Getting a Little Creative

Creativity & Education

I had an interesting conversation with a very good friend who has been working in the educational field, specifically in schools, for several years. From her own experience, she believed creativity is a capacity we learn to develop in our families and in schools. However, she considered this capacity is not fostered with the same emphasis as logic because since we are little we are told to be more practical, and our educational system is designed to lead us to choose professions which will feed us in the future. This is the reason why the arts do not have the same importance as the sciences in our education and we kill many talents, she considered.

In my research, I found a couple of experts who support the idea that creativity is not something that belongs to certain privileged people; all human beings are born creative. Every child has a full capacity to imagine, to dream, to create (Bradshaw, 1990).  Picasso once said that all children are born to be artists (Robinson, Ted Talk). However, at some point in our lives we stop doing it because we are told (often at home and in schools) that our dreams are unrealistic and we do not get the opportunity to develop our creativity, we numb it instead. When we see creative people around us, especially in the artistic domains, we think they are special people with special gifts.  Yet, I believe these people found a passion and searched for the opportunity to develop their creativity in it. We tend to misplace creativity only in the arts; nonetheless, we see examples of great creativity in any domain. For instance, all the advances in technology, developments in medicine & sciences, successful businesses, among others. Thus, creativity is a capacity that belongs to every human being. However, some people develop it more than others.

I came up with more questions which awoke my interest in this topic: Where do we foster our creativity: at home, in school? What does education have to do with creativity? Do our scholar systems support or inhibit the development of our creativity?

Through education we learn values, develop a thinking process, foster relationships and develop our creativity. However, this last does not happen very often in our scholar system. Ken Robinson, an English international advisor on education in the arts, talks about this in various conferences. He defends the idea that schools actually kill creativity instead of foster it.

I invite you to watch this video of Ken Robinson and share your comments in this blog.

 

Personally, I totally agree with Ken because Curriculums are not designed to make us use our minds and bodies as a whole to think creatively. Moreover, curriculums do not consider the importance of play to enhance the students’ learning, when the capacity of playing is inherent to every child and is through games that they learn to create, memorize, relate to others and develop moral values. I believe that we should think about the possibility of changing curriculums to foster creativity in our students.

What do you believe?

References:

Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child. New York: Bantam Books.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

The beginnings...

During my last year of university I took a class in the faculty of Psychology called: Psychology of Creativity. It was actually one of my best courses ever. It was based on the activation on our right brain hemisphere through breathing exercises, creative writing, poetry, painting and music. I took the course as one of the first steps I was giving to develop creativity in my life.

After I graduated from the university, I was working in Human Resources in my home country (Ecuador), delivering training to the employees of the company I was working for. In my trainings I tried to be very dynamic and interactive, for I would get the participants on their feet, to move, play, create, reenergize and laugh. At first, I always found resistance in them, either because they didn’t want to get out of their comfort zone or because they didn’t want to feel ridiculous. However, once they started the activity and got involved in it they didn’t want to stop and they showed a great sense of engagement in each game. I was really surprised of all the things they could create when they committed to the activities.

Every time I saw these adults becoming like children I reflected on how beautiful childhood is. It is a never ending game, where our imagination has no limitations and determines how we live our days. We actually have that capacity to play for hours without getting tired, and more importantly, it is through play that we develop our creativity, values and relationships with others. Also, as children, we are not afraid to make mistakes. If we are wrong, we find a creative solution to solve the problem.

At the same time, I felt sad because we step out of this beautiful age so quickly and our creativity and capacity to play tend to go inactive as we grow up, as if they were bad and we tried to punish them. So, I came up with two questions:  Why did we decide to punish our capacity to create? And, at what point of our lives did we decide to numb it?

What do you think?

A Flashback

Why creativity? In short, because it is a capacity that we do not give much attention since we are little and we are not aware of its positive power in our lives.

My interest in Creativity began several years ago when I took a class at the university called: The Little Prince Seminar. In this class we would read and analyse each chapter of this book, which happens to be my favourite. Its author, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, perfectly portrays the meaning of life in the character of The Little Prince. This little man is always complaining of how adults worry too much about getting the perfect job, learning more and being successful in life and they miss the most important things as friendship, being surprised by beautiful and small things and playing. The Little Prince will remind the Pilot the importance of not losing the child that is in him, who allows him to imagine, to foster true relationships and to create.

Through this book I started to reflect on how I was living my life at that time and I noticed that I had become very serious, trying to achieve a successful career, which was not bad, but because of many worries in my life I forgot to play, to laugh, and do many creative things that I used to do before. In short, I just forgot to become more like a child, enjoy the simplest and most beautiful things in life and let myself dream of what I could do with them. I started to look around me, and to my surprise, I found successful grown-up adults who didn’t play anymore. In each meeting they would gather together to talk about politics, businesses, soccer, parties, etc. When I came up with an idea to play anything, their answer was: ¨that is boring! Let’s talk about serious stuff¨.

As The Little Prince, I felt frustrated and sad because it seemed like a rule one had to follow: ¨As you grow up, you forget about becoming a child¨. Again, following The Little Prince, I took this problem very seriously because that inner child lives inside us and is longing to express himself to make us happier and fulfilled (Bradshaw, 1999). Anyone can tell me that when we let ourselves laugh, play and create like children, we have so much fun! So, I decided to help myself and other adults to be more conscious about this problem. Every time I could, I would talk to my friends about The Little Prince and the importance of recalling that innocence and creativity in our lives. A few times, I made copies of the book and highlighted the important parts of it and gave it to some friends. However, people didn’t think it was important and every time that I spoke about this subject, they would change it.

So, I wanted to research more around creativity and our capacity to play and little by little I have found more resources. I decided to start this blog to share my personal reflections about these topics and invite people to discuss about it, especially teachers who can do so much to foster creativity in their students and positively influence in their future as professionals and human beings.

References:  

-          De Saint Exupéry, A. (2000). The Little Prince. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc.

-          Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming: Reclaiming And Championing Your Inner Child. New York: Bantam Books.