Creativity in Secondary Education

Jonathan Savage, Martin Fautley

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857252128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

Creativity is increasingly seen as central to good learning and teaching throughout the curriculum. This book examines the political and educational context behind such developments and looks at dilemmas faced by trainee teachers as they begin their teaching practice. Demonstrating what creativity is, how it evolves and how it can be nurtured in various teaching contexts, it enables trainees to develop creativity in their teaching role and in their pupils? learning. Throughout, the book links clearly to the new Professional Standards for QTS and presents exercises, subject-based case studies and teaching examples to engage and support all secondary trainees.

1
Setting the scene:
creativity in secondary education

By the end of this chapter you should:

• have thought about creativity, and what it means to be creative;
• have considered views of learning and how the notion of creativity sits within these;
• have reflected on the place of creativity within your specialist subject;
• have considered the role of creativity within the National Curriculum.

This chapter will help you to meet the following Professional Standards for QTS:

Q1, Q2, Q6, Q7, Q8, Q9, Q10, Q15, Q18, Q22, Q25

Introduction

Creativity is an important concept in education and elsewhere, and it is hard to imagine it being seen as anything other than a positive attribute of individuals and institutions alike. Indeed, arguing against creativity in schools would seem to be like arguing against ‘motherhood and apple pie’. But if creativity is universally acknowledged to be a good thing, it ought to be straightforward to define what it is.

PRACTICAL TASK

Have a go now – define creativity. Compose a sentence that begins ‘creativity is . . .’

Maybe you found this slightly more problematic than you first thought? Or maybe you produced a perfectly usable definition of creativity which encompasses all possible outcomes – whichever you managed (or didn’t!), let us now consider what others have written on the topic, and arrive at definitions which will be of use to us in terms of academic discourse, have meaning in day-to-day work in the classroom, and that we can take forward into the rest of this book.

Creativity – is it magic?

To go back to basics, creativity involves creation, and creation involves creating something:

If we take seriously the dictionary definition of creation, to ‘bring into being or form out of nothing’, creativity seems to be not only unintelligible, but strictly impossible. No craftsman or engineer ever made an artefact from nothing. And sorcerers (or their apprentices) who conjure brooms and buckets out of thin air do so not by any intelligible means, but by occult wizardry. The ‘explanation’ of creativity thus reduces to either denial or magic. (Boden, 1990, p2)

And we are not going to deny that creativity exists or suggest that you need to be a Harry Potter to do it! So, if the notion of creativity implies that something is being created, what is going on? To ‘do’ something in normal speech usually involves some form of activity, mental and/or physical. This ‘doing’ also implies a process, and the notion of a creative process is one which figures significantly in the literature.

Breaking down into stages

Research into creativity was undertaken for the most part by psychologists in the first instance; more recently educational researchers, social scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and management consultants have also become involved. Many of these accounts draw on an early piece of research undertaken in the 1920s by Wallas (1926), who broke down the creative process into four stages:

Preparation Incubation Illumination Verification

The first stage, preparation, represents the consideration of an issue, which involves getting ready for the next stage too. This is followed by incubation, which is defined as a period of time where the issue and its ramifications are considered, mulled over and thought about. Illumination involves arriving at a point of realisation where a solution presents itself or becomes apparent. Finally verification involves some form of testing of that which has happened.

Even after the intervening years, the four stages of the Wallas model still appear to be logical in terms of a sequence of events, and show

… a continuous process, with a beginning, middle, and end of its own.
(Vernon, 1970, p91)

The four stages are of use in the classroom as they allow us to consider how a creative activity can be presented to our pupils. We will look later on at how you the teacher can plan for this to happen in your lessons.

Convergent, divergent and lateral thinking

Another piece of research, from later in the twentieth century, is also of concern in our discussion here. Guilford (1967) in his ‘structure of intellect’ model proposed that there are a number of different mental factors or abilities. According to this model there are two kinds of productive abilities, convergent and divergent. Convergent thinking moves in a linear fashion towards a fixed answer, whereas in divergent thinking there may be no fixed answer, no specified linear route to a predetermined ending, and so the thinker has considerable latitude. Divergent thinking seems particularly apposite to creativity. Closely related to it is lateral thinking, a term developed by de Bono, and often to be found in schools associated with his ‘six hats’ notion (de Bono, 1985) of developing pupil thinking skills. Divergent thinking deliberately moves away from straightforward approaches to problem-solving, and allows the possibility of novel outcomes being generated. For our consideration of creativity, it seems likely that the notion of divergent thinking is an area that we would wish to promote.

Boden: P- and H-creativity

Creativity is seen by some as being a ‘special’ facility. This is often called the trait theory of creativity and says that certain individuals have a tendency towards creativity. This work arose in the 1950s. However, in common with most contemporary commentators, we do not see it that way. For us – and, we hope, for you too – creativity is a faculty which we believe is present in all the pupils we teach, and which is possible to develop. After all, we are all, or can be, creative to some degree (QCA, 2004, p9). While we know Mozart had composed a lot of music by the time he was 11, child prodigies are a separate issue, and although you may have one or more in your school, our concern is with all the pupils in all our classes. This means that we need to think of creativity from what we might call an ‘everyday’ perspective. So, each time a child paints a picture, comes up with a new idea, plays a new arrangement of notes on a xylophone, thinks of a new way of assembling their science experiment, makes a new construction with Lego bricks or a myriad of other everyday creative acts, they can be said to be being creative, not along the lines of composing a Mozart symphony, but in a smaller, more personal way. In her writings, Margaret Boden draws a distinction between everyday creativity, which she terms psychological in the sense of having occurred to an individual, and those ideas which, although coming into being in the same fashion, also have historical importance beyond that of the immediate. These she designates as P-creative and H-creative:

If Mary Smith has an idea which she could not have had before, her idea is P-creative – no matter how many people have had the same idea already. The historical sense applies to ideas that are fundamentally novel with respect to the whole of human history. Mary Smith’s surprising idea is H-creative if no one has ever had the idea before her. (Boden, 1990, p32)

This distinction between two different types of creativity is important, as it allows for the individual to produce something which is new for them, but not necessarily new for the world. Anna Craft is referring to a similar idea when she writes of:

… the kind of creativity which guides choices and route-finding in everyday life, or what I have come to term ‘little c’ creativity. (Craft, 2000, p3)

We shall return to the notion of creativity for everyone throughout this book, particularly in Chapter 7 when we discuss inclusion.

What we have discovered:

• Creativity involves doing something.
• This something is new for the doer, but maybe not entirely novel in historical terms.
• Creativity is not something only done by ‘special’ people.
• You, and everyone in your class, can be creative.
• Everyday creativity is valid.

Creativity for every subject

Another misconception that we need...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The authors
• 1 Setting the scene: creativity in secondary education
• 2 Teaching creatively
• 3 Teaching for creativity
• 4 Creative learning – learning to think in new ways
• 5 Assessment and creativity
• 6 New technologies and creativity
• 7 Creativity and inclusion
• 8 Creativity and motivation
• 9 Your future development
• Index