Nowadays, we hear a lot about how students need to be more creative, how creativity enables students to solve problems more effectively, how creativity helps prepare students to find innovative and imaginative ways to solve unique situations and circumstances in real life and so on. In addition, if we speak to business leaders they would say they want people who are creative, who can innovate, who can think differently, who can work in teams and communicate effectively. The key term we are expected in school and after school is “creative” or “creativity”. In this blog post, I will present the definition of creativity, introducing some myths about it and discussing how to teach creativity in school.
What is Creativity?
In fact, we can find a lot of definitions of creativity. For example, Koestler (1964, p.95) defined “Creativity is the ability to make connections between previously unconnected ideas” while NACCCE (1999, p.30) said “Creativity as imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value”. Or from Ken Robinson (2011) view, he saw Creativity as a process (of trial and error) of having original ideas (may not to the whole world but to yourself) that have value. He also emphasised three important terms in his definition are process, original ideas and value. However, I think that creating a definition for creativity can be problematic and even unhelpful because creativity is something that we cannot really see but we still can know and giving judgment.
More than the definition, I think creativity is about a limited amount of input and unlimited output. By this, I mean that we taught certain things to children and they were able to think far beyond the things that were taught. For example, teachers said “Sky is blue”, some children can think “It is not completely blue, it is black, pink and white, it is colourful”.
Another term that linked closely to Creativity is “Imagination”. Ken Robinson said that Imagination is the key to everything. Imagination is the ability to step outside of our current space, to bring to mind things that aren’t present to our senses. With imagination, you can go back to the past or visit the future. And, Creativity is putting your imagination to work. You can be imaginative all day long and never do anything but to be creative you really do things. It is a very practical process. In other words, Imagination is seeing and thinking of the unknown, Creativity is making it into reality and something concrete.
Why creativity is so important?
Albert Einstein once said, “imagination is more important than knowledge”. Because knowledge can be obtained and is limited, imagination and creativity come from within and is unlimited. Without creativity, the world would not be what it is today. The world today came from someone’s imagination. Moreover, we are living in an unpredictable world, a child starts his school today, at 5 year olds and will attend his career about 15 years later. We have no clue about the world he is going to live and work in. Therefore, Creativity is not an option, it's an absolute necessity (Ken Robinson, 2014). And as President Obama said in his speech (State of the Union, 2011) “None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from, what we can do, what America does better than anyone else, is spark the creativity and imagination of our people “
Common creativity myths
Firstly, some people believe that only few special people were born with talent and just these people can be called ‘creative’. That myth came from the 18th century when creativity was considered to be a natural talent or God-given gift (Fleming, 2012). In addition, Pinker (1995) stated that creativity is an innate human feature and cannot be learnt like language. But in fact, creativity is something everyone can learn. Because creativity is not just about one moment, it is about the whole process and because everybody has tremendous creative capacities (Ken Robinson). Therefore, learning creativity means finding the creativity that already exists within us and enhancing them by practising. For example, looking at all the singers in a music company, we cannot say who was born with talent and who are improved with everyday practice.
Secondly, people often say they are not creative. What they mean by that very often is that they cannot play an instrument or they do not pain or they do not dance. And all those things are the arts. We admit that arts must be very creative. But you can be creative in anything, for example, math, writing, cooking and so on. People tend to associate creativity with the arts only but creativity is really a function of everything we do. Therefore, education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it. A child who can draw a nice picture and a child who can solve the math in different ways both can be called creative.
Teaching creativity in schools
People often say we cannot teach creativity and we cannot assess it. The trouble with creativity is that we cannot thoroughly define it. We think of creativity as something too complicated and we cannot teach someone what we even do not know well. Therefore, I believe instead of teaching children what is creativity, we can help them explore how creative they are by different learning activities both indoor and outdoor. I can suggest some pedagogies that can be applied in school in order to enhance children’s creativity.
1. Storytelling
Storytelling is not only about telling a story. In fact, we can teach children more things than we imagine. A boring lesson can be much more interesting through a story and will stay in children’s memory much longer. Moreover, children can learn how to make their own story, by using their most powerful and energetic tool – imagination (Egan, 1990).
2. Play and Outdoor learning
“the idea that play, a very important human activity, is intrinsically bound up with all artistic activity, the early and obviously playful activities of children being sublimated into activities such as painting pictures, playing music and reading novels” (Swanwick and Tillman, 1986, p.306)
From a lot of theories, by playing, children can develop themselves thoroughly in terms of physical development, emotional development and intelligent development.
The benefits of outdoor learning can be included physical exercise and freedom, enhanced learning through first-hand experience, enjoyment, persistence, a wider range of possible activities and increased confidence through facing of fears.
3. Critical thinking
By allowing children to think differently, we can help them develop their problem-solving skills. Instead of giving them the right answer, we can ask another question like “what other ideas could we try?”. Using open-ended questions also can be a good idea.
4. Problem-solving
To develop this skills, case-study can be a good activity. By doing that, children will have a chance to practice with a situation that they may face in the future. The good thing is they do not have to solve the problem alone, instead, they have their friends and teachers who will give them a lot of ideas and sharing experience.
Conclusion
Creativity is a necessity for children. However, we have to acknowledge that creativity requires risk-taking. In fact, Society teaches us that risks are bad, risks are dangerous or in other words, we are discouraged from taking risks. Therefore, it is really hard to foster creativity in schools. For example, a society operates like a nanny state which means that the government and its policies basically interfere with our own personal choices and try to protect us, try to force us to make safe decisions and punish us by doing anything that could potentially be of danger to us. Even though we are grown adults and we should have to make our own choices. Imagine all of the art new ideas, innovation and creativity that we admire so much today and what if none of that would exist because people that created them had been normal people with safe behaviour.
I believe that school should be a safe environment for kids to express and explore their creativity. School should be a place where they can take risks and not be criticised, not be told that “that’s wrong”. Teachers should teach sufficient skills for children to have a foundation but still leave plenty of freedom for them to explore their own way of doing things. we hope the best for children but taking risk is not the worst. Because you do it safe doesn’t mean that the life will be fine. It would be sad to see people who have so much potential but lack the confidence to take a chance because they have been brought up to believe that “that’s wrong”.
References
Fleming, G.J. (1998) ‘A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity’. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(4), pp. 290-310.
NACCCE (1999) All our future: Creativity, Culture and Education. London: DfEE.
Koestler, A. (1964) The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson & Co.
Ken Robinson (2014) The Brainwaves Video Anthology. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlBpDggX3iE (Accessed: 10/12/2017)
Ken Robinson (2011) London Business Forum. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtnRaa7AgLs (Accessed: 10/12/2017)
Barack Obama (2011) The Obama White House. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl2g40GoRxg (Accessed: 10/12/2017)
Pinker, S. (1995) The Language Instinct. London: Penguin.
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