Schools and creativity.

[Bathsheba]

Too noisy for me to read at the moment... bookmarking it for tonight. But just my thoughts on the issue of children and creativity in the school environment:

The Italians have developed wonderful pedagogy (the science of being a teacher) which helps foster positive approaches to helping children be creative in the school environment. My DD's school is heavily influenced by these ideas, especially those developed at Reggio Emilia. Essentially the teacher avoids overlaying their beliefs and strategies onto children... instead they act as co-learner on the child's path of discovery. What this means is that, for example, a Reggio teacher would never teach a child how to draw a tree. The teacher's role instead is to provide resources and facilitate discussion about trees and to document the discoveries the child has made. If you walk into a Reggio influenced class room you won't find walls covered in the exact same renditions of the exact same subject matter like you do in most classrooms. For example... they would never hand out an image of a rabbit at Easter time for the children to colour in in all the same pencils... and then hand out a cotton wool ball to stick "in the right place" on the rabbit... and some string for the rabbits whiskers. This task just teaches children to be obedient and should have no place in the class room. In a Reggio class IF the students wanted to learn about rabbits they might start by sitting around in a circle (not all facing the same way at the teacher like in most class rooms) and talk about their experiences of what rabbits look like... then they might get up and go to one of several areas (of their choice) that have different media in which they can create a rabbit depending on the interest of the child, eg clay, collage material, pencils, paint etc. And then if a few children seem to be really engaged in the task their work is fully documented (including quotes of what they say about their work) and this is put on display. Photos are taken of the children at work too. So when a parent enters the room at Easter they might see several very different interpretations of rabbits... rather than the wall of almost identical rabbits.

Where I worked as a teachers assistant for 5 years this was my role: to help set up, supervise and document children being truly creative... not just learning to follow instructions. I saw that this system really worked and my own DD spent her preschool and primary years learning in this manner.

Anyhow... that's just my background on the issue... looking forward to reading this article... thanks again for posting Bron... you're finding some great ones lately!