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Creativity -- a crucial component for schools today
The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 10/01/2006 9:42 AM
Simon Marcus Gower, Contributor, Jakarta
It seems that we live in often highly challenging times. Times, indeed, that can create a multitude of challenges and changes to our daily life that need to be accommodated and responded to. To offer children opportunities and the potential for success, schools must adapt and adopt a variety of methods and means via which students can recognize and overcome challenges and accommodate change.
Our technologically developed world, along with globalization, creates a world that may pose new problems but also possibilities for us all. It is this world that education must deal with and help to prepare for and creativity will consistently be an asset in this world.
From having to deal with the likes of multimedia, multi-nationalism, multi-cultures and multi-ethnicity in society to accommodating the needs and achieving the possibility of multi-tasking, being multi-disciplined and multi-talented -- the task of educating children for our ""multitudinous"" world is a daunting and awesome one.
Many possible factors and solutions may come together to help educators in their efforts toward educational outcomes but perhaps one of the most crucial factors that will so often contribute solutions and so offer great opportunities for success in schools is creativity.
Creativity is a powerful and yet all too illusive thing. Perhaps for schools and education, it is fundamentally important to define and share an understanding about what we mean by creativity. In a rather ordinary and perhaps rather staid mode of thinking, people will often readily associate creativity with making or designing something in an arts and crafts sense.
Ask somebody the question, ""are you a creative person?"" and a likely answer would be ""Oh, no not me. I can't draw or make anything."" But this is a limited conceptualization of creativity. We all have some certain creativity within us and it is this creativity that should be encouraged and nurtured in school.
Creativity is not limited to the arts and crafts -- though of course it is entirely reasonable to significantly link creativity with those areas. Creativity can be seen and defined in so many other and quite diverse ways. For our ""multitudinous"" world creativity can be looked at in a multiple of ways.
Creativity in schools is consistently placed in the early years of education in those areas of arts and crafts. Little children coming home with things that they have made, drawn or painted for their moms and dads are things that we are all quite familiar with. Finger paintings or childish representations of the world as they see it are often stuck up on refrigerators with fridge magnets or even framed.
These things represent an appreciation of the value of creativity and allow for exploration, expression and even imagination through creating pieces of art and designs that are reflective of the world about us. But creativity does not end with arts and crafts; nor should it just be allowed to reside only in early childhood education.
Arts, crafts and design should be carried through to and made available in higher levels of education. The skills of observing and critically examining the world that can be learned and practiced from artistic expression and creativity are valuable and should not be neglected and set aside so easily in the educational process.
Sadly, though, often such creativity is set aside as a perception takes over that such things are ""childish"" and the child -- now the student -- must be increasingly focused on studious academia. The artist's pencils and paintbrushes are pushed aside in favor of the notebook and pen.
But creativity can be developed and cultivated in a number of ways and this should be remembered. Even if the ""typical"" (or even perhaps stereotypical) tools of creativity, such as the paintbrush or pencil, are set to one side creativity can still be entered into via other means and methods.
Another of the ""multiples"" that we have in our modern world, that modern education ought to respond to, is multi-intelligence. It is here that we can recognize, and indeed do justice to, the variety of ways in which creativity can be encouraged and cultivated. All of us have some certain creativity -- what needs to happen in schools is the provision of opportunities for children to practice, to employ and utilize the natural creativity that they have; this creativity being borne of their natural curiosity. This should be encouraged and capitalized on, not stifled and squandered.
Creativity can be thought of in terms of outcomes. Obviously for artistic creativity the outcomes are drawings, paintings, designs, etc.; but creative outcomes can be defined in many other ways. For example, an outcome could be considered a ""solution"". The students are given a problem and creatively they generate and propose a solution. Conversely, students could creatively and originally identify a problem to which a solution may be found.
Students could also be encouraged to creatively propose innovations and/or inventions providing new methods, products or processes via which original ideas and thinking may result. Creativity can also come in the form of inspiration wherein students create ideas or thought that has the power to motivate or move people -- creative writing such as poetry comes to mind here.
Creativity can also come in the form of presentations or performances in which students are challenged to prepare and produce a project for public (audience) consumption. The creative process here can help students to achieve organizational skills, team-working and confidence in public speaking or performance.
The above ideas may seem rather grand in scale, what with students being required to work on projects and present products. Creativity, though, can work on a smaller scale and have less of a ""product-orientation"". For example, the creative skills used in solving disputes should not be ignored. A student that is able to resolve conflicts and suggest alternatives is a student that is exercising and applying his creativity.
Strategies applied in completing tasks and assignments can be creative too and will allow students to model behavior and practices that will be likely to be useful to them in their future careers which will, almost inevitably, require them to interact and work with people in the workplace. Creativity does, then, need the students to do more in school than simply sit quietly in class and listen to their teacher. Creativity requires that students are active in thought and proactive in responding to the tasks set for them.
This in turn demands that teachers are creative, active and proactive. The pressures of following a curriculum and meeting learning objectives will surely remain but the methods and means via which teachers achieve such objectives may be seen as more adaptable, flexible and reflective of the need to stimulate and encourage students' creativity.
The role of the teacher is, therefore, more of a stimulator -- a provocateur of thought and action -- who creates opportunities for students to engage, practice and learn in and through a creative process. Indeed to educate should be to help to create; helping the child to create their way in the world, helping to create pathways toward productivity, usefulness, contentment and fulfillment.
