Being Creative

The photographer John Loori wrote: “Creativity is our birthright . It is an integral part of being human, as basic as walking, talking and thinking.”

There seems to be an air of mystery and negativity around the word creativity. This mainly comes down to our assumptions and reinforcement of the perception that some people have creative potential and others don’t. Time and time again I hear my students say things such as " but I am not creative", "I don't have the imagination to draw" etc...

It seems that most of my students base their assumptions on their abilities and their technical skills and more importantly, on their lack of understanding of what creativity is and the process of creativity. 

Last year I heavily focused on helping students improve in their technical abilities so that this year we could focus more on the creative process. Before that I was attempting to do both, with very little success in changing their attitude towards their creative abilities.

According to the experts, it is possible to encourage or inhibit the development and expression of creativity in young children. Most theories of child development view young children as highly creative, with a natural tendency to experiment, and explore their physical and conceptual environment. 

However this high level of creativity is not necessarily maintained throughout childhood and into adulthood. The level of creativity declines when they start kindergarten and peaks again when they reach puberty. 

Much of this has to do with how creativity is valued and perceived by their educational, home and social settings. For example there has been a long standing perception that visual art is merely an activity to enjoy and a formula to follow in which all student work basically ends up looking very much the same or a copy of someone else's expression. 

Although copying or following a step by step process has its benefits in developing technical skill, what is often overlooked is the most important element of all... creativity!

I once heard a story about a lady who at the age of 7 was shown by her teacher, how to draw a bird in the sky. So far this story sounds quite logical...a teacher should show a student how to do something. Wrong! This student had a problem, she didn't know how to draw or represent the idea she had in her head. Rather than being guided through the steps required to solve her problem... the solution was offered. Where's the learning in that! Sadly this student was robbed of the opportunity to develop her creativity. For many years after that she continued to draw her bird as shown by her teacher...something that resembled a stretched out letter M. A very simple line drawing that many of you may have encountered before. There is nothing wrong with representing a bird with a simple line, there are times when this is a good solution. But she didn't arrive at this solution on her own and therefore she was led to believe that this was the one and only solution. It wasn't until she was much older...much, much , much older that she encountered the problem again, but this time she questioned the solution given to her so long ago and realised what she had been robbed of. The simple line looked nothing like the bird she wanted to draw, it didn't express her idea and to make it worse she did not know how to come up with a new solution.

                                                           example of the letter M bird

           

bird paintings by Year 3 CCPS (2012)

Creativity is essentially a form of problem solving. But it is a special type of problem solving...one that involves problems for which there are no easy answers: that is, problems for which popular or conventional responses do not work. 

Creativity involves adaptability and flexibility of thought. These are the same types of skills that numerous reports on education have suggested are critical for students, not just in visual art, but also in other areas of the curriculum. In order to maximise children's creative potential, the focus of creativity should remain on process, i.e. the "generation of ideas".

For a proper understanding of children's creativity, one must distinguish creativity from intelligence and talent, but I'll leave this discussion for a future blog post.

We’ve known for a long time that the creative process can be broken down into four distinct processes, most of which can be fostered and augmented. The processes are:
Preparation
Incubation
Illumination
Implementation

For the past few weeks students from Year 4 to 6 have been focused on the preparation phase

Preparation involves what most would refer to as work. A musician , for example, plays scales, chords, or songs first before writing or creating their own music.
Basically, it's the process of practising and researching; laying down the ground work and foundation to launch into the incubation phase.

This semester all three grades will be working towards the production of an artist book with the intention of being able to exhibit their work in an interactive manner. Yes! this means an exhibition... a real one...not a virtual gallery like the exhibitions I have done so far. This means that it will not be me who mounts their work for display. No. the students will have creative control on how their work is to be presented to their audience.

I will now leave you with some images of the lovely 'work' produced by the Year 5 students.

Ps I promise this post will be the one and only longest post for the year. The rest will be purely the documentation of the students creative process via images of their work.