What exactly is Creativity? How does it apply to education? What does it mean?
In an educational context..
Creativity is possible in all areas of human activity, including the arts, sciences, at work, at play and in all other areas of daily life. All people have creative abilities and we all have them differently. When individuals find their creative strengths, it can have an enormous impact on self-esteem and on overall achievement.
Creativity is not simply a matter of letting go. Serious creative achievement relies on knowledge, control of materials and command of ideas. Creative education involves a balance between teaching knowledge and skills, and encouraging innovation. In these ways, creative development is directly related to cultural education.
Young people are living in times of rapid cultural change and of increasing cultural diversity. Education must enable them to understand and respect different cultural values and traditions and the processes of cultural change and development. The engine of cultural change is the human capacity for creative thought and action.
Creative and cultural education are not subjects in the curriculum, they are general functions of education. Promoting them effectively calls for a systemic strategy: one that addresses the balance of the school curriculum, teaching methods and assessment, how schools connect with other people and resources and the training and development of teachers and others.
Source: National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education "All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education", May 1999 report.
Creativity = Creative Economy
Do you know what the word 'creativity actually means? See if you agree with any of these...
"Creativity means not copying" Jacques Maximin, chef
"Creativity is effective novelty" Michele & Robert Root-Berstein, Psychology Today
"Creativity is coming up with something new by letting go of convention" Kenneth Heilman, neurologist
"Creativity is the ability to restructure one's understanding of a situation in a non-obvious way" Dr. John Kounios
"Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while.
That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things"
Steve Jobs
"Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy.
What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple,
that's creativity"Charles Mingus
Pragmatic definitions
“Creativity has been defined...as ‘the ability to bring something new into existence’; and this definition will serve our present purpose well enough”
Anthony Storr
“...this particular understanding of creativity involves the physical making of something, leading to some form of communication, expression or revelation. Of course there are other forms, and other kinds, of creativity. But then it gets more fuzzy, and can start to seem meaningless. In this context, going with a ‘common sense’ interpretation of the term is probably as good as any...” David Gauntlett
"We favour a more inclusive notion of creativity that embraces personal creativity used in problem working but the outcome would not change the domain”
Norman Jackson
Conclusion...
Unlike many
phenomena in
science, there is no
single, authoritative
perspective or
definition of
creativity.
Wikipedia