The Growing Importance of Creativity in Education

What is Creativity?

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterized by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing.

A product is creative when it is (a) novel and (b) appropriate. A novel product is original, not predictable. The bigger the concept and the more the product stimulates further work and ideas, the more the product is creative.

Sternberg & Lubart, Defying the Crowd

Creativity discourses commonly attend to creative ability, influence, and assessment along three broad themes: the physical environment, pedagogical practices and learner traits, and the role of partnerships in and beyond the school.

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Even those of us not in explicitly creative fields must come up with new ideas and insights to move ahead. How can we shake up the way we think? Creativity has been pegged to conducive environments, perfect collaborators, personality traits, serendipity, and even spiritual muses. Research shows that creative thinking involves making new connections between different regions of the brain, implying that we can make ourselves more creative by engaging our divergent thinking skills and deliberately exposing ourselves to new experiences and learning. While research psychologists are interested in increasing innovative thinking, clinical psychologists sometimes encourage patients to use artistic expression as a way to confront difficult feelings.

Learning creativity

Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking. You can learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesizing information. Learning to be creative is akin to learning a sport. It requires practice to develop the right muscles and a supportive environment in which to flourish.

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Facing the rapid changing world driven by globalization and technology, we need to reconsider our practice in this world and pay more attention to creativity. As we all know, creativity is the sustainable power of technology development which calls for more talented creators for further development. But on the contrary, our education system is suppressing students’ innate creativity potentials with uniform curricula and mechanized teaching method. [1] Sir Ken Robinson, the champion of the importance of creativity in education, talks about the need for all children to have a creative outlet. He mentions that ‘’creative intelligence is dynamic, it’s diverse and it’s distinct’’.  Creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same significance. More and more children are educated out of taking risks and they become numb to trying and failing before they succeed. We need to teach them to be prepared to be wrong and to be original. The world is becoming more and more dynamic and the ability to be adaptable is now a valued commodity. Creative intelligence generates the perfect skill set which we need to equip young people with so that they can navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. “Innovation in education is stepping outside of the box, challenging our methods and strategies in order to support the success of all students as well as ourselves. This transformation may be small or a complete overhaul, but it is done with purpose and supports the whole student.” Whitney

Creativity in Schools in Australia

Creativity is once again front and center in the call for educating more effective 21^stcentury workforces. Today we know that creativity is ubiquitous, that everyone is creative, and that all students deserve the opportunity to develop, and learn and maximize their own creative thinking abilities. Having progressed through industrial and knowledge economies, we are now propelled into a dynamic creative economy of enormous complexity, interconnectedness, and opportunity. The Australian national curriculum mandates the development of the general capability of creative and critical thinking. However, achieving this is severely hampered, as the report attests, by inflexible curricula, teaching models that limit differentiation and creativity, and stymied organizational leadership that limits teacher practices and de-incentivizes schools as innovative environments. In Austraila, they shall develop a national Creativity Index that will measure creative skills and capacities alongside literacy and numeracy. Their research shows an urgent need for a more ecological approach to improving creativity in schools, not just for measuring it. This means approaching schools as ecosystems in which teachers collaborate with other teachers, students, and leadership, and teaching and learning are approached interdisciplinarily. It also urges the immediate incorporation of compulsory creativity training in all initial teacher education and professional development across the country. With support from the Australian Research Council, the Australian national curriculum is offering new Australian research and practical tools built from the 600+ teachers, principals, and students expressed needs for improving creativity in their classrooms. Large-scale, current and empirical research and tools grown from within the Education sector can greatly enhance models. Using practical and collaborative approaches they can expand user-centered innovation possibilities and have the potential to radically improve Australian education, and more effectively implement the Australian Curriculum’s ‘critical and creative thinking’ general capability. [3]

Why is creativity important?

Multinational companies such as Adobe are now conducting their own research to stress the need for creative skills and capacities in their recruits. While market needs shouldn’t drive education, they play a strong role in determining what gets taught, and how. Digital technology is playing an ever-greater role in the how of educational engagements. And we’re not talking about just being able to put a Computer or Tablet in every learner’s hands, but actually using hybrid reality technologies and emerging digital technology to educationally meet and extend our own and our students shared creative imaginations. This is not only a good education but good business too.  From augmented reality and games development to the immersive world and virtual reality technologies, to smart homes, workplaces and smart cities, creativity and creative ways of thinking are at the forefront of educational needs today.

^{Lucubrate Magazine, Issue 37, August 17th, 2018}

 

[1] Yanmei Yin: Punya Mishra and Danah Henriksen: Creativity, Technology & Education: Exploring their Convergence, Springer (2018)

[2] The Creative Ireland Programme, Ireland

[3] Australia Association for Research in Education

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Category: Development, Education, Magazine, News, World