Early Childhood Creativity: Challenging Educators in Their Role to Intentionally Develop Creative Thinking in Children

Creativity is a topic of wide global interest, often discussed in fields such as education, psychology and business (Runco, Divergent thinking and creative potential, Hampton Press, New York, 2013; Yoruk and Runco, Journal for Neurocognitive Research 56:1–16, 2014). However, the relationship of pedagogical practices in early childhood education and care (ECEC) as it applies to the development of creative thought processes of young children is a relatively new area for investigation. This paper presents recent research that examines the role of the educator as an intentional teacher within Australian early learning environments and investigates the relationship of this role to children’s developing creativity. Theoretically informed by Vygotsky’s sociocultural constructivist approach (Vygotsky, Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1930, 1978) and neo-Vygotskian theories on creativity (John-Steiner and Moran, Educational Psychologist 31:191–206, 2012), this paper explores some of the beliefs and understandings of educators on creativity. Furthermore, this paper exposes some of the misconceptions of educators about children’s creative thinking as they engage in play-based learning activities. The evidence from this Australian study suggests that the role of the educator is pivotal in assisting children in the early development of creative thinking thus challenging their role as educators.     

Creativity in Artistic Education: Introducing Artists into Primary Schools

Despite a more prominent role of arts education in the school curriculum, artistic creativity does not occur to a great extent in primary school practice. More opportunities for teachers to strengthen their know‐how in the field of artistic creativity can therefore be considered important. Arts education projects focus on pupils' development of creativity by means of introducing artists with their divergent working methods into primary schools. Beside fostering pupils' creative openness and skills, arts education organisations aim to transfer artistic enthusiasm to teachers in each project. Collaboration with artists can encourage teachers' artistic creative work. New working methods, techniques or ways of experimenting are more likely to be adopted in daily teaching practice when the project duration consists of several years. However, most projects are short‐lived and the means for a long‐term project policy are limited. Consequently, results in the area of sustainable outcomes concerning artistic creative work with teachers are limited. To create a long‐term view, the availability of financial resources is an important condition in order to realise a mentality change towards artistic creativity in education. Finally, continuing debate with several participants about making artistic creative work sustainable remains necessary.     

Divergent Thinking in Italian Students with and Without Reading Impairments

Several studies have explored the relationship between dyslexia and creativity, but results have been rather mixed. This study examines whether Italian dyslexic children are more creative than their peers without a reading impairment. One hundred ninety Italian children aged between 9 and 13 participated in this study, divided into two groups: Ninety five dyslexic students and ninety five peers without a reading impairment. All the participants’ creativity skills were assessed. The results indicated that dyslexic children outperformed their peers in the total score, and in the originality, elaboration, and titles sub-scores, whereas no differences were found in the fluency and flexibility sub-scores. The results are discussed in relation to the practical implications, and provide indications for supportive learning environments.     

Early childhood educators’ experiences and perceptions of professionalism and professionalisation in the Asian context

Increasingly early childhood educators are referred to as “professionals,” but how do they view themselves in terms of professionalism? What does it mean to be an early childhood professional? This study explored the views of 78 Asian early childhood educators who were upgrading their qualifications to degree level. In groups of five to eight, participants visually created and explained metaphors of professionalism as a class activity. The visual metaphors were analysed using Gleeson’s polytextual thematic analysis with Rogoff’s personal, interpersonal and institutional planes as the theoretical framework. Findings revealed that the educators’ perspectives of professionalism and professionalisation related to their work–life roles, their cultural understandings and relationships, and how they believed they were viewed by others in relation to the status of early childhood education. This study provides an insight into perceptions and challenges related to the developing professionalism and professionalisation of early childhood educators in Asian contexts.     

Multicultural Student-to-Student Dialogue and the Generation of Creative Ideas

Both participation in dialog and exposure to others from different cultures have been theorized to increase the ability of an individual to be creative. This study focused on the multicultural student-to-student dialog that took place in one graduate level course. The purpose of this study was to explore how participation in this dialog might influence student creativity, specifically how the students generated creative ideas for their final course papers. No connection was found between participation in the multicultural student-to-student dialog and the generation of creative ideas for their final papers. However, insight was gained into the creative process used by students in generating their final paper ideas.     

苏霍姆林斯基的创造教育思想

苏霍姆林斯基认为，学校进行创造教育的主要任务是培养多方面的天赋和才能，培养学生的创造品质。创造教育的基本内容有：创造意识教育、创造毅力教育、创造力培养、教会学生学习和世界观教育。上思维课、进行创造性劳动的、提供丰富多彩的精神生活以及发现和培养创造性教师，这是实施创造教育的主要途径和方法。     

Counter-conduct in creative university research: deliberations on freedom

This article describes how a political assemblage currently at work in higher education is re-articulating academic subjectivities. This assemblage draws together entrepreneurial and humanist concepts of creativity into an intellectual resource that can change national economies. Academics are urged to use their creativity to counteract the narrowing funding base of the university. The article first introduces a history of the concept of creativity and explains how governmental agendas for creative industry and creativity in education emerged. Second, it describes a practice-based research project that grapples with the difficulties of knowledge transfer between the ‘creative’ and ‘social science’ academic disciplines. This raises questions about creative knowledge and reveals some ethical tensions in the performance of academic research. The research project is then positioned as a ‘counter-conduct’, used to short-circuit the procedures implemented for the conduct of creative research in the creative, entrepreneurial university.     

浅议创新教育与创造性思维的培养

创新教育是素质教育的重要方面之一,开展创新教育的根本目的在于培养学生的创新意识和创新思维。创造性思维是指用新异和创造性的方法和程序解决问题的思维活动,培养学生创造性思维的方法很多,如颠倒法、添加法、联想法等等,这些方法可以通过教会学生发散性思维、丰富学生想象力、培养学生的独创性思维等具体途径实现。     

Developing conceptual frameworks for creativity, ICT and teacher education

This paper presents the first phase of a study in teacher education, which explored how a conceptual framework for creativity with information and communication technology (ICT) might be developed and expressed in professional development for primary education pre-service and newly qualified teachers. The Creativity and Professional Development Project (C&PD) involved 16 education ICT specialists in the final stage of their BA in an English University. They participated in the project to investigate their classroom practice in the use of ICT to promote creativity in the making of digital video movies, and to reflect upon the development of their pedagogy with ICT in primary classrooms. The analysis focuses on the student teachers’ experience of engaging in creative activities to prepare, teach and evaluate a school-based project, and identified themes of their understandings and personal experience of creativity, the contribution of ICT, and their reflections on professional development. This analysis raises the issue of designing learning experiences, which promote and support creativity with ICT in the context of teacher learning. A conceptual framework to describe creative practices with ICT in teacher education was developed from the study.     

论德育创新与创造性人才的培养

如何实施创新教育,培养创造性人才是当前教育改革的研究主题.本文从德育创新这个角度作为切入点探讨创造性人才的培养,提出德育创新在培养创造性人才中的作用,并以此为指导分别从转变教育观念、思想政治课教学改革、校园文化建设和教师队伍四个方面去探讨如何改进我们的德育工作.     

"Thinking the Practice": Academic adult educators' reflections on mediating a summer institute as a multicultural learning journey for graduate students

In this paper we research our roles as academic adult educators who worked with 40 graduate students during a 10 day summer institute, which we developed using the theme "Culture and Diversity in Education for Adults". We discuss how we framed the development and delivery of this summer institute in the context of a transgressive and transformative learning journey that heeds Paulo Freire's (1998) call to "think the practice" by reading and comprehending the word and the world critically. From this perspective, we examine our positionalities that situate us as present, sometimes strong, yet sometimes vulnerable educators who use insurgent theories and positional pedagogies to shape alternative learning experiences. We also examine how these positionalities impact our conceptions of pedagogy and multiculturalism, and we explore how they helped to shape the inclusive teaching-learning interactions that we designed to query being, acting, becoming, belonging, and surviving in education and the larger Canadian and global cultures. In this regard we investigate how our learning journey emerged as one deeply textured by engagements with issues of educator and learner positionalities as well as matters of context, disposition, relationship, and affiliation. We explore how our learning journey with institute participants took us into the uneasy intersections of the personal, professional, and political where pedagogical practices and associated challenges, risks, possibilities, and liabilities emerge.     

Mapping creativity in the Hungarian National Core Curriculum: a content analysis of the overall statements of intent,curricular areas and education levels

In the past 20 years, creativity has increasingly been recognised as an important aspect of young people's education around the world. The global interest in creativity is fuelled by various economic and social considerations. One concern of the approach to creativity in education is the curriculum. The research reported in this paper aimed at identifying the curriculum-level enablers and barriers to nurturing creativity in Hungarian public education by investigating the place of creativity, as well as that of creative pedagogy, in the Hungarian National Core Curriculum (HNCC) using content analysis. Findings revealed that creativity and the components of creative pedagogy were recurring elements of the HNCC. In Arts and Mathematics, the high importance of creativity was also supported by the strong presence of the elements of creative pedagogy. The barriers identified include the lack of clear and consistent definitions of creativity, the varied incidences of creativity and components of creative pedagogy, with extremely low attention to nurturing creativity in Foreign languages, Man and nature (science), and The Earth – our environment (geography). It has been concluded, therefore, that a more coherent and consistent approach to creativity across the HNCC is required.     

Practice What We Preach: Differentiating Instruction and Assessment in a Higher Education Classroom as a Model of Effective Pedagogy for Early Childhood Teacher Education Candidates

Teacher education faculty are experiencing increasingly diverse higher education classrooms. In many ways, the diversities present in collegiate classrooms mirror the differences in classrooms of young children. The diversity may be a result of a range of ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic differences. Or it may be differences resulting from previous experiences, background knowledge, learning style, needs, or interests. In this article, two university colleagues present challenges related to meeting a plethora of learner needs in a course with participants from three different programs of study. The authors describe the challenges faced, steps taken to use the challenges as opportunities for growth, and the outcomes of their efforts. The authors candidly describe how they used the principles of Differentiated Instruction to model effective pedagogy for their early childhood teacher educator candidates.     

Secondary school creativity,teacher practice and STEAM education: An international study

How creativity in education is applied by teachers to secondary school contexts is dependent on how the term ‘creativity’ is grounded, politicised, and practised. This paper reports on an international study of secondary schools in Australia, USA, Canada, and Singapore investigating how creativity is understood, negotiated, valued and manifested in secondary schools, focusing on teacher and student understandings, actions, benefits and impediments to creative and critical thinking. Participant reflections revealed inter-, trans- and cross-disciplinary learning shaped by teacher collaboration, dialogue and classroom organization that fosters critical and creative thinking. Implications are made for the ways practicing teachers develop and foster creativity via pedagogical approaches that enhance connectivity and interdisciplinarity of teaching practices between domains of learning. An education-based Creativity Index through which administrators and teachers can gauge, assess and implement creative skills, capacities, pedagogic practices and assessment of creativity within secondary schools is posited. Implications for STEM/STEAM education and centralizing creative capacities in teaching, learning, and educational change are offered.     

Nurturing Creativity in Education

Across continents, creativity is a priority for education and is central to the discourse on 21^st century learning. In this article, we explore how a greater focus on ‘everyday creativity’ in schools changes the dynamics of teaching and learning. We look briefly at the main concepts in the literature on creativity in education. We then focus on examples from the Centre for Creative Education's creative partnerships, which bring together educators, learners and creative professionals. This is followed by a discussion on how teachers assess learners’ creative dispositions, as well as the quality of creative processes and products. We conclude with recommendations for school-level strategies and policy and research to support learner and teacher creativity.     

Songwriting for nature: increasing nature connection and well-being through musical creativity

Abstract

We conducted two field studies to examine whether songwriting retreats held in a natural setting would increase nature connectedness, as well as improve emotional well-being and performance on a creative reasoning task. In the first study, high school students took part in songwriting instruction either in their school or at a national wildlife conservation area. Results showed that the natural setting uniquely increased nature connection, while both settings improved mood and creative reasoning performance. In the second study, we observed similar effects for adults who attended songwriting retreats at the same conservation area and compared this to results from a science-based workshop in another remote natural area to assess whether nature connection effects were entirely attributable to nature contact. The findings of these studies imply that both musical creativity and outdoor education experiences improve well-being, while outdoor education also increases nature connectedness, and songwriting also increases creative reasoning.     

The Limits To Creativity In Education: Dilemmas For The Educator

Since the end of the 1990s, creativity has become a growing area of interest once more within education and wider society. In England creativity is now named within the school curriculum and in the curriculum for children aged 3–5. There are numerous government and other initiatives to foster individual and collective creativity, some of this through partnership activity bringing together the arts, technology, science and the social sciences.
  As far as education is concerned, this growth in emphasis and value placed on encouraging creativity can be seen as being in stark contrast with the government policy prevalent from the late 1980s onward. One of the underpinning themes and justifications for this re-kindling of interest in fostering creativity is that the individual and collective empowerment which is fostered by the development of creative skill is seen to be a good thing at the social and economic level in particular (Craft, 2002). These justifications have been discussed elsewhere (Jeffrey and Craft, 2001).
  But an important question to ask is, how desirable are the cultural norms of continual change and innovation in Western society?
  This paper examines some possible social, environmental, cultural and ethical limits to creativity, in the context of educating for creativity (NACCCE, 1999). It argues that the notion of creativity may be value- and culture-specific and that this poses the so-called liberal educator with various dilemmas of principle and pedagogy, which are explored.     

Connections teachers make between creativity and arts learning

Background: Creativity is often cited as one of the capacities that needs to be actively encouraged in all aspects of schooling. However, what creativity is and how it may be promoted through formal teaching and learning approaches remain contested. There are also differences between educators in terms of how they understand, discuss and conceptualise this complex concept.

Purpose: This paper focuses on the difficulties associated with talking about creativity in education. It considers the ways in which schoolteachers who are involved in the area of arts education understand, describe and discuss the concept of creativity and how it interacts with their classroom practice.

Sample: Twenty-three educators who taught Arts (either as generalist primary classroom teachers or as specialist teachers), and the leadership team from a Kindergarten to Year 9 (pupil ages 5–15) school in the suburbs of a city in the Australian state of Victoria participated in the project.

Design and methods: In this phenomenological study, data were gathered from participants through questionnaires, discussion groups, email prompts and reflective journals. The material was analysed qualitatively.

Findings: By examining the teachers’ dialogic and discursive responses about creativity, it was possible to capture some broad ways in which the participants spoke about creativity. Data were analysed thematically and grouped into categories that represented the connected ‘creative orientations’: thinking orientations, action orientations, emotion orientations and skill/outcome orientations.

Conclusion: There is a need for educators in and across a range of discipline areas to share, map and think about creativity. The approach adopted in this exploratory study offers a way that could be used to focus discussions and help facilitate educators’ talk about creativity.     

英语教学中大学生创造力的培养

创造力是智力发展的最高体现。创造力的发展决定了个体潜能的发挥,大学教育应全力促进大学生创造力的发展。着重探讨了在大学英语教学中应如何促进大学生创造力的发展,如:创造语言氛围;利用提问加强双边活动;激发学生创造性思维。     

Integrating creativity training into Problem and Project-Based Learning curriculum in engineering education

In order to foster creative engineers, a creativity training programme was carried out in medialogy education in a Problem and Project-Based Learning (PBL) environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. This paper focuses on the question of how engineering students perceive the strategy of integrating creativity training into a PBL curriculum. A total of 20 medialogy students in the training programme were interviewed. The data shows that the training programme was thought useful and students get benefits such as gaining project work skills, creative concepts and confidence of being creative. However, limitations of the programme show that only five days of training did not fit the requirements of learning skills in PBL. So the supervisors are suggested to offer more creativity techniques and process engagement to move projects forward.