Creativity and Creative Pedagogies in the Early and Primary Years

Teresa Cremin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138670945
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317207542
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Whilst recognition of the role and nature of creativity and interest in creative pedagogical practice has grown, tensions persist at several levels, particularly in accountability cultures, where international comparisons of literacy, numeracy and science frame, shape and often limit policy, practice and curricula. Responding to this context, the book draws together the work of a number of eminent scholars of creativity and creative pedagogies. It offers diverse perspectives from Colombia, Denmark, England, France, Poland, Hong Kong, and the USA and highlights differences as well as similarities across cultural contexts. Individually and collectively, the authors reveal both the complexities and the possibilities of creative pedagogies. While some focus more upon conceptual challenges, others examine classroom practice, both that of teachers and visiting artists, and identify difficulties as well as potential possibilities. In offering hope as well as challenge, creative approaches to learning are of interest to all educators. This book was originally published as a special issue of Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education.

Widening our understanding of creative pedagogy: a North–South dialogue

Vlad Petre Glăveanu^a, Zayda Sierra^b and Lene Tanggaard^a

^aDepartment of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark; ^bResearch Group in Education and Diversity International (EDI), Faculty of Education, University of Antioquia, Antioquia, Colombia

The present article offers a reflection on creativity and creative pedagogy emerging out of an ongoing dialogue between three authors placed in two very different sociocultural contexts – Denmark and Colombia. Despite obvious geographical, economic, and cultural differences, similar concerns animate our practice when it comes to the question of creativity and creative pedagogy. The article opens with a brief presentation of the two cultural settings considered here and, based on it, continues with a discussion of paradigmatic foundations of creativity within education in general and within school in particular. These reflections inform our approach to creative pedagogy and suggest a reformulation of this concept in the light of sociocultural and decolonial theoretical perspectives. In the end, we question today’s global ethos in formal educational environments of striving towards accountability and standardisation in ways that minimise, if not outright exclude, difference, diversity, and, consequently, creativity itself.

Introduction

‘School kills creativity’ – a conclusion that often echoes in today’s discussions of education in both scientific forums and public debates. A concern that has been on the mind of researchers and educators for a long time, at least since Torrance gave evidence of multiple ‘creativity slumps’ in school (Torrance 1967). At the same time, several educational reforms in countries around the world contributed to what Craft (2008, 1) defined as ‘the beginning of a tsunami of opportunities for creativity in terms of pedagogy, curriculum and learning’. The present article, and this special issue, contributes to this general movement towards imagining schools and forms of pedagogy that foster rather than ‘annihilate’ creativity.

Our starting point in this debate is that the meanings we give to creativity in school, and in education more generally, are deeply related to how we understand children, the processes of teaching and learning, and the role of society and socialisation in these processes. For a long time, developmental theory has been dominated by a reductionist conception of the child as a more or less passive recipient of external influences, a being whose knowledge of self and world is initially limited and biased. The child as essentially reactive is gradually replaced by a view of children as both active and creative. But, even in this context, what kind of creativity do we think children are capable of? Some keep a very residual notion of creativity in the case of children (Sawyer et al. 2003, 240), others celebrate children’s creative expression in the form of ‘little c’ or mundane creativity (Craft 2001). And yet, a critical reflection on this topic would need to start from a more basic definitional question: why do we need to associate creativity with societal value and, more than this, who decides what is of value for society? A modern tradition of aligning creativity to the needs of capitalist societies makes us value most of all the (over)production of ‘goods’ and their incessant consumption. Should children be expected to participate in this cycle with their creativity?

The above-mentioned reflections, concerning the meaning and value of creativity in education and schooling, are born out of an ongoing dialogue between researchers located in Denmark and Colombia. Despite great cultural and socio-economic differences between these two contexts or, rather, because of them, the three authors of this article found themselves confronted with a similar question: from which paradigms are we theorising creativity in school, for what purposes, and with what consequences? This question stems from both our long-term engagement with theories of creativity and their paradigmatic underpinnings on one hand and, on the other, from our experiences of working with teachers and students within various educational contexts. In our dialogue, we share a sociocultural understanding of creativity as a distributed process that connects people, objects, and symbolic systems (Glăveanu 2014). This relational ontology makes us, first of all, wary of theories and practices that reify creativity and consider it a more or less ‘objective’ quality some people possess more than others (the psychometric model). Second, the symbolic and normative constraints placed on the definition of creativity bear the mark of relations of power between different groups and are often used to marginalise or discriminate. It is our aim to build a critical cultural approach to creative pedagogy that engages with paradigmatic discourses and notices how they are embodied in a series of everyday practices inside and outside the classroom. Such an exercise not only makes us aware of the cultural and political make-up of our theories but also, above all, can help us construct better, more fair and equitable perspectives.

For this purpose, we begin this article with a discussion of the two cultural contexts that inspire our work; then, we discuss three main paradigmatic views of creativity and their educational consequences, primarily in relation to current models of creative pedagogy. At the end, we consider the role of diversity for creative pedagogy worldwide and question the present-day ‘cultures of standardisation’ in school striving towards sameness and, to a great extent, conformity and uniformity rather than creativity.

Contrasting cases: creativity and schooling in Denmark and Colombia

In recent years, the Danish educational system at large has been undergoing extensive reforms under the neo-liberal regime increasingly governing public institutions. New, large schools and colleges are under construction, and fusions between institutions are seen everywhere. At the same time, institutions for teachers’ education have moved away from focusing on teaching particular subject matters to emphasising competences and results (Rasmussen and Rasch-Christensen 2014). Overall, output-oriented education is fashionable in Denmark, in particular in the light of the PISA discourse, measuring what can be measured to ensure that learning interventions are effective and controlled by outputs (Rasmussen and Rasch-Christensen 2014, 16).

Part of the new rhetoric in education, both in Denmark and in Europe more generally, focuses on the need to develop both functional skills in traditional subjects and meta-competences such as creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The latter are considered important vehicles for translating knowledge into action, for the creation of economic growth and social welfare. Creativity is perceived as central for the development of local and national economies. What remains largely unquestioned is how exactly creativity in school helps the economy and, most of all, what teachers can do to foster it; and yet, considering the long tradition of innovation in the country, many would place creativity at the core of how Danes think about themselves and their history. It is indeed hard to tell the story of the Danish educational system without mentioning creativity. The roots of creativity-enhancing reforms go back to the romantic movements of the 1800s and Rousseau’s innovative ideas about education (Appel and Fink-Jensen 2014). Up to this day, the Danish law regarding public schools (Folkeskoleloven) explicitly mentions the necessity for school teachers to develop students’ imagination (fantasi), desire for learning and doing (virkelyst), and democratic values.

However, in recent years, the usual high confidence in the capacity of the Danish educational model to ensure the development of creative competences among pupils (a combination between fantasi and virkelyst) is being questioned. The high weight placed on international competition and the trust in global measures of performance embodied by PISA are now forcing Denmark’s policy-makers to change the system. For example, in the new reform of public schools (Folkeskolen), students are to receive more teaching within subjects such as language and mathematics which lead to measurable functional skills. Moreover, new teaching materials are preparing students directly for national test items, leading to misguided forms of ‘teaching to the test’ and disregarding any other educational processes or outcomes not included in the assessment. Responses to such changes are mixed to say the least. Teachers rightfully worry about their role in shaping activities in the classroom and, more than this, about the fact that their own evaluation might be guided by criteria towards which they have little input.

Overall, these macro-level changes invite more and more teachers to reflect on the general role of education and the way in which creativity is understood and enacted in the educational system (Lene Tanggaard, the third author of this article, has been repeatedly invited in this context to offer creativity workshops to Danish teachers in different municipalities). What teachers are mostly concerned about is whether the creative expression of children can or should be ‘assessed’ just as any other competence. Moreover, the exact position of the teacher is questioned: either to adopt a coaching role and let the environment create, in a broad sense, the space for creativity or, on the contrary, to adopt a more directive role and model the creative activity of students. This is particular important since, in Danish schools, creativity is considered vital to the culture of schooling. It is something teachers often praise and value to a high extent. Accordingly, and as an alternative to output-driven schooling, researchers have argued that one way forward is to develop a ‘muddy’, ‘impure’ pedagogy that is meant to materialise the potential of students to change and create things, also those not illuminated by present learning goals (for details see Tanggaard 2013; Tanggaard, Rømer, and Brinkmann 2014).

To some extent, the same concern for the effects of outcome-driven schooling and the growing emphasis on testing are also present in Colombia. However, unlike Denmark, which shares the Western cultural legacy of thinking about creativity, the Colombian case forces us to start from a more basic interrogation. How to conceptualise creativity (and creative pedagogy) within one of the most culturally and biologically diverse countries in the world, one that, at the same time, has been dealing with a long-lasting armed conflict and deep economic inequalities? Considering creativity in this context means understanding, first of all, a formal education system that does not promote critical thinking and problem-solving but the mere transmission of information, not connected with students’ lives and current world changes (Zubiria 2014).

In Colombia, recent results of the PISA tests reveal a grim picture. Students from different social classes not only study separately, but also receive an education of different quality. The country ranked 62 among the 65 who participated in the 2013 study and fell 10 places compared to the last assessment in 2009 (El Espectador 2013). These are the overall results, but the interpretation changes if we distinguish students by social class, type of school, and the city they live in. The Colombian educational system separates people based on class: in general, the rich study with the rich in private schools, and the poor with the poor in public schools, which account for 72.7% of the population. The public sector, particularly in rural and ethnic areas, is the one who faces daily the problem of smoothing the functioning of schools in these different social, cultural, and economic contexts while their students are having, at the same time, the poorest resources in terms of quality of teachers, didactic materials, and infrastructure (Pereyra 2006). According to García et al. (2013), if we look at skin colour or ethnicity, standardised evaluations also show a serious case of segregation and inequality. The poor results are primarily of students from economically deprived families, who are the majority. The upper-class students, however, do better, although their performance is still mediocre compared to European countries, as Gentili observes (2014). For this author, what makes students from the Latin American elites more competitive is a historically existing model of accumulation and exploitation of the poor, which makes rich families so rich, and not their school virtues.

Colombian educational policies have been oriented in the last decade to the inclusion of all children into the school system. However, these policies have tended to confuse equality, the universal access to schooling (without reviewing critically its Eurocentric objectives and contents), with equity, the recognition of the adverse impact of an oppressive colonialist history on many diverse cultures and the need for an intercultural knowledge dialogue with them. Although the constitutional reform of 1991 recognised the pluricultural character of the nation – a result of decades of resistance by Indigenous and Afro-descendent people – an assimilative official curriculum is still compulsory, which continues ignoring differences and reproducing the status quo (López and y Sourrouille 2012).

Several initiatives in the field of ethno-education and popular education have emerged in Colombia in the last two decades as an effort from Indigenous, Afro-descendent, rural, and other economically disadvantaged groups to better serve their children’s needs towards building a more democratic and pluralistic society (Castillo and Caicedo 2008; Cendales, Mejía y, and Muñoz 2013). These initiatives require another type of qualitative assessment (i.e. students’ participation in identifying and solving problems in their communities; creative leadership towards participative actions to reduce poverty; equity in gender, interracial, and intergenerational relationships; political incidence, among others). However, government educational policies permeate or co-opt these efforts by centralised administrative decision-making based on individualistic standardised measurements designed in places far away from these communities. Thus, government policies and curricula continue to contribute to the violence that has characterised Latin American history since the European conquest. It is, in particular, an epistemological violence that, according to Castro-Gómez (2000), occurs when certain ways of being, thinking and living in the world are ignored, made invisible or denied, while knowledge and practices from the elites who hold political, economic and social power are legitimised as superior.

Understanding creative pedagogy: from which paradigm?

There are many differences between the educational system in Denmark and Colombia. And yet, teachers in both geographical and cultural locations are striving to incorporate creativity into the curriculum and their educational practice. Interestingly, in both cases, school reforms are largely considered to come ‘from the outside’, imposed in a top-down manner by governments who look towards standardised testing and international rankings as golden measures of achievement in education. What is at stake here, however, goes beyond common challenges. It concerns the very central question of how we theorise creativity in education and for what purposes. In other words, our North–South dialogue is largely centred on understanding what paradigmatic views of creativity underpin existing models of school and society, what is the origin of such views, and how they are reinforced in models of education, of schooling, and current discussions of creative pedagogy. In this regard, the following three paradigmatic views have been previously outlined: the He-paradigm, the paradigm of the creative genius; the I-paradigm, the paradigm of the creative individual; and the We-paradigm, the paradigm of creative collaboration (see Glăveanu 2010).

The Western conception of creativity has been dominated since its beginnings by the image of geniuses – highly eminent creators who are capable, almost singlehandedly, to shape their society and culture. Defined by uniqueness and rarity, these people stand out and often struggle against the society...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction – Creativity and creative pedagogies: Exploring challenges, possibilities and potential
• 1. Widening our understanding of creative pedagogy: a North–South dialogue
• 2. Creative potential in educational settings: its nature, measure, and nurture
• 3. Development of children’s creative visual imagination: a theoretical model and enhancement programmes
• 4. Creativity in Hong Kong classrooms: transition from a seriously formal pedagogy to informally playful learning
• 5. Creative Little Scientists: exploring pedagogical synergies between inquiry-based and creative approaches in Early Years science
• 6. ‘Everyone can imagine their own Gellert’: the democratic artist and ‘inclusion’ in primary and nursery classrooms
• 7. ‘It’s a real journey – a life changing experience.’ A comparison case study of Creative Partnership and other primary schools
• Index