Creative Learning in the Early Years

Nurturing the Characteristics of Creativity

Ruksana Mohammed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138635401
• eBook ISBN: 9781351796910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Taking a fresh look at the role of creativity within the early years, this accessible guide explores what is meant by creativity and considers how creative skills, behaviours, and thinking can be identified and fostered in the individual child. Underpinned by the latest research and policy, chapters illustrate how creative attitudes can be adopted in all subject areas, and opportunities for creativity maximised.

Creative Learning in the Early Years acknowledges the power of creative processes in helping children reach their full potential in the early years and beyond. Photocopiable work tools enable the reader to plan, observe, assess, and record progress as they develop playful and creative approaches, whilst practical advice and demonstrable examples are easily integrated into existing practice. Topics addressed include:

• recognising and encouraging creative tendencies
• stimulating the child's imagination
• developing adult creativity and self-awareness
• creating enabling environments and creative spaces
• using documentation and planning to inspire creativity.

An exciting and accessible guide which encourages exploration, experimentation, reflection, and development, Creative Learning in the Early Years will support current and future early years practitioners as they discover the rich opportunities opened by creative practice.

1
Creativity and education

Think

What is the purpose of education?

What are we preparing children for?

Why should you be concerned with creativity?

Chapter Focus

• A history of creativity in education and the factory model
• The link of creativity to economic development towards the fourth revolution
• Creativity in educational aims as a twenty-first-century skill and the creativity crisis
• Creativity and early years education
• Bold beginnings
• Advocating for creativity in the early years

This chapter is not intended to bombard you with information about a political stance on creativity and education, or generate another explanation for it, but is rather to give you enough grounding to understand its importance and in turn what it means for the early years. There is a vast amount of literature advocating the role of creativity for education and future economic success; these are available through the references provided within this book for you to explore at your own convenience. However, this chapter brings to the forefront a continuing case for creativity in the early years.

The concept of creativity has always been popular in educational thought and over the years has become an essential aim for education. It was recognised in the 1950s that education should prioritise the development of creativity, but it was not until the late 1990s that greater emphasis started to be placed upon it and what it meant for education. In the UK alone, a number of studies made an attempt to link the essential role of creativity in learning to the early years and primary classrooms. These studies were closely followed by the 1999 report All Our Futures, led by Sir Ken Robinson, then Professor of Education at the University of Warwick. His report argued that creativity should be set alongside literacy and numeracy as a strategic priority at all levels of education and made a case for a national strategy for culture and creativity in education.

The report recommended new priorities, which included a much stronger emphasis on creativity and a new balance of teaching and the curriculum between learning knowledge and skills and having the freedom to innovate and experiment. However, regardless of the varying literature advocating for and explaining the place of creativity in children’s learning, there are still issues as to how educators perceive it, how creativity is visible in practice, and the approaches that should be taken to foster it within educational contexts – the key question being what does creativity look like? Many of these issues arise from the historical roots of our education system, which very much continue to echo in our present.

Fact Note: The Sputnik Shock

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union beat the United Kingdom and United States to the launch of the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was known as Sputnik 1. It is claimed that the US, UK, and other Western countries lost what was known as the ‘space race’. For this very reason, education systems came under scrutiny, as the loss was attributed to, and judged to be the results of, defects and the ‘lack of creativity’ in education.

Discuss

With peers/colleagues the link of creativity to education. What patterns emerge?

Back to the past …

Over the last 200 years, the UK has lived through what can be defined as three industrial revolutions. The first, between 1760 and 1840, involved a transition to new manufacturing processes, including going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, efficiency of water, increase of steam power, the development of machine tools, and, of course, the rise of the factory system. The second industrial revolution involved the widespread introduction of steel to the UK, electrification of factories, and the introduction of mass production and the production line. The third revolution took place towards the latter half of the twentieth century and saw industry make the switch from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics. It was the latter, in fact, that marked the beginning of what is known as the ‘information age’ that we currently live in.

Buried under rules and regulations, our education system was designed during the first industrial revolution to train us to be good workers and follow instructions for the benefit of the economy. It was regarded as the ‘factory model’ of education, assembling masses of children (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) (Toffler, 1970). Creativity didn’t have a place; it didn’t exist. Even today, the echoes of the factory model are still present. Pink (2006) illustrates this well; he defines education progression through past economic development, but also advocates that it really is time for a much-needed change:

• 1) Agricultural age (farmers) – education was for the very few and was class-bound, i.e. for the rich only. The structure of schooling at that time mirrored monasteries and army life.
  

  Research to Explore

  • 1995–1996 Wood and Jeffery explored teacher creativity.
  • Later, the renowned Anna Craft (1996, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2005) focused on how to nourish the creative teacher and on the essential role of creativity in early childhood.
  • Fryer (1996) went on to study teachers’ attitudes towards creativity in their daily professional work.
  • Beetlestone (1998) focused on creativity’s place in the early years environment of the classroom.
• 2) Industrial age (factory workers) – a basic level of education was required by production workers; creativity and thinking were not required. The curriculum was modelled on the factory metaphor, with children divided into year groups; knowledge divided into subjects; and progression made through school batches. This still exists today.
• 3) Information age (knowledge workers) – an age we currently live in. Governments view education as a product and a personal investment. Hierarchal approaches to education exist in the form of league tables, with private schools for the rich and mainstream schools for the working class and the poor.
• 4) Conceptual age (creators and empathisers) – an age one needs to prepare for. Pink (2006) believes that to survive in the economy to come, it is not the factory model masses that are needed, but the creators and empathisers that education should be working towards developing.

As well as the current information age, one can say that we are in fact living in a ‘digitalised age’; therefore, Pink’s conceptual age could be moving towards an age beyond our imagination, an almost ‘imaginative age’. So how prepared are we for this? Or, more importantly, how prepared are children for an age we cannot foresee? We can only imagine!

Connect

Where can you observe the ‘factory model’ of education present in the early years?

In 2007, Howard Gardner further provided a case for a change in education by identifying what are known as the five different minds. Gardner believes that these will be increasingly important in our future in order for us to thrive in the eras to come, and that these need to be developed through education.

• 1) The disciplined mind – developed through education to support individuals becoming ‘experts’ in one area of specialism or discipline. One could say that our current teaching of subjects in education represents the beginnings of catering for this type of mind. However, times have changed and there is a need to become interdisciplinary, or multi-disciplinary, in order to gain expertise in multiple disciplines and keep them going.
• 2) The synthesising mind – being able to synthesise huge amounts of information. This includes a wide range of sources and experiences, making decisions about what is important, and combining and communicating information in a meaningful way. Within the synthesising mind will be an area of expertise (discipline), though, which will then know the trusted sources of information within that area and be able to keep an overview of it and see the big picture.
• 3) The creating mind – what this book is really all about. It is the mind that develops new ideas, practices, and experiences, solves problems, innovates, provides fresh thinking and perspectives, and engages in creativity. A mind that adapts to the changing world. However, both the disciplined and synthesising mind play a role within the creating mind, as new and innovative developments in disciplines cannot occur without the ability to be knowledgeable in areas and synthesise the information from it in order to create.
• 4) The respectful mind – ‘responding sympathetically and constructively to differences among groups; seeking to understand and work with those who are different; extending beyond mere tolerance and political correctness’ (Gardner, 2007, p. 157). This mind welcomes social contact, tries to form links, and avoids making judgements. This mind is vital in exploring diverse experiences across communities and cultures in order to embed them further in changing disciplines and creating.
• 5) The ethical mind – considers sophisticated moral issues in an abstract way. Decisions, behaviour, and beliefs of those around you can influence the development of this mind and provide role models for it.

There seems to be a harmonious rhythm needed across all five minds in order for them to function and develop. A disciplined mind is needed to be able to synthesise; creativity involves synthesis, and needs to draw on the disciplined mind for knowledge – although a very disciplined mind is less likely to be creative, and a highly synthesising mind may not lead to creativity (Johnston et al., 2018, p. 145). A balance is thus required where education should be developing all five minds equally.

Activity

Taking each of Gardner’s Five Minds, list under each how early years education is currently developing them in children.

Can you see connections across the minds? Make this visible by highlighting or drawing arrows.

Is there more emphasis on particular minds than others? Why could this be?

Seventeen countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a forum made up of governments, identified creativity as a core competency, so valuable for the next generation that it requires major restructure of national and international educational programmes (Ananiadou and Claro, 2009). Settings and schools were thus viewed as the place for the encouragement and development of creativity, because apparently they can do so more efficiently and can develop it en masse (Shaheen, 2010, p. 166). The echoes of the factory model are still very much alive today.

It is frustrating that many aspects of our education system have not changed for over a hundred years, especially since both Pink and Gardner have provided sensible insights into a bigger picture relating to the role of education and the future. However, despite this, in 2006, the Leitch Review of Skills (HMSO, 2006) continued to focus political attention upon numeracy and literacy, maintaining a line of continuity in UK education policy highlighting the acquiring of ‘essential knowledge’. In 2011, Sir Ken Robinson was asked to reflect on the current challenges around creativity in education, and his own assessment of the UK government’s response to his work is that it was ‘marginalised’ by a government in thrall to more basic issues of numeracy and literacy. In 2015, he continued his advocacy for creativity in education to prepare children for a world we cannot envisage, a shape-shifting world, so that when they get stuck with something they’ve never seen before, instead of just remembering and following instructions (per the factory model), they choose instead to think (Robinson, 2015) (as creators and empathisers do, using the disciplined, synthe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Creativity and education
• 2 Defining creativity
• 3 The creative child
• 4 Creativity and imagination
• 5 The creative adult
• 6 The creative curriculum
• 7 Creative planning and assessment
• 8 Creative spaces
• 9 Creative approaches
• 10 Creative inquiry and reflection
• Appendix: Work tools
• References
• Index