I had transformed her way of teaching. When I asked her in what way, she explained that it concerned the question of respecting instructions. Previously, when she gave instructions to her students and they then brought back their productions, their creations, she judged quite harshly those who had not respected them, criticizing them as if they had failed, considering that it was her role as an educator. Today, she welcomes their work whatever it may be and the unexpected openings it can represent, both for themselves and for the collective, even when the instructions have not been understood or respected. This approach is enriching and respectful of the person, it allows going further by going beyond simple judgment. How does this work and why?

Creative Exercise: A Framework for Singular Expression

Let’s take an example to question our traditional relationship to pedagogical instructions. In an exercise that I developed and proposed on numerous occasions, I invite participants to create a photograph or a short video. I give them a considerable number of instructions, often very precise. These people are generally adults in professional training, artists, they can even be children in the context.

The challenge of these exercises lies in the creation itself. There is deliberately no evaluation of compliance with instructions; the objective is to create something enriching for others. The instruction serves to establish a reassuring framework that encourages participants to see their approach through, to dare to create, to dare to express something of themselves.

Here is the fundamental nuance of my approach: the real challenge is that each person can express themselves and contribute to the common social space. This collective instruction helps everyone to go beyond what they would never have dared to undertake alone and to encounter their creativity, a large part of which remains unconscious.

Collective Sharing: From Singular Creation to Mutual Enrichment

Once the object is created, whether it’s a photograph or a video, a personal or collective creation, it is viewed collectively, thus contributing to the experience of all the spectators present. In this way, each person’s singular expression enriches others. This fragile and improbable expression, made possible only thanks to the proposed framework, produces not only the creation of something unique, but also generates, through a process of symbolization, the self-construction of each participant and, beyond that, their social inscription.

This dynamic is only possible thanks to the dimension of autonomy granted to participants. All create simultaneously, each on their own side, before sharing their achievements with the group. We then discover together what each has produced. During the creative phase, each participant enjoys complete autonomy. After stating the instructions, I no longer intervene: each becomes responsible for their creation.

Creative Gap: When Transgression Enriches Experience

Faced with an instruction, I have always observed that even adults, including people of high social standing, sometimes don’t listen to everything, only retain certain elements, or, despite initial attention and complete recording of instructions, forget certain aspects once immersed in the creative situation. This is explained by the fact that they find themselves confronted with something more essential, that they have opened themselves to creativity, which is indeed the objective of the initial framework, that is, the instruction. The instruction has led them to authorize themselves to creativity. And if, in doing so, the instruction has dissolved into it, this is not a problem, because it has nonetheless achieved its goal.

Precisely, the objective of this exercise is for participants to open themselves to themselves, share their creativity and explore territories that are unknown to them. It is this discovery of the unexpected that truly enriches them.

The instruction constitutes what authorizes. The essential lies in the fact that participants have authorized themselves to discover their creativity, to expand their consciousness, to create something. Such is the true function of the instruction: not to constrain and standardize productions, but to offer sufficient confidence so that each ventures into their creativity, into their encounter with the world.

Welcoming Singularities: The Art of Receiving the Unexpected

Thus, when participants return with their creations, the experience proves in all cases unique and irreversible. This shared experience constitutes our common reality. The only fruitful attitude therefore consists in choosing to be enriched by the singularities encountered. When some have not respected the instruction and have created something else, forgotten elements or appropriated the exercise in their own way, but have nevertheless brought something, this is precisely what matters.

If others have not succeeded in producing anything, I invite them to start again immediately, in a few moments, because the exercise remains simple and allows creating something very brief in little time. The important thing lies in the creative act itself.

When we welcome all the productions, the essential consists precisely in receiving what each has offered, according to their own path, their personal journey, according to their singular way of appropriating the instruction. We then enter into a diversity of incredible richness. Each participant, including those who have not respected the instruction, which was generally not intentional, because each strives to do well, discovers and understands that their involuntary transgression, rather than being experienced as an error, has on the contrary allowed creating a fertile shift, enriching the exercise with a singularity and opening new perspectives of experience and mutual discovery.

This moment of shared and unique artistic experience leads us toward horizons that even the workshop facilitator did not know could be reached.

A Philosophy of Creative Welcome

Beyond this specific experience, this approach may seem unrigorous or unconstructive at first glance. However, if we accord value to this shared and unique experience, which will never be reproduced identically, our best attitude consists in receiving everything it can offer us. Participants who have not respected the instructions are perfectly aware of it, we even discuss it openly, but without passing judgment. They can also draw lessons from it. Perhaps during the next session, they will respect the instructions more, out of personal desire and for themselves. But they will never have been judged for not having followed them.

The pedagogical construction thus proves much more subtle: we become aware of what has occurred, but we do not advocate systematic transgression by declaring that “you must do anything, it’s better.” Not at all. We simply act to the best of our abilities. By working thus, without forgetting that the objective went beyond simple respect for an instruction to aim for openness to creativity, we keep present in mind that the primary intention was for participants to feel legitimate in creating and opening themselves to the unknown, to discovery.

Such was the purpose of the instruction: not to exist for itself, but to open toward something relating to creation. It therefore potentially contained its own transgression.

An Existential Metaphor

This dynamic is akin to life itself: life is given to us, and we are free to make use of it, each in our own way. This is where all human richness lies. If we all acted identically, without the enrichment of our mutual oddities and our singularities, the world would certainly be impoverished!

In the field of scientific research, for example, how many major discoveries have been made by error, by chance, by non-compliance with the experimental framework, often involuntarily! Rather than rejecting these unexpected results, the scientist’s talent consists in mobilizing their curiosity, in welcoming the immense enrichment of what might seem fortuitous, but which could exist precisely only thanks to the existence of this framework and its formulated intentions. Simply, these intentions did not lock themselves in the straitjacket of predictable results, but dared to allow unexpected enrichment and authentic discoveries.

Toward a Pedagogy of Welcome

This approach invites us to fundamentally rethink our pedagogical relationship to error and transgression. Rather than sanctioning deviation from the norm, we can choose to see in it an opportunity for mutual learning. The instruction, in this perspective, is no longer a straitjacket but a springboard toward creative exploration. It offers the necessary security to dare the adventure of discovery, while keeping open the possibility of the unexpected.

This pedagogical philosophy, applicable well beyond creative workshops, reminds us that the richest education often springs from the unforeseen, from the singularity of each learner and from our collective capacity to transform “errors” into treasures of learning.