From Lifelong Creativity to Self-Authorship: The Humanistic and Creational Dimension of Women’s Citizenship in Education – Maria Grzegorzewska and Irena Wojnar

Abstract

The developed issue aimed to search for sources and categories of meanings used to define the essence of citizenship in the context of the adopted humanistic and creative perspective. The research problems concerned the following: 1) the areas of civic activity in the subjective and social dimension of reference; 2) the place of women’s lifelong creativity in the humanistic and creative dimension of citizenship, and 3) the space of transgressive development in women’s lifelong creativity in education. Due to the research problem that arose in the procedure of analysing the lifelong creativity of selected female characters, secondary sources and evidence of their professional work were taken into account. Sources of the interpretation of citizenship were adopted based on Maria Ossowska’s (1946) essay Wzór obywatela w ustroju demokratycznym [The Model of a Citizen in a Democratic System], in which the author distinguished and characterised 13 civic virtues and identified abilities proposed by Charles Taylor (2001). My perspective on interpreting the sources of citizenship combines the humanistic and creative dimensions, an added value contained in the title approach: from lifelong creativity to self-authorship. Self-authorship is understood as the forces of subjectivity, intentionality, the meaning of life and creative adaptation. The lifelong creativity of women in education and their achievements determine their cognitive and social value and emancipatory nature. Women’s lifelong creativity shows the presence of important areas of transgressive development related to the acquisition of knowledge and scientific achievements and the activities carried out in the field of social practice, referred to as (self-)realisation.