There has been a lot of discussion around the topic of creativity. Educators and society in general seem to agree on the importance of creativity – but do our schools provide a fertile ground for our teachers and students to develop and cultivate this attribute?
In Will Richardson’s blog, he argues that on the whole schools do not do a very good job at cultivating creativity. He refers to behavioural therapist, Andrea Kuszewski‘s article The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience in which she argues that children are taught from a young age at school to pay attention, watch the teacher, imitate what the teacher does, stay in your seat, don’t question authority, and receive praise. This, Kuszewski argues is not teaching children to think; we are teaching them to memorize – instead of encouraging them to innovate (or create), we expect them to follow the outline and adhere to rules.
Kuszewski refers to findings from researcher, Alison Gopnik who found that too much direct instruction—showing a child what to do, rather than letting him figure out the solution himself—can severely affect his ability and/or instinct to independently and creatively solve problems, or to explore multiple potential solutions.
America is experiencing a creativity crisis as noted in Richardson’s blog and Thomas L Friedman’s That Used to be Us. In Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s article The Creativity Crisis, research is showing that students’ creativity levels have been falling since 1990 – particularly among those from kindergarten through sixth grade.
According to Bronson and Merryman, American teachers are overwhelmed by curriculum standards and don’t have room in the day for a creativity class. University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls this “art bias” – the age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. The following paragraph taken from Bronson and Merryman’s article highlights an important point about integrating creativity into the classroom.
Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.
Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch spoke at the G8 Forum about how there has been innovation and progress in all areas of life except education. He calls this a colossal failure of imagination. Murdoch provides a sobering example of how in every part of life, someone who woke up after a fifty-year nap would not recognise the world around him – except in education. Today’s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age: a teacher standing in front with a textbook, a blackboard and a piece of chalk.
Rupert suggests that in order to excite the imagination of our students we need to use technology as the vehicle to personalise the learning experience. He makes the point that technology will never replace the teacher, but it can relieve the drudgery of teaching by taking advantage of the increasingly sophisticated analytics that will help teachers spend more time on things that make us all more human and more creative.
Ken Robinson’s argues in Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative that contrary to popular belief, being creative is something that can be learnt, and not just for a select few. Creativity, according to Robinson is a step further on from imagination. Being creative is doing something – it’s a process of putting your imagination to work. It is applied imagination.
The question is how can educators and students develop creative potential in schools?