International Conference on Creativity Education 20-24 October 2008 National

Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

Theme: Cultivating creativity within the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge – Tertiary

Level Arts Education

Title: The Importance of Creativity in Education: Complimentary Perspectives

Authors: Arda Culpan RMIT University and Bernard Hoffert, Monash University
Australia.

Abstract
The presentation draws on the perspectives of two Australian educators
who work in separate arts education contexts to argue that the concept of
creativity is central to educating students not just for knowledge in a
particular arts discipline, but also for the ability to use that knowledge
creatively. Allied to this, it outlines an approach taken to facilitate student
teachers’ creative development Introduction
in the context of visual art education
courses at an Australian university.

Introduction

The Australian National Education and the Arts Statement highlights the place of the arts in
promoting creativity:

“The arts foster imagination, risk taking and curiosity - important aspects of
creativity . . . . Rigorous academic arts subjects and experiences in the
senior years act as pathways to the ever increasing range of career
opportunities in the creative industries” (Ministerial Council on Education,
Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2007, p. 6).

This emphasises the preparatory role for the innovation process education in the arts
makes, and broadens the recognition of what art educators can achieve. While art
education provides learning in and about art, integral to this should be an awareness of
developing the creativity, which is fundamental to all education. Art Education concentrates
on knowledge about art and skills such as observation, perception, imagination and
curiosity. These are also fundamental skills that underpin learning in any discipline and are
basic to the generation of new knowledge through research. The first part of the
presentation reflects Bernard Hoffert’s perspective that these skills should be integrated in
learning processes across all education, so we educate not just for knowledge in a
particular discipline, but also for the ability to use that knowledge creatively.

The current discourse on creativity illustrates that it is necessary more than ever to provide
student teachers with concrete experiences for understanding the potential of arts
curriculum to promote creative thinking and practice. As such, the second part of the
presentation outlines the general approach taken by Arda Culpan to facilitating student
teachers’ creative development in visual art education courses at an Australian university.

______________________________________________________________

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 Part 1: The crucial role of creativity education

Creativity is a fundamental dimension of development and progress; whether it be

sciences, humanities or arts, all depend on innovation to carry their disciplines forward,
However, most people are not obviously creative; they may have the ability to be creative,
but it is not immediately evident. A major function of education is to draw out peoples’
natural strengths, help realize their intellectual and practical abilities, teach them to realize
their innate potentials. We teach students to read, to write, to think analytically, to be
numerate, and to fulfil their potential in many ways, but we do not address creativity; if we
are to fully educate our students, we must also address their creative potential. Our
responsibility as educators is to identify the potential individual’s have and develop it for the
benefit of themselves and for the advancement of society.

A precise description of creativity is highly elusive, particularly as the meaning of creativity

varies according to its context. In basic terms, create and creativity mean:

To cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is
not made by ordinary processes; to evolve from one’s own thought or imagination as a
work of art or an invention” (Coulson et al., 1983, p. 392).

The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to
create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations. (Flexner & Hauck, 1993, p.
472).

The general elements of creativity include, persistence, critical reflection, daring in one’s
thinking and risk taking (Joubert, 2001; Sternberg, 1997). As creativity involves application
of ideas derived from observation, perception and imagination, driven by curiosity,
education in the arts needs to enhance these abilities on the following basis:

Observation - the foundation for any interaction with the world, be it practical or conceptual,
for it is how we relate to what is around us and explore reality; perception - the process
through which we comprehend our surroundings, relate sensation to understanding, give it
meaning and derive our knowledge of reality.

Imagination - the counterbalancing journey through the unreal, the opportunity to chart the
seas of fantasy and search for realms, concepts and experiences, unfettered by the
limitations of the material world.

Curiosity - the starting point for investigation, the motivation to inquire through observation,
to understand through perception and to extend through imagination. Curiosity is the
reason we interact with the world, the push to understand and extract meaning, the impulse
to explore our surroundings and interact with them. Curiosity is the starting point for arts
education, the need to represent and express that which has not yet been recorded.

Observation, perception and imagination can be regarded as building blocks of idea

development, the ways we conceptualise the world; they are also the basis of education in
the arts, the raw material of artistic creation that underline our core studies in the creative
arts. These fundamental aspects of idea development are integral to the mechanisms
through which we educate artists and draw out their creativity.

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Arthur Koestler (1970) argues: “The act of creation itself, is based on essentially the same
underlying pattern in all ranges of the continuous rainbow spectrum. But the criteria for
judging the finished product differ of course from one medium to another” (p. 200). If
creative activity in all areas is based on the same underlying pattern, as Koestler suggests,
arts educators have a crucial role to play in educating scientists, economists and students
across all disciplines, as well as artists. We are accustomed to teaching observation,
perception and imagination for students to achieve artistically, stimulating their ideas, using
their creativity in culture; but we can also use aspects of what we teach to enable students
to achieve across the intellectual spectrum.

Learning to observe, to perceive and to imagine is not an addition to the curriculum, but a
different emphasis within it, regardless of its discipline base, especially as these skills help
us see more clearly, understand more comprehensively and to dream more fantastically.
They enable us to use our knowledge as the basis of ideas; they equip us to innovate. We
all have the ability to observe, to perceive, to think about what we observe and acquire
knowledge as a result. We also have the ability to imagine, to allow our dreams to inspire
our actions. Consider just two famous examples:

1. Wilbur and Orville Wright who were responsible for the first motorised aircraft built a
glider with movable parts in the wing assembly, to vary the shape of the wing surface in
response to the flight conditions. This maximized the potential upward thrust from moving
air across the wing and enabled the flight position to be corrected in response to wind
changes. They mounted an engine on the glider and on December 17, 1903 undertook the
first powered flight. What was revolutionary was neither the glider nor the engine, which
both relied on existing technology, but the movable wing to allow a pilot to manipulate the
aerodynamic impact on the wing structure (McFarland, 1953). The Wright Brothers
developed powered flight based on their observations of how birds change the shape of
their wings. The development of their ideas entailed: observation-seeing how birds altered
different parts of the wing to control the force of the air against it; perception-considering
this in the context of controlled human flight; imagination-considering how this might be
used to create controlled flight. Through experimentation, they developed a mechanism for
altering the shape of the wing in flight and designed it into an aircraft.

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2. In 1907, Picasso experimented with the construction of representational images using
abstract shapes; he had seen tribal masks in the ethnographic museum at Trocadero and
been struck by the intensity of their highly distorted interpretations of the face. These
stylized wooden masks gave him an idea for reconsidering the figure in space by focusing
on generic aspects of identity, rather than those of specific individuals; it involved the
viewer in reflecting on the interpretation of the image, effectively giving the work meaning;
he embodied his ideas in Les Demoiselle D’Avignon, 1906, one of the most influential
paintings of the twentieth century (Hoffert, 1995). This led to the development of Cubism
and the high level of pictorial abstraction which resulted in non representational art.
Picasso’s observation, perceived in the context of his work, allowed him to imagine a new
pictorial format which became a cornerstone of twentieth century artistic achievement.

If we address education in science, medicine, engineering, the humanities and social

sciences, different branches of technology, knowledge acquisition across all disciplines
with an emphasis on observation, perception and imagination, we allow the process of idea
development to enrich whatever studies we deal with. We also foster an educational
system which feeds the creative potential of all domains of study and the intrinsic
possibilities of all students, no matter what their discipline interests. Further, creativity
facilitates imaginative solutions to the myriad problems of a modern community, including
immigration, health care, environmental concerns, security, economic development,
housing, social welfare and so on. Creativity should be embedded in our education system
so that all aspects of economic and community life are better addressed through a creative
work force.

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 Part 2: Creative development in pre-service teacher education

The concepts covered by Bernard Hoffert add impetus to my role in promoting pre-service
teachers’ creative skills that are integral to their own artistic practice, and applicable to
learning across the whole curriculum at all educational levels. The visual art education
courses, offered at first, third and fourth year level of the four year Bachelor of Education
program, and the one year Graduate Diploma, align with the concept of creativity within the
New Learning framework proposed by the Australian Council of Deans of Education with
reference to the learning needs of students within an ever-changing society:

Creativity is essential in the development of thinkers of the future with a focus

on creating a kind of person, with kinds of dispositions and orientations to the
world, rather than simply commanding a body of knowledge. These persons
will be able to navigate change and diversity, learn-as-they-go, solve
problems, collaborate and be flexible and creative (p. 2).

While student teachers come with wide ranging interests and skills, very few have
experience in autonomous or collaborative learning, and most state that they are not
‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ . Yet they all need to be prepared for addressing the learning
needs of children in the 21st century. Therefore the visual art courses aim to promote
students’ creative abilities and capacity to reflect critically on their learning processes, and
to support their peers’ learning. Students are strategically positioned within a collaborative
environment to explore a breadth of learning styles, and a variety of theoretical
frameworks. Their practical and pedagogical development is scaffolded in line with several
interrelated concepts:

1. Students’ open inquiry processes are fundamental to progressive curriculum (Cope &
Kalantzis, 1997). Allied to this, in order to advance students’ creative abilities and
autonomy teachers need to develop their own creative attributes and implement creative
teaching practices rather than follow traditional instructional approaches based solely on
direct instruction (Biggs, 1999). Open-ended learning opportunities promote individuality in
creative expression and non-convergent thinking, risk taking and important inter and intra-
personal skills (Gardner, 1993). Furthermore, student-centred pedagogy in creative
practice must recognise individual differences in learning styles, and “[value] the ideas of
width, diversity and personal autonomy” (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - CGF, 1989, p.
27) especially as, “educational equity is likely to increase as the diversity of forms grows”
(Eisner, 1998, p. 179).

One of the terms essential to any understanding of education must be that of

creativity. The word has come to denote a disposition of mind which is
experimental, open, engaged, a particular kind of teaching and learning where
the results cannot be comprehended in advance of the process (Abbs, 1989,
p. 1).

2. Creative teaching energizes students to make shifts in their thinking, internalise learning,
and change their sense of self (Jeffrey, 2006) encompasses Innovation - new or different
combinations of elements, fostering different kinds of meanings and thinking skills through
various forms of artistic representation, and promoting risk taking (Sternberg, 1997;
Joubert, 2001) by setting challenges, without clear-cut solutions, to build students’ creativity
and individual or group ownership (Ofsted, 2003). The concept of group ownership
suggests that students grow in a collaborative learning context by contributing to each
other’s learning.

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Teaching for creativity also entails stimulating students’ imagination, original thinking and
non-verbal expression, and recognising that students’ access to various modes of creative
expression is subject to personal context - students venture into their less comfortable
learning areas in a collaborative community where their contributions are valued and they
extend their thinking, experiment, and appraise (Eisner, 2002). While creativity can be
considered in relation to individual self-actualisation the process of creation is not
necessarily a solitary activity, reified in the myth of the artist shut in a garret, the social
aspect of creativity - developed at group level, is also important (Cropley, 2006).

3. Although creativity is central to arts education that promotes specific information and
abilities, it encompasses attributes that are fundamental in any discipline. Creativity can be
regarded as:

Standing beyond the differentiation of disciplines, as if a guiding beacon for

us to apply across the boundaries of human endeavour and to shape all that
we do within our learning and research, wherever that is placed (Hoffert,
2004, ¶ 12).

The above concepts fit well in a teacher education context, especially in contending with
perceived myths about creative ability. Consequently, a key principle of the courses is that,
“creativity is not a special faculty with which some children are endowed and others are
not, but that it is a form of intelligence and as such can be developed and nurtured like any
other mode of thinking” (CGF, 1989, p. 29). This means students need well considered
support in advancing their creative abilities and taking intellectual and intuitive risks to
extend the boundaries of what they thought is possible.

Accordingly, the courses aim to advance students’ creativity through class-based

discussions on art, artists’ work, and ways of promoting children’s creative development,
and independent research tasks on diverse art forms from past and present cultures.
Students also attend art galleries to extend their perceptions of art, stimulate their curiosity,
imagination, and ideas for their own arts practice, and ways of designing lessons for
primary school children. Their art practice skills are developed through the ‘making’ of art
forms in a range of visual media, traditional and computer-mediated sources. Students are
scaffolded through open-ended studio-based tasks designed to provide creative stimulus
through exploring concepts, generating imagination and persisting in acquiring relative
techniques. They are encouraged to share ideas and critical reflection processes as they
work. The giving and receiving constructive critique assists peers/students to extend their
confidence for moving to higher cognitive levels as distinct from compromising their sense
of ownership over their work by overt teacher direction or harsh critique.

This way students who quickly display a readiness to explore new combinations of artistic
elements, and the resolve to confront challenges in pursuit of creative goals have
opportunities to devise their own creative work projects. The others need more time,
stimulus, and constructive critiquing to generate ideas, develop and refine techniques
before gaining the impetus for self-initiated creative activity and small group project work. In
accordance with the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (Victorian Curriculum
Assessment Authority, 2005), these projects incorporate visual art knowledge, including
conceptual and technical skills within the broader context of an interdisciplinary exploration
that extends across the arts and beyond.

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 Methodology - observations of students’ engagement

The systematic evaluation of the visual art courses includes critical reflection to ensure that
students’ diverse learning needs and interests are met. A qualitative, interpretive approach
is used to gain insights into students’ level of engagement, and their perceptions of the
merits the course content and pedagogy. This involves keeping a field journal of pertinent
insights gained through close observations of, and dialogue with students throughout their
developmental activity and their final presentations, collecting related artifacts, carefully
considering students’ unsolicited feedback, and their comments in the mandatory end of
semester evaluation forms. These processes acknowledge that researchers should fine-
tune their approaches in accord with emerging conditions (Eisner, 1998).

While many students, at first year level recognize that their skill range is limited, they come
to reflect critical thinking capacities that often effect a profound change in their view of
themselves as creative beings and become adept at goal identification, forward planning,
revising, questioning and peer tutoring. In turn, they develop a palpable sense of
achievement regarding their work, and enthusiasm for one another’s work, and value the
challenge of developing imaginative ideas, setting creative goals, and co-creating a
collaborative artistic community. By third and fourth year students engage in increasingly
higher levels of creative practice through research and practical exploration, and exemplify
two of the key attributes identified by Barone and Eisner (1997). They develop conceptual
and technical skills in order to generate artistic work, and work as researchers to promote
an empathic understanding of the world. Through linking their own practice to an
educational context, students make connections between their own artistic experience of
and the implementation of creative teaching that extends beyond art education. Through a
mix of guided and self-initiated explorations, students come to understand that, while the
visual art education can enhance creative thinking across disciplines, making a range of
skills and knowledge accessible to all learners by incorporating physical, personal, social,
and interdisciplinary learning, art learning itself does not equate to nebulous ‘free
expression’ of low cognitive value. The importance of continuity, diversity, breadth and
depth in visual art, firmly grounded in sound aesthetic understandings and practices, is
emphasised.

It is the knowledge base, the preparation and research, which enables

Innovation to occur. The imagination must build on sound preparation to
achieve the actual (Hoffert, 2004, ¶ 9).

Concluding Comments

The increasing emphasis placed on the role of education in preparing students to

contribute to the innovation environment, stresses the importance of creativity in achieving
political, economic and social goals. Both authors argue that creativity can be embedded
in the educational context by process rather than content alone and this process can be
derived from standard forms of art educational practice. The contention that visual arts
learning can enhance creative thinking across disciplines, by making a range of skills and
knowledge accessible to all students, builds on the demonstrable value of this process in
achieving creative art outcomes. Identifying the development of observation, perception
and imagination as core skills on which this process depends, extends their role in the
development of creativity, as it applies in art, to the broader context of knowledge
acquisition. These skills in knowledge acquisition evidenced in physical, personal, social,
and interdisciplinary dimensions of visual learning, form an educational process, rather
than a specific content which can be activated across the whole curriculum` to enhance
knowledge in any context, enabling it to be more creatively applied.

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