I have thought a lot about the idea of creativity in education recently, this is a growing list of thoughts and questions I have that I want to investigate further. There is no particular order, but that is in part the idea of this blog...
What is creativity seems like a good place to start. It is certainly something that people disagree up on; some believing that anything that is 'created' is creative, some believing that there has to an originality of thought in order for something to be creative. Perhaps it's the big 'C' little 'c' debate. Sir Ken Robinson in a recent discussion about the future of education (http://ideas.economist.com/presentation/new-school) puts creativity as "the process of having original ideas", indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness", but this brings into question the idea of originality. If it is original to the maker, is it therefore creative? What if it's been done a thousand times before? What if it was heavily influenced by something else, seen either consciously or subconsciously?
In education, the word creativity and it's various derivations is used extensively without explanation of the exact definition. If creativity is always subjective, as I am lead to believe, then is it possible to apply objective criteria, as we are so often required to do in schools. This debate opens up the nature of school assessment and it's relevance in today's education, but I'll leave the reasons for education for a later blog. In 'expressive arts' subjects we are often asked to look for forms, codes and conventions, which by it's very nature is asking people to imitate. Is something which is an imitation of something else creative? If not, how can the piece of work be marked highly in a 'creative subject'.
If we were to assess creativity in a student, would we need to benchmark and baseline as we do in other criteria based assessment systems. Is creativity something which can be learned as Ken Robinson believes? Or is it something you either have or don't have?
Other issues I have with using the word in schools are when it is suffixed with words such as "management" or "learning". For management to be creative, does the management style have to be imaginative? Original? I cannot personally remember seeing or experiencing an original style of management. Also, creativity often includes an element of experimentation and risk, and I certainly haven't seem any of that at leadership level in schools. I am doing a second Masters in Educational Leadership where one of the taught units is on "Creative Management" so maybe I'll discover all about it then. As for Creative Learning, I can only imagine that this is creative styles of learning, as learning itself cannot be creative, or can it?
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