Creativity in the Primary Curriculum

Russell Jones, Dominic Wyse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136675508
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Are you striving to establish a more creative and imaginative classroom? Are you interested in:

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• the generosity of creativity;

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• creative conjecture;

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• being an advocate for creativity;

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• welcoming the unexpected,

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• the unpredictable and the unconventional;

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• taking risks;

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• learning which leads to new or original thinking which is of value?

If so, this completely updated new edition of a classic text will show you how to achieve these ideals.

The book is written in a clear and practical way by leading researchers and practitioners, offering help and advice on the planning and implementation of effective creative teaching and learning, and providing examples of best practice through a rigorous theoretical rationale.

A hallmark of the book is its exploration of creativity through curriculum subjects. It builds on this in its first and last chapters by addressing key cross-curricular themes that thread their way throughout the book. Throughout there is an emphasis on critical and reflective practice.

New to this edition are:

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• three entirely new chapters on drama, music and geography;

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• an update of the introduction to account for advances in creativity research, policy and practice;

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• a new final chapter identifying cross-curricular themes;

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• greater attention to international dimensions and examples.

In this second edition the authors are drawn from six universities which between them produce some of the best education research internationally, and some of the best teacher education. The authors also come from leading national and international organisations such as the National Gallery in London and the Geographical Association.

Creaivity for the Primary Curriculum is a core text for both training and practicing Primary teachers who wish to maintain high standards when approaching their teaching.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Russell Jones and Dominic Wyse

DOI: 10.4324/9780203809464-1

‘Creativity’ is a concept that continues to inspire and motivate beginning teachers and experienced teachers alike but it is also a term which is hard to pin down, to define and to assess. Typical key questions asked by educators are always going to be ‘Just what is creativity?’ and ‘Is it possible to teach creativity?’ It is important that we address these questions and others in order to understand creative processes and to establish some agreed sense of direction for the rest of this book to follow. For example, one of the key starting points we have in dealing with a complex notion like ‘creativity’ in this context is that we expect it to demonstrate some form of originality. An interesting starting point could be the view that ‘Creativity means a person’s capacity to produce new or original ideas, insights, restructurings, inventions, or artistic objects, which are accepted by experts as being of scientific, aesthetic, social, or technological value’ (>Vernon, 1989: 94). Of course, ‘originality’ itself is a difficult concept because it can never exist in a vacuum. To create something which demonstrates originality necessarily means that there has been some kind of re-examination and re-evaluation of existing knowledge. Let us take the example of Anthony ’s sculpture Angel of the North. If we accept that this is an example of ‘creativity’, then it also exists as part of a historical and an artistic set of ideas. There were sculptures made before this one and many were made of metal rather than stone. There were representations of the human form and of angels. Sculptures have been located in public spaces before. Gormley uses casts of his own body regularly to explore the relationship between the human form and its natural surroundings but clearly this particular sculpture demonstrates both creativity and originality. Building on the existing artistic heritage of sculpture, key decisions were made in the creative process. To begin with, it is constructed on a vast scale (20 metres high and 54 metres across), it was not only built of steel, but then located in the industrial north-east of England as both a reminder of manufacturing industries and of the strength of those working communities. The wings of the Angel are gently angled forwards as though those communities are being embraced. The form of the sculpture echoes the design and engineering feats of the Tyne Bridge and has been placed by the side of a main road so that it serves several geographical purposes. In more ‘poetic’ terms, the structure has gathered genuinely iconic status as it stands firm against all weathers, all critics, all detractors and ultimately represents the resilience and strength of the working communities of the north-east. Gormley wrote that ‘I wanted to make an object that would be a focus of hope at a painful time of transition for the people of the north-east, abandoned in the gap between the industrial and the information ages’ (Gormley, 2012). The point here, clearly, is not that we expect children to build sculptures of this magnitude, but that the roots of originality and creativity are firmly located in childhood; we can bring those same principles of discussion, re-examination and re-evaluation into our classrooms. If we are to understand creativity more deeply and recognise how this connects to classrooms and the work of teachers then we need to look at how research evidence has attempted to clarify the situation.

The modern era for creativity research (according to psychologists) goes back to J. P. Guildford’s address to the American Psychological Association in 1949. Guildford began by making a close link between abilities and creative people, something he also described as a series of character traits. He described the neglect of the study of creativity as ‘appalling’ (Guilford, 1987: 34). Guildford noted the importance of creative talent to industry, science, engineering and government. A key feature of his presentation was that creativity can be expected ‘however feeble, of almost all individuals’ (p. 36). He argued that up to that point, researchers had emphasised convergent thinking skills and had ignored divergent thinking skills. The use of the word ‘creativity’ in the title of the presentation and subsequent paper was used to sum up the kind of divergent thinking that he had in mind. In 1957 the Soviets launched the first artificial space satellite and the Americans saw a lack of creativity as one of the reasons for their failure to win the first event in the space race (Cropley, 2001). This had the effect of galvanising the field of creativity research.

Psychological research through the 1970s and 1980s was largely concerned with more detailed attempts to define and ultimately measure creativity. The Torrance tests of creativity were one of the most well known examples of such measurement. Feldman and Benjamin (2006) locate this work in the tradition of psychometric assessment and point out that the frequently cited ideas of ‘technological inventiveness’ and ‘ideational fuency’ emerged from this strand of research. The Torrance tests, like so many standardised tests, came under increasing criticism due to the telling argument that creativity was much more complex than even these rigorous tests were showing. As a result, the most recent research has shown some lines of enquiry that are of particular use to educational practitioners.

Csikszentmihályi’s early work focused on personality, motivation and the discovery of new problems (Csikszentmihályi, 1990). His research with several hundred artists sought to understand why some produced work that would be judged to be creative, while others did not. As far as personality was concerned, it was found that more creative students had the following features: sensitivity; openness to experiences and impulses; they were self-suficient and not particularly interested in social norms or acceptance. However, the trait that most consistently distinguished these artists from others was ‘a cold and aloof disposition’ (op. cit.p. 192). Even at this stage, Csikszentmihályi recognised that the fact that these were artists, and not scientists or another group of people, was significant and that these findings probably would not generalise to other groups.

Like other researchers, Csikszentmihályi and his team failed to find any relationship between traditional measures of intelligence and criteria for creative accomplishment. Csikszentmihályi realised that for many creative individuals the formulation of a problem is more important than its solution. Thus, he set out to investigate the discovery orientation of artists. When presented with visually interesting objects and drawing materials, a group of students were encouraged to do what they wanted, and finish when they had produced a drawing that they liked. The variables used to measure the students’ discovery orientation included the number of objects that they touched: the higher the number the more likely that the problem was being approached from a discovery orientation. Another variable was the number of changes the person introduced into the drawing process. Established artists and teachers rated drawing produced by students who had used discovery orientation much higher in terms of originality than other students who had used a more predictable problem-solving approach. In terms of artistic career success some seven years later the correlation was still significant.

Csikszentmihályi’s early work through a person-centred approach led ultimately to the view that this was not the full picture. Instead, he proposed that the usual question ‘What is creativity?’ might have to be replaced by ‘Where is creativity?’ (Csikszentmihályi, 1990: 200). His well known ‘systems perspective’ (p. 205) sees creativity as the result of interaction between three subsystems: the person, the field, and the domain. The domain is a system that has a set of rules. This might be a subject like mathematics, or a religion, a game, or a sport. For example, Western classical music is a ‘domain’ that requires the composition of sound and silence to create pieces of music for the beneft of performers and audiences. The ‘field’ is part of the social system which has the power to infuence the structure of the domain. Music competitions such as the ‘Lionel Tertis international viola competition and workshop’ are part of the way that the field of classical music has infuence. Entry to music colleges and the scholarships that they provide are also part of the infuence of the field. The most important function of the field is to maintain the domain as it is, but the field will also act as a gatekeeper to allow changes to the domain to take place. The role of the person is to provide variations in the domain which will be judged by the field. Variations of this kind represent exceptional creativity.

Teaching creativity

There are hundreds of programmes that claim to enhance children’s creative development. These range from detailed approaches carried out over quite lengthy periods of time to specific techniques such as SCAMPER which is used to change something that already exists to produce novelty by Substituting, Combining, Adapting, Magnifying, Putting to a different use, Eliminating, and Rearranging/Reversing (Cropley, 2001). Another example is the use of ‘brain-storming’ which has been extended to include more structured ways of generating ideas such as mind-maps and other visual techniques which use hierarchies of categories. Many of the packages begin their lives in the business sector, such as Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking approach. However, In spite of great interest in the area and considerable financial success for some approaches, there is a lack of empirical evidence: ‘A clear, unequivocal, and incontestable answer to the question of how creativity can be enhanced is not to be found in the psychological literature’ (Nicholson, 1999: 407).

Teresa Amabile has made a significant contribution to the creativity research field. Because of her dissatisfaction with standardised creativity tests, she used tests/activities that required the creation of some kind of real world product, for example making paper collages or writing Haikus. These were then judged for creativity and other dimensions by experts, such as studio artists or practising poets who rated the collages. Amabile called this ‘consensual assessment’ (Amabile, 1990: 65). The conceptual definition of creativity that she used was: ‘A product or response will be judged as creative to the extent that (a) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct, or valuable response to the task at hand, and (b) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic’ (p. 66). Amabile made the point that although creativity is often very difficult for judges to define, they can recognise creativity when they see it. They also have considerable agreement about their judgements, particularly with products but less so with creativity in persons or creative processes. She also correctly argued, in our view, that creativity is a continuous rather than discontinuous quality which begins with everyday creativity at one end and ends with Einstein, Mozart and Picasso at the other end. The differences are not the presence of creativity per se but the abilities, cognitive styles, motivational levels and circumstances of the different people concerned.

Working with Amabile, Beth Hennessey’s work has built on the work on creativity to link with motivation. Hennessey has shown that intrinsic motivation enhances children’s creativity whereas extrinsic motivation, stimulated by an external goal, is a ‘killer’ of creativity. For example, high-stakes accountability systems have a negative effect on teachers’ capacity to engage pupils’ intrinsic motivation. However, her research also showed that to a certain extent this negative effect can be mitigated by ‘immunisation procedures’ (Hennessey, 2010: 343). These procedures involve teachers helping children to understand the value of intrinsic motivation in spite of a range of extrinsic motivators that may be present in classrooms. Hennessey says that this approach only maintained base-line motivation and creativity, not unusually high levels of creativity that are possible in the ideal classroom environment for intrinsic motivation. In a fascinating final section to her chapter, Hennessey advocates the open classroom of the 1970s in America, which was inspired by the British infant classroom model of the 1960s, as the ideal practical realisation of what she and her colleagues have discovered about the optimal classroom conditions for creativity.

Overall, researchers remain optimistic that creativity can be enhanced by the ways that teachers work with pupils and students. A number of factors have been identified that necessitate the need to:

• Reward curiosity and exploration.
• Build motivation, particularly internal motivation.
• Encourage risk-taking.
• Have high expectations/beliefs about creative potential of students: this applies to both teachers’ views of their pupils and pupils’ own self image.
• Give opportunities for choice and discovery – ‘The evidence is fairly compelling, and not surprising, that people are more interested in – more internally motivated to engage in – activities they have chosen for themselves than activities that have been selected for them by others, or in which they are obliged to engage for reasons beyond their control’ (Dudek and Côté, 1994; Kohn, 1993).
• Develop students’ self-management skills.
• Support domain specific knowledge: pupils need to understand as much as possible about the domain (often the subject area) that they are doing the creative work in.(Nicholson, 1999: 409)

This point about opportunities for choice is highly significant and one which the English education system has repeatedly neglected, particularly since 1988.

Creative partnerships

In 1999 the report commissioned by UK government called All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE Report, 1999) argued that a national strategy for creative and cultural education was essential to unlock the potential of every young person. One of the most positive developments following the NACCCE report was the national Creative Partnerships (CP) initiative. CP described itself as follows:

The Creative Partnerships programme brings creative workers such as artists, architects and scientists into schools to work with teachers to inspire young people and help them learn. The programme has worked with over 1 million children, and over 90,000 teachers in more than 8000 projects in England since 2002. Creative Partnerships is England’s fagship creative learning programme, designed to develop the skills of children and young people across England, raising their aspirations, achievements and life chances. (Creativity, Culture and Education, 2011: online)

CP’s initial commitment to grass-roots control of creative projects was unique in relation to educational initiatives from the New Labour government of 1997 to 2010 which generally featured heavy top-down control. Although the New Labour government failed to implement some of the most important recommendations of the NACCCE report, it did commit significant financial investment in C P.

Two large-scale national evaluations of CP were commissioned. The evaluation addressing the link between attainment and creative partnerships projects found a modest impact at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 but not at Key Stage 2 (Kendall, et al., 2010). However, the measure of attainment was of course the national statutory test scores which are not the most appropriate measure for the impact of initiatives that sought to encourage creative learning. The second evaluation looked at the impact of creative partnerships on teachers. Overall, an overwhelmingly positive impact of involvement in CP was found and that teachers felt that CP had particularly benefted their development of skills for leadership and interpersonal work. Perhaps not surprisingly it was also found that those teachers who ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 English
• 3 Mathematics
• 4 Science
• 5 Design and Technology
• 6 Drama
• 7 Geography
• 8 History
• 9 Music
• 10 The Visual Arts
• 11 Creativity Across the Curriculum
• Index