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