Friday, December 3, 2010

Progress?

Since I sent in my proposal last May, and possibly unconciously for a long time before that, I have been trying to work out exactly what I am planning to do. Initially I started with a vague notion that my Junior Cert students are getting less creative every year and the idea that integrating art in the primary school curriculum may be a way of overcoming this problem - teaching other subjects through the arts, or with art methodologies could possibly develop important skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, team work, risk-taking, etc. seen to be important for fostering creativity. I got excited by the mountains of studies that I've been gathering, which seem to agree with this. However, the more I read, the less certain I am about this.
Creativity is a bit of a buzz word these days, everyone from politicians and economists to parents and teachers talking about the need for creativity in the future. Problems with this include the fact that no one can agree on exactly what creativity is, or how best to develop it. Other interesting aspects of the debate, which I came across recently, are that society may not be able to function if everyone is very creative (see www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mindbloggling/201011/should-everyone-be-creative) and that creativity is not always a good thing (see Cropley, Cropley, Kaufman and Runco (2010) The Dark Side of Creativity (www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2705195/?site_locale=en_GB), there's a Google books preview available). Arts advocates are claiming that teaching through the arts can tackle all problems from truancy and low self-esteem to higher academic results across all subject areas. Others, arguing for art for arts sake, are worried that these claims may cause more damage, with the intrinsic values of the arts losing out, especially if they prove to be false, or inconclusive. You can read a summary of this debate here: www.practice.ie/essays/april-09-nick-rabkin-arts-intrinsic-and-instrumental-values
Earlier this week I realised that this is the issue that I want to focus on (some of you may have noticed the addition of a question mark to the end of my title above). Is there a case to be made for greater integration of the arts in Irish primary schools, or would the arts lose more than they would gain if this happened? Does learning in the arts actually boost creativity? Rather than the large nationwide survey that I had originally envisaged carrying out, I have decided to conduct case studies around my region (Longford, Westmeath, Cavan, Roscommon and Leitrim). I have been in touch with the Arts Officers in these counties and I hope that a small number of primary schools will facilitate my research in the new year. For the moment I am continuing to define my terms of reference and finalise my methodology, but I feel that I am finally making some progress.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Creativity in the digital age

I was surprised to receive a new book in the post the other day, I ordered it in August and had forgotten all about it: Creativity and Education Futures: Learning in a Digital Age by Anna Craft (Trentham Books, 2011). It looks at the changing nature of childhood and how education might adapt in response. Do we treat technology as a risk factor for children, or embrace it's empowering possibilities? How do we educate them to deal with the rapid advances and uncertainties of the future?
I have already come across a few of Anna Craft's books on creativity on google books and bought Creative Learning 3-11 and How We Document It (Trentham Books 2008, edited by Anna Craft,Teresa Cremin and Pamela Burnard) earlier. While looking through the new book I noticed an illustration by Andrew Park of Cognitive Media (www.cognitivemedia.co.uk) who also drew the Ken Robinson RSA animation below. It turned out to be a representation of a talk Anna Craft gave in Galway earlier this year. Cognitve Media documented all of the talks at the CELT (Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, NUIG) 2010 conference and they can be downloaded here: www.nuigalway.ie/celt/conference/conference2010.html
You can also watch Anna Craft's keynote address, which is a summary of the book, in full here:
www.nuigalway.ie/celt/webcasts/Craft_Keynote/Craft_Keynote.html

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

What is creativity?

I realised very early in my reading that creativity is very hard to define. There are as many definitions as there are writers on the subject (and there are a great number of them). While I don't expect to come up with a definitive answer I'd like readers of my blog to let me know what they think, so I'm posing some questions here:
What is creativity to you?
Do you consider yourself to be creative?
What areas of life do you think creativity is most important in? 
Do you think it can, or should, be taught?

Feel free to answer one or more of these questions here by adding a comment. I hope to get a friendly debate going, so keep in touch and respond to each others comments please. I'm sure any of these questions may lead you to think of more, so add them too if you like.
Thanks in advance for your contributions,
Annette

Monday, November 15, 2010

Welcome

I made initial contact with a number of schools today, if you are reading this after receiving my email or returning for another look, welcome to my blog. I hope that you find it interesting. Feel free to post comments to any of the items below or contact me by email anytime. I am at the early stages of my research and would welcome any suggestions. The About Me section and the previous posts should give you an idea of my background and research interests, but I hope to develop this blog as my project progresses and hope that it will become a place for discussion.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope you will keep in touch,
Annette

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Side-effects

There have been a few side-effects from my research so far, one is that I have been drawing a lot more, but the main one is a change in my attitudes towards teaching and the way I teach. Although I have always stressed the process over the finished piece, I used to give a lot more design guidance than is needed for the students to gain a creative boost for themselves.
This year I decided to use what I've been reading and let the students drive the lessons more. I devised a project inspired by the Tim Burton exhibition I visited during the summer. It featured many pages from childhood sketchbooks that later developed into his film characters. Drawing was Tim Burton's way of dealing with the isolation he felt growing up in suburban America. Using this idea I asked my students to use their lives as inspiration for an art project with the final product being a fantasy creature / building etc. I set tasks along the way to emphasise the research element, including visual brainstorming about themselves, researching mythological creatures and reflecting on the process as they go along. You can see some examples of the work on my art room blog (stmelsart.blogspot.com).
They were all very enthusiastic at the start, but anxious to get on to the final task. Since then I've encountered a lot of problems. I think there are many reasons for this including the way they have been taught up to now, their reliance on computer games etc. for entertainment and a belief that the way to research is to type a word into Google search and print out the results. Thinking for themselves is not something they are used to doing.
I had one disastrous class a few weeks ago where I spent most of the time shouting or waiting for silence and nobody got any work done. I had given out pages explaining the task and steps involved, but no one seemed to know what to do. After that I took time to figure out what went so wrong. I felt like abandoning the project, but decided to reflect on it instead. I realised that it was so different from the usual way of working that the students were panicking. I would have panicked too if I had to do it at their age. They are so used to being told exactly what to do, or learn, that when faced with too much choice they had no idea where to start. Several times I was asked 'when do we get to the good bit?' or 'what are we doing today?' I've figured out that there has to be a balance between the students' freedom of choice and the guidance I give them.
I went in the next week and rearranged the furniture, starting with a circle of stools at the top of the room and easels as well as tables in the rest of it. We started with a group discussion of what had gone wrong and then some directions for where to go next before they each found a space to work that suited them. The room has been a lot calmer since and, although there still is a long way to go, I now feel there is some hope that my art room will become a place where students learn to think creatively for themselves as well developing the art skills they need to do well in the state exams.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Brief research update

My plan to keep this blog updated regularly hasn't gone too well so far, but I have been busy behind the scenes gathering more sources and managing my bibliography. Since my last post I've had my first tutorial, been back to NCAD library twice and attended the Douglas Hyde Conference (more later on it).

Some new additions to my reading list include:
  • Jim Gleeson's (2010) Curriculum in Context: Partnership, Power and Praxis in Ireland which has only one index entry for Arts Education, but should be of interest as it is an up-to-date examination of the socio-cultural and policy contexts of the Irish curriculum. 
  • Daniel Murphy's (1987) report into Education and the Arts which presents research into 'various aspects of the educational process from the standpoint of the creative artist' (p.5), interviewing 'virtually the entire Irish artistic community' (p.5).
  • Art and Human Development (2010) edited by Constance Milbrath and Cynthia Lightfoot which explores the role of art in the construction of knowledge.
  • Anne Bamford's The Wow Factor (2009) which presents global research into the impact of the arts in education
  • I've also been watching episodes of the BBC series How Art Made the World (available at http://art.docuwat.ch/videos/) and I've ordered the accompanying book by Nigel Spivey (2006) How Art Made the World: A Journey to the Origins of Human Creativity

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Week One

It's been an exciting week and although I didn't get to read as much as I planned, I did make many new contacts and attended two days of stimulating discussion that will probably lead to paths I hadn't considered before.
I spent eight hours in total on trains to and from Dublin and made use of the time reading sections from Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom (Beghetto and Kaufman, 2010); The Educational Psychology of Creativity (John Houtz, 2003) and Creativity: A Handbook for Teachers (Ai-Girl Tan, 2007).
I went to the NCAD library after I registered on Wednesday and took home a selection of books including Gardner's Creating Minds (1993) which examines creativity through the lives of Freud, Picasso, and Gandhi amongst others.
I also have a couple on primary school and childhood art; integrating the arts in the curriculum; why schools need the arts; Sternberg's Handbook of Creativity (2009) and Sue Crowley's Letting the Buggers Be Creative (2005), which I have yet to read. I have noticed that although there is a vast amount of books available on creativity from various perspectives, the same names crop up in most of them. I'm already finding some of it repetitive, so I will have to start being more selective once I clarify the direction I want to follow.
Friday was induction day and I spent Saturday at the Art Teachers' Conference in the Camden Court Hotel, more about both of these later.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Official start

The term officially started yesterday, although I don't register until tomorrow and have induction on Friday. I decided to start by reading some of the articles I have collected. It seemed easiest to start with the As so I read about a range of topics yesterday. Here's a short summary (I intend to do this every few days, so I have a record of my reading that I can't lose):

Abedi, Jamal 2002 A latent-variable modeling approach to assessing reliability and validity of a creativity instrument in Creativity Research Journal Vol 14 No 2 pp 267-276

This article described an assessment of a new multiple-choice, pen and paper Creativity Test based on the constructs of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (the most popular test used by researchers). The new teat aims to cut down on the time it takes to administer a test of creativity. It was administered, along with the Torrance test and the Villa & Auzmendi Creativity Test to 2270 students in Spain and results compared. All 3 tests rate participants on 4 sub-scales Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration. The researchers found mostly moderate (internal consistency) reliability coefficients for the new test, but noted that both reliability and validity estimations improved when measured using Structural Equation Modeling rather than traditional statistical approaches.

Alter, Frances; Hays, Terence & O’Hara, Rebecca 2009 The Challenges of Implementing Primary Arts Education: What our teachers say in Australasian Journal of Early Childhood Vol 34 No 4 pp 22-30

A qualitative research study investigated 19 Australian primary school teachers' personal arts experiences and training as well as their own arts pedagogy. They found that the value of art-based learning is often overlooked and discussed the difficulties of fitting the arts into a crowded curriculum. Teacher confidence and past experiences in the arts (dance, music, visual art and drama) were examined and shown to have a large impact on the quality of their teaching in the arts areas. The preparedness of non-specialist teachers in teaching the creative arts was questioned and there were calls for improvements through a range of measures, including better teacher training in the arts.

Anthony, Marcus 2008 The case for Integrated Intelligence in World Futures Vol 64 No 4 pp 233-253

This was a thought provoking article, although it was probably not relevant to my research. Building on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences Anthony puts forward a case for transpersonal dimensions of intelligence, which have been neglected since The Enlightenment. He believes that recent changes in the global economy and needs of populations have created a need for an expanded theory of intelligence and more intuitive thinking. He feels that cosmic forces are ignored and ridiculed by most academics, but a more open discussion of these possibilities is now needed.

Amorino, James S. 2008 An Occurrence at Glen Rock: Classroom Educators Learn More about Teaching and Learning from the Arts in Phi Delta Kappan Vol 90 No 3 pp 191-195

This was a short summary of some of the aspects of a five-year powerful professional development experience for educators in the Glen Rock district in America. It was built around integrating the arts into all types of instruction and led to teachers reinventing their own practice. 3 key questions were asked at the start of the programme: Can you teach creativity? Does creative thinking embody an intellectual behaviour which emerges from a specific set of conditions? Can these conditions be recreated in the classroom?

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The importance of art in education

I just found this video on teachertube. It's a nice summary of some of the reasons for using art in education, although it doesn't give any sources for the statistics quoted and makes some very general statements:
www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=112187

Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Douglas Hyde conference

The Douglas Hyde is held in Ballaghaderreen every year. This year's theme is "Inside Creativity: Education, Innovation, Economy, & Society". It sounds like it could be relevant to what I'm hoping to do so I think I'll go along. It's on 15th & 16th October. More details are available here: http://roscommonarts.com/hyde/events10.htm

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

What I'm reading at the moment ...

I got details in the post this week about registration and induction, so I think it's time I got organised. I have an ever-growing bibliography of articles and google books, but not too many physical books. At the moment I'm dipping into 3 whenever I get a chance - Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom (2010) edited by Ronald A. Beghetto and James C. Kaufman; Zing! Seven Creativity Practices for Educators and Students (2010) by Pat Mora and 100+ ideas for Teaching Creativity (2007, 2nd Ed) by Stephen Bowkett. The first is a collection of current research in the area and will definitely be useful. The other two are lighter reading, Zing! contains a series of letters from the author to teachers and is interesting enough, but a bit condescending in tone, while 100+ ideas gives a good synopsis of areas to look at in more detail later, as well as practical advice, games and activities.

Monday, August 23, 2010

The Creativity Crisis

www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
One of the reasons I decided to start this research was a feeling that creativity levels are falling. Ten years into the new Primary curriculum I thought I should be seeing improvements in my secondary school classes, but a high precentage of recent students find it extremely hard to generate ideas for themselves. This link seems to show that this is part of an international trend.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity | Video on TED.com

Here's an interesting video for a start (click on the link above). I found it through the new Scottish curriculum website: www.ltscotland.org.uk/learningteachingandassessment/approaches/creativity/index.asp

My creativity blog

I am about to start an MLitt in Education in NCAD in September. This blog is designed to help me keep track of my research as I go along. I hope it will also be of interest to those who help me along the way, anyone concerned with boosting creativity in education and as a source to other creativity links from the web.