Creativity
What is creativity and how can it be encouraged?
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) recently looked back into the archives of its 1956 newsletter on the theme of creativity. The ideas expressed in the newsletter are still relevant today.
Harold Taylor, in his article Creative Thinking and the Common Man, defines the truly creative and original mind as one which is able to invent, to discover new relationships, to introduce novelty, and to find new ideas.
He arges that the way to encourage creativity is to" give freedom, encouragement and help to the individual, to create in him a sense of self-confidence, to trust him, to cherish him, and to give him that sense of expectancy for the excitement of the unforeseen which is the necessary condition of the creative act."
Gardner Murphy, in his article The Process of Creative Thinking, discusses the phases of the creative process.
He argues that to foster creativity, "the first huge responsibility of the teacher is to encourage, to give freedom, to swing wide the gates to whatever a child’s or adolescent’s mind wants to explore to make contact, to know, to grasp, to assimilate the new to the self. The first principle, then, in the development of creativeness is the encouragement of the child’s sheer sensitiveness to the charm, the challenge, the mystery of this wonderful world.”
W. Whyte, in his article Creativity vs. Organization Life, aruges that many types of organizations put up barriers to innovation and discovery.
In these articles, we can see the importance of the principles of effective education - such as creating a relationship of trust with the students, and by acknowledging the ways in which children learn and develop, and that children learn in their own individual ways - to fostering creativity as an educational outcome.
