Helena Gil da Costa has been a lecturer at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto since 1999, where she has worked in the areas of creativity, sociology, education, and Portuguese culture. She trained in Early Childhood Education at the Escola de Educadores de Infância Paula Frassinetti and later graduated in Sociology from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. She completed a Master in Total Applied Creativity at the University of Santiago de Compostela and earned a PhD in Social and Human Sciences from the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro. Since then, regardless of the subject she teaches, creativity has been the central axis of her practice. Her latest adventure? A 100 km walk in the Sahara Desert.
What memories do you have from your childhood?
A beautiful image-sound that stays with me is the waterspout of the tank in our house in Póvoa de Lanhoso – it runs water day and night, in summer and winter, water that flows from there to irrigate the fields. We never lacked it. It is, in a way, a symbol and metaphor for what I was given to live. I was born and live in Porto, but that place is still today my place of “coming home”. It was, and still is, where we all gathered – my grandparents, parents and siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. We were many, of all ages. As children, we spent our days roaming the hills. I was lucky (I truly think it is a blessing) to grow up in a family of good people – people with solid values, integrity, people of faith, people who understood their relationship with and service to the community as part of their life purpose.
Your background is in Early Childhood Education. How did that path come about?
Even if in very different contexts and forms, education has always been part of my family. It accompanied me from the beginning. I discovered my own path in a very simple, almost childlike way. One day I was returning home on the tram and saw a group of children from what was then called an orphanage. At the time, that was how care homes were named. The children could be recognized from afar – always in groups, always in line, all dressed in grey. It wasn’t the first time I had seen them in the city. But that day, for some reason, I thought things could and should be different, that my place could be with them. I abandoned the idea of studying Romance Languages and, the following year, enrolled at the Escola de Educadores de Infância Paula Frassinetti. There I trained, went on to work directly with children (very different from those I had seen that afternoon), and later returned as a lecturer. A few years later, I was involved in creating and managing the Santa Maria School of Early Childhood Education and the Santa Maria School (nursery, kindergarten, and primary school). I worked as a lecturer for almost 25 years. I never returned, however, to direct work with children – I never worked with those who made me find my path. I owe them that. Today, at 68, whatever other roles I may have had, if you ask me what I am, I answer without hesitation: I am an educator.
Later, after studying Sociology, you went on to do a Master in Creativity. What led you there?
My training as an early childhood educator took place during a very particular and intense period in Portugal’s history (1975–1978). It was, as we know, a time of great dreams and illusions, of collective enthusiasm, a time when people believed it was possible to change and create a better world – it was in our hands, it was our responsibility. Years later, during my Sociology degree, the impact was almost the opposite. Sociology forces us to keep our feet on the ground, to look at social reality as it is – to understand how social relations actually occur, to realize that our individual capacity and power for social change are limited. For a long time, I felt a void I did not know how to fill – oscillating between those two poles, believing in both, but not knowing how to connect them. Creativity, as a field of study, also arrived “by chance,” as many good things we are searching for do, even without knowing it. It “fell into my lap” during a conference. Weeks later, I enrolled without hesitation in the Master in Total Applied Creativity at the University of Santiago de Compostela. There I understood that the void could be filled, that change can and should happen. It is no longer about changing the world, but about changing worlds – mine, certainly, first, because that is also my primary responsibility. Since then, as a person and as a lecturer, the focus has been on “learning from within” – what we call “embodied knowledge”.
“In a world that is mad, how can we not think about our responsibility, about what we must do?”
Today you identify creativity as the core of your work. How did that lead you to the Universidade Católica?
In a rather “natural” but challenging way, creativity led me to train people from very different areas – young interns in industrial design, unionized bankers, production line managers in a footwear factory, people in the management of a Port Wine company… With that experience, during a time of restlessness and desire for change, I sent my CV to the School of Arts, which had just started its activity. Initially, in 1999, my collaboration was very occasional – I ran an annual creativity seminar for postgraduate students. In 2001, I began teaching at the Faculty of Theology. Gradually, the collaboration expanded and, years later, almost without noticing, I moved into full-time work at the University. I have worked with all academic units in Porto, and participated in and coordinated several transversal projects. Today my institutional affiliation is with the Faculty of Education and Psychology, but I continue to collaborate with other academic units and projects.
Can creativity be taught?
Tools and techniques can be taught, but they are not creativity in themselves. There are many academically validated definitions of creativity, but I will focus on one – creativity as a human capacity/quality and attitude. As such, it is not taught, just as intelligence(s) is(are) not taught. What can and should be done is to create conditions for it to be developed and expressed. Otherwise, we risk losing much of that capacity. On the other hand, although we all have creative potential, that does not mean what we do with it is automatically creative. It is often said, for example, that children are very creative, but that is not strictly accurate – children have a great imagination, but they lack knowledge and evaluative capacity. For something to be creative, it is not enough to be different or unusual; it must have quality, value, meaning, and it must intentionally respond to a need.
What are the phases of the creative process?
Different authors identify different (non-linear) phases of the creative process, with more or less detail. I will share one of the simplest – the time to center, the time to act, the time to celebrate. Centering is the time to stop, to be silent, the slow time of finding and giving meaning to what is experienced and sought. Acting is doing – the moment of concretizing what was previously discovered or recognized. Celebrating is the time of joy and gratitude for what has been achieved, however small it may be. Without each of these, there is no true creation, and without creation there is no life, only copying and reproduction. However, we often live in imbalance, and when one of these times dominates the others, something goes wrong. If we look at many workplaces, for example, what matters is doing, doing, doing, without really knowing why or for what purpose. Quantity prevails over quality, and people struggle to breathe. We increasingly find unhealthy people, groups, and organizations – so unhealthy that they do not recognize, or prefer to ignore, their own condition… until it is too late.
“If we ask ourselves where we usually get good ideas, we rarely answer that they come while working in front of a computer.”
From your work with international students at the Universidade Católica in Porto came the book Education, Creativity and Portuguese Culture…
The book is a narrative-testimony of the course Introduction to Portuguese Culture and Language, aimed at international students from all academic units and all degrees. The course has existed since 2017 and more than 700 students from over 40 nationalities and four continents have taken part. As a lecturer and researcher, this course and the book are my latest “pride and joy”. Today I only enjoy writing and thinking in depth, and in a simple way, about lived experience. The book therefore tells and supports (conceptually and methodologically) our creation process – what we do, how we experience it, what resulted from combining my different areas of training and being Portuguese, but above all from working with students. Academic life and work are not separate. It is not “me to them”, it is “us”. Isn’t that teaching and learning? Isn’t that being educators-educatees? Some say the book is brutally honest, and I like to think it is. It includes testimonies and excerpts from student work over the years. I had to contact them all over the world to obtain permission. It was a beautiful process – worth it in itself. I began writing the book in 2019 and finished in 2025. Things need time.
What is today the biggest challenge in education?
Such a difficult and big question. There are many. In a world that is mad, how can we not think about our responsibility, about what we must do? One that haunts me is coherence – coherence between discourse and practice, between what we know and what we actually do. There is a fundamental difference between information, knowledge, and wisdom. We speak of holistic education, but we still often focus almost exclusively on the cognitive dimension and forget that we are embodied beings. Creation does not exist without time. I believe that, perhaps more than ever, we as teachers need to stop and reflect on ourselves, on what we are and what we do. But this requires time, availability, distance, and a great deal of courage – much of what we are constantly avoiding.
Where do you find space to have ideas and rest?
If we ask ourselves where we usually get good ideas, we rarely say they come while working in front of a computer. We tend instead to mention walking, driving, being with friends, cooking (not my case), or showering. At this stage of my life, I go on trails whenever I can to see-feel-smell what cannot be seen, felt, or smelled on the road. I spent New Year’s Eve in the Sahara Desert. I went with some fear, I knew it would be hard, but going to the desert was an old dream. I wanted to hear silence. I came back happy. We were five – we walked about 100 kilometres in five days. Today I have no doubt that, in some form, I will return. Walking like this is one of the ways I now respond to a question that, I believe, is not just for me but for all of us: in what ways and contexts does creativity help create (and even recognize) more beautiful worlds?