Creativity in schools (part 2)

A friend told me yesterday that blogging was my way of procrastinating from dissertation research. First, I wish I blogged enough to warrant that accusation. More importantly though, it reminded me of a common perception about the value of blogging. It isn’t as important as dissertating. Unless, of course, it is dissertating.

Met with Paige Cole last night and brainstormed the design of a creative multimedia project for high-schoolers, one that combines deconstructing mass media portrayals of identity and the possibility for self-representation through digital narratives. Good timing, since I’m still reeling from Ken Robinson’s argument that creativity is as important in education as literacy. I’m excited about the possibility for high school students to imagine and re-present themselves in ways that might run counter to what’s available through mass media.

Thinking about the project, I revisited photographer Alec Soth’s comments early this morning about art education. He writes, citing personal experience, about a conflicting dichotomy between “doing art” and “teaching art,” a polarization I find troubling. Not without a hopeful ending however, Soth points to Peter Schjeldahl’s lecture, Why Artists Make the Worst Students,

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing. Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There’s no more organized information. I’m trying to establish within my seminars disorganized information, which students can start practicing their moves on.

Creativity and education

A friend just sent me a link to Ken Robinson’s talk about creativity and education on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a listen.

Being wrong isn’t the same thing as being creative. But what we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, we stigmatize mistakes, and we’re now running our national education systems like this, where mistakes are the worst things you can make. We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Reminds me of conversations I’ve had these past few years with undergraduates during their student teaching experiences. The culture of learning at schools often rests primarily on students learning to respond to questions that separate right from wrong, that show if students can recall very specific types of information. Like Ken alluded, I’m sure this is in part a reflection of national legislation. A great joy for me, as a teacher educator, is seeing preservice student teachers (and their mentor teachers in the schools) also using questions that open up space for students to take risks with their thinking. Questions that help create an atmosphere to celebrate the learning potential of “being wrong.”









Dad lifting me on the forklift to photograph the barn. Click here to see the barn.