Professor Michael Anderson of The University of Sydney joined “The Creative Process” course last week to give a compelling guest lecture on the importance of creativity in education.
Professor Anderson addressed “the elephant in the classroom”: the lack of creativity in many standard practices in the current education system. He argued that focus on meeting narrow assessment criteria – a model developed in the nineteenth century – meant today’s students were not being given the necessary skills to deal with the twenty-first century. His suggestion was that creativity needed to be added to the existing “basics” of education, so that the new core curriculum would feature literacy, numeracy, and creativity.
Professor Anderson offered two reasons for this change in approach. First, rapid technological advances mean that computers and robots can increasingly handle mechanical tasks (from product assembly to data location and matching). Human workers need to have the skills to work WITH the resultant products and data to add value to the modern workflow. Secondly, the huge challenges facing the world today – climate change, poverty, warfare, food scarcity – cannot be solved without new and innovative strategies. (As Albert Einstein said, “problems cannot be solved using the same thinking that created them.”) Educating for creativity is vital to the survival of the planet, not just the human race.
Teaching creativity can be a challenge, Professor Anderson acknowledged. Creativity can seem too ‘woolly’ or ‘airy-fairy’ to be a curriculum subject; teachers lack a cogent strategy for helping people learn to use creativity. Many people also have a limiting belief that only geniuses or ‘special’ people are creative, rather than creativity being an innate human trait accessible to everyone.
To address these issues, Professor Anderson proposed a four-step “cascade model” for learning creativity. The first step is paying attention: taking the time to really experience and examine what you are engaging with. The second is questioning: asking “why?” and delving deeper than the obvious response to get to “really, why?” The third step is to play with possibilities: to think beyond the rigidity of existing structures or offered alternatives and embrace multiple options. The final step is evaluating responses: reflecting for yourself and seeking feedback from others.
The next lectures in “The Creative Process” will move into the area of neuroscience, with an exploration of what is happening in the creative mind.
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