Cultivating Creative Thinking

What does it mean to be creative?  At NAEA this past spring, an outstanding Super Session focused on the topic of creativity.  Featured speakers were Arthur Efland, Kerry Freedman, Enid Zimmerman, and Doug Boughton.  

Efland spoke of heightened interest in creativity as a “social and economic necessity” in response to NCLB and entrepreneurial interests.  While describing creative dispositions, Zimmerman noted that talent and creativity are different entities; talented students are more likely to conform than creative students.  She then shared educational interventions to encourage creative thinking for all students.  Freedman spoke of creativity in postmodern education as “a process of learning,” with students needing time for self-study and self-motivation.  For assessment, Boughton recommended that portfolios, or “living documents,” provide evidence of problem finding and solving and risk-taking.  He advised teachers to recognize social contexts when evaluating student work and to remember that they are not “the sole arbiter of quality.”  

My colleague, Nan Hathaway, and I sat captivated in the balcony throughout this session.  Each of these noted art education scholars affirmed our belief in the need for increased creativity in our schools.  To accomplish this, we must understand what our students need from us to become independent risk-takers, problem finders and solvers in school.  We know that they already do this on their own outside of school when they play games, build a fort, pursue a topic of interest, collect nature specimens, and perform their own plays.  Their world is filled with creative moments!  How can we cultivate innate curiosity, open-mindedness, and enthusiasm for learning under the constraints of the school day?  

In this month’s blog, I will share with you some theories of creativity and apply them to observations from my elementary art classroom.  This is a very rich topic and I hope you will join in the dialogue about teaching and learning to expand creativity in our schools.

Diane Jaquith 
Burr Elementary School
Newton, MA 
didij@aol.com