Creativity in Education

The picture above was painted by my friend…as you can see she is an amazing artist. Having been her best friend pretty much all my life, I have seen her just get better and better at the things she seamlessly and effortlessly is able to create. When I asked her ‘How are you so good at art?’, her response was something that I didn’t expect. ‘I did it to get praise from my Mum and Dad, because I didn’t get much otherwise’. It is my guess that this is almost a form of positive reinforcement. Charlotte is still drawing and painting, recently she’s won various competitions for her art.

This made me think: Has she taught herself how to be creative? Forced herself to be creative? Was it an innate skill she already had? Was her creativity developed by extrinsic motivators? Or do parents responses impact on creativity?

David Peat suggests that all aspects of infants are creative, whether its learning to walk, talk, sing, play, and so on. Suggesting the best and most difficult thing to do is get out of the way of creativity and just let it happen. This I definitely agree with.

Recently we have been exploring Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He attempted, but failed to identify fixed personality traits of creative individuals, concluding that there is no fixed ‘creative type’. Therefore, there is no sole contributor to make an individual creative. However, he does emphasise the importance of motivation or determination in creative performance. One of the blogs I’ve read How and why children draw reinforces this, suggesting some motivating factors encouraging children to draw.

One blog that was really interesting was the Mark McGuinness Wishful Thinking blog, questioning ‘What makes a Creative Person?’. This is very useful, he includes other arguments and proposes his own thoughts. He proposes there are three differences between the creative person and other people.

• They think of themselves as “creative”.
• They love doing creative work.
• They put themselves in an environment where creativity is encouraged.

It seems this is an area that has no answers, no limits, no definitives…maybe that’s the beauty of it.

“Yet the plethora of purported experts on creativity suggests that creativity is slippery, porous, and resistant to definition, quantification and, access. Just when one thinks one knows everything about it, one realises one cannot possess it”.

(Featured within The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology. J, L. Kincheloe & R, A. Horn P. 310).

This entry was posted on November 12, 2008 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.