Imagination and Creativity

Does anyone really have the right to be shocked about the current creativity crisis? People should not be shocked, but they should be mad. Really people should be asking what can be done to change it.

One reason I think creativity is stifled is because of lack of motivation in kids to do activities that are not ready-made entertainment. If they think they will be bored, they won’t do it. Why use their imaginations when that may take time or any sort of effort? It is more about what was discussed in class. Americans want quick fixes and fast results. With that mindset, how can creativity and imagination flourish?

Andrea Kuszewski writes in her article “The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience” the following:
“What is supposed to be the most critical learning period for shaping children into the leaders of tomorrow has evolved over the years into a stifling of the creative instinct—wasting the age of imagination—which we then spend the rest of our lives trying to reconnect with. The time has never been more ready for systemic change than right now, and we’ve never had better tools to achieve this level of creative disobedience, to successfully prepare our children for the big challenges that lie ahead. It might be uncomfortable and take a bit of work, but our future depends on this radical change in order to survive.”

Creativity in school starts with the teacher. My district thinks textbook use in the classroom is extremely important. This was a Social Studies adoption year, and I was able to choose the book I wanted. I did research, asked other teachers that I trusted, and I found one. It was a book used in some Advanced Placement classes, but it emphasized History as a narrative. It had biographies of people that should be known but are not, it had comparisons to current events and global historical figures, it put more focus on events and people that were more important than Columbus like textbooks usually do, and reading it was not as boring because it was not like reading a typical textbook. It even showed the importance of art, literature and music in American culture. This means I wasn’t able to get it.

The other History teacher found a book that was based on the Wiggins Model, Understanding by Design (UbD), and has more pages about Columbus than I have ever seen before. Since this is the latest, shiniest way to teach History, the district chose this for both of us. Basically it puts an emphasis on inquiry, which I do anyway. This just means it has more questions at the end of the sections. It is sad that districts think that teachers need to be told how to teach by a textbook. The main concern the curriculum coordinator had for my principal was that since I did not get the book I wanted if I would use the book I was given. I said I would, but textbooks rarely get used in my classes anyways.

I want my students to think outside the textbook, and usually they say those are the hardest assignments to complete. They have to think in a broader way than reading the book to find the right answer. They need to be able to try new ways of learning. Sometimes they fail, but those failures can sometimes teach more than successes, and can lead to new ways of thinking and learning. This cannot be done by the teacher alone; creativity and imagination have to be incorporated into the culture of the school to be as effective as it can.

In her article, Kuszewski also says,
“While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution…it seems that by directly instructing children—giving them the answers to problems, then testing them on memory—we are inhibiting creative problem solving, to quite a significant degree.”