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.