Creativity in Primary Education

Anthony Wilson

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473907171
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

"An alien spaceship crash landed in my playground today"

For one primary school in England, this was not an ordinary day. It was a fabulous day of inspiration, writing, drawing, discovering and learning for the pupils, the staff and the parents. But the best thing of all? The only truly out of the ordinary thing was the alien spaceship.

So how do you make creativity a more everyday part of primary teaching? Teachers and trainees agree that creativity is a fabulous thing. But to get creative approaches into everyday teaching, you need to tackle the question - what is creativity?

This book explores this question in an accessible and practical way. It helps trainees to do more than 'know it when they see it', by helping them to understand the separate and very diverse elements of creativity. The third edition of this popular text retains key material, but it has been updated and revised to include two new chapters on the creative curriculum, along with links throughout to the Standards and the new National Curriculum.

This book will help you enhance your teaching so you and the children in your class can be:

fellow explorers, adventurous discoverers and spontaneous investigators!

Part 1 Setting the Scene

1 Changes in the Landscape for Creativity in Education

Anna Craft

Emese Hall

Chapter Objectives

By the end of this chapter you should have:

• understood that creativity is no longer the preserve of arts education;
• explored how creative teaching focuses on the teacher;
• seen how creativity is critical for individuals to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

This chapter addresses the following Teachers' Standards (DfE, 2012a):

• establish a safe and stimulating environment for pupils, rooted in mutual respect;
• have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils' interest in the subject, and address misunderstandings;
• promote a love of learning and children's intellectual curiosity;
• fulfil wider professional responsibilities.

Introduction

In the last part of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, creativity in education has increasingly become a focus in curriculum and pedagogy. It is now embedded in the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum and the National Curriculum for schools (England). There has been a substantial investment in staff development and the creation of teaching resources for school teachers.

This chapter explores why the landscape has altered so radically from the policy context which immediately preceded it. It also explores current concepts of creativity in use in education, and strategies used to enhance opportunity for pupils to be creative.

Finally it raises some fundamental tensions and dilemmas that face teachers fostering creativity in education.

What has Changed?

The last twenty-five or so years have seen a global revolution so that in many places creativity has moved from the fringes of education and/or from the arts to being seen as a core aspect of educating. No longer seen as an optional extra, nor as primarily to do with self-expression through the arts, early twenty-first century creativity is seen as generative problem-identification and problem-solving, across life (Craft, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005).

Three Waves of Creativity in Education

We can describe the change in creativity policy as occurring in three ‘waves’.

• The ‘first wave’ of creativity in education was perhaps in the 1960s, codified by Plowden (CACE, 1967), drawing on child-centred philosophy, policy and practice.
• The second wave began in the late 1990s, about ten years after the introduction of the National Curriculum.
• And the third is well under way in the early years of the twenty-first century.

The First Wave: Plowden and beyond

The recommendations of the Central Advisory Council in Education in 1967 (which became known as the Plowden Report), formed thinking about creativity in education for the generation which followed it (CACE, 1967). Drawing on a large body of so-called liberal thinking on the education of children, it recommended that children learn by discovery, taking an active role in both the definition of their curriculum and the exploration of it. Active and individualised learning was strongly encouraged, as well as learning through first-hand experience of the natural, social and constructed world beyond the classroom. A core role was given to play.

Plowden made a significant contribution to the way in which creativity in education was understood. It influenced the early years of education but had an impact on the later primary years and secondary education, too. It provided an early foundation for the more recent move in creativity research towards emphasising social systems rather than personality, cognition or psychodynamics.

Through Plowden, creativity became associated with a range of other approaches: discovery learning, child-centred pedagogy, an integrated curriculum and self- rather than norm-referencing.

However, within the Plowden ‘take’ on creativity, there are several problems.

The first is the role of knowledge. For while we cannot exercise imagination or creativity in any domain without knowledge if we are to go beyond the given or assumed, Plowden nevertheless implies that a child may be let loose to discover and learn without any prior knowledge.

Secondly, there is a lack of context implied in the rationale for ‘self-expression’. Plowden appears to conceive of the child's growth and expression in a moral and ethical vacuum. It has been argued more recently that encouraging children and young people to have ideas and express them should be set in a moral and ethical context within the classroom (Craft, 2000, 2006; Fischmann et al., 2004; Gardner, 2004).

Thirdly, Plowden suggests that play provides the foundation for a variety of other forms of knowledge and expression and in doing so appears to connect play creativity within the arts only and not with creativity across the whole curriculum.

Related to the third point is a further problem, which is that play and creativity are not the same as one another, for not all play is creative.

Such conceptual and practical problems, it has been argued (NACCCE, 1999), were in part responsible for creativity being pushed to the back of policy-makers' priorities in curriculum development. Until, that is, the late 1990s, which saw a revival of official recognition of creativity in education: the second wave (Craft, 2002, 2003a, 2004).

The Second Wave of Creativity in Education

During the late 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest in psychology and education research. This accompanied policy shifts reintroducing creativity into education.

Three major curriculum-based initiatives occurred.

The National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education Report

The report linked the fostering of pupil creativity with the development of culture, in that original ideas and action are developed in a shifting cultural context. It suggested that the fostering of pupil creativity would contribute to the cultural development of society, since creativity rarely occurs without some form of interrogation of what has gone before or is occurring synchronously. The Report proposed the idea of democratic creativity, i.e. ‘all people are capable of creative achievement in some area of activity, provided the conditions are right and they have acquired the relevant knowledge and skills’ (paragraph 25). This notion has some connection with Plowden, in that children's self-expression is valued and all people are seen as capable of creativity. But it contrasts with the Plowden approach too. First, it argues for the acquisition of knowledge and skills as the necessary foundation to creativity – reflecting the wider research context in the ‘situating’ of knowledge. Secondly, it has a great deal more to say on creativity than Plowden since that was its main focus. Criticisms of the NACCCE Report are very...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Setting the Scene
• 1 Changes in the Landscape for Creativity in Education
• 2 The Art of the Possible: Creative Principled Leadership
• 3 Creative Teachers and Creative Teaching
• 4 Play and Playfulness in the Early Years Foundation Stage
• 5 Creativity and Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development
• 6 The Importance of Informal Learning to Children's Creative Education
• Part 2 Creativity in the Core Curriculum
• 7 Creativity and Literacy
• 8 Creative Mathematics
• 9 What is Creativity in Science Education?
• Part 3 Creativity in the Foundation Curriculum
• 10 Thinking about Creativity: Developing Ideas and Making Things Happen
• 11 Creativity and Primary Art and Design Education
• 12 What has Creativity Got to do with Citizenship Education?
• 13 Creativity in Primary Design and Technology
• 14 Creative Primary Geography
• 15 Creativity in Primary History
• 16 Creativity in the Music Curriculum
• 17 Children, Creativity and Physical Education
• Index