This is an excellent time to be talking and thinking about creativity. For many years it seemed as if creativity had been relegated to the back seat in education. But now it is clearly making a comeback, as seen in several recent policy documents.
* Birth to Three Matters, the guidance for supporting children in the first three years of life (DfES, 2002), stresses the importance of promoting children's creativity from their earliest years.
* Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA, 2000) describes creativity as a cross-curricular theme as well as an area of learning in its own right. 'Creativity is fundamental to successful learning. Being creative enables children to make connections between one area of learning and another and to extend their understanding.'
* The Primary Strategy, Excellence and Enjoyment (DfES, 2003), says 'promoting creativity is a powerful way of engaging pupils with their learning'.
* The QCA project 'Creativity. Find it, promote it' (2003) is very clear about the importance of creativity. 'Learning to think and behave creatively can transform pupils' lives... it increases their motivation, self-esteem and levels of achievement. Beyond school, it enriches their lives and prepares them for the world of work.'
As practitioners working with young children we have a key role in supporting and extending children's creativity. We have the power to help or hinder.
Foundation Stage
In Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, creative development includes:
* Art - drawing, painting, printing, construction, sculpting, textiles, photography.
* Music - pitch (high/low), dynamics (loud/quiet), tempo (fast/slow), rhythm.
* Dance - actions, gestures, stillness, pattern, production, perform and composition.
* Role play and imaginative play - imitative play, fantasy play, superhero play.
These elements are sometimes described as the visual and performing arts.
Learning through the arts is beneficial in its own right and contributes to children's development in all areas of learning (see box).
Frequently, creativity and the arts are seen as the same thing. But this is not the case. Involvement in the visual and performing arts does not necessarily mean involvement in creativity. Many art experiences offered to young children are dull, repetitive and far from creative, a way of occupying children and covering the walls rather than a way of promoting creativity.
Creativity is part of every area of the curriculum, and all areas of learning have the potential to be creative experiences. The creative process, which includes curiosity, exploration, play and creativity, is as applicable to the curriculum areas of Personal, Social and Emotional Development, Communication, Language and Literacy, Mathematical Development, Knowledge and Understanding of the World and Physical Development as it is to art, music, dance and imaginative play.
Lifelong creativity
Creativity is important throughout life, not just in the early years.
Recent thinking distinguishes between 'big c ' and 'little c' creativity.
'Big c' creativity involves invention and a break with past understanding - for example, when Einstein developed the theory of relativity. 'Little c'
creativity enables individuals to find routes and paths to travel (Craft, 2001). It is a process of conscious invention and describes the resourcefulness of ordinary people rather than extraordinary contributors.
Such creativity involves seeing things in fresh ways and learning from past experiences. It involves:
* thinking along unorthodox lines
* breaking barriers
* using non-traditional approaches to problems.
Creativity enables us to explore the full range of human potential and improves our capacity for thought and action. It enables us to respond to a rapidly changing world by re-appraising our values and ways of working. The creative process helps us to deal with the unexpected by extending our current knowledge to new situations and using information in new ways. It encourages us to take risks, think flexibly, be innovative, play with ideas and respond imaginatively.
Young children's creativity
There has been a lot of discussion about the nature of creativity in young children. Children's creativity is creativity with a 'little c'.
Children are being creative when they:
* use materials in new ways
* combine previously unconnected materials
* make discoveries that are new to them
* create something new and original for them.
Creativity means connecting the previously unconnected in ways that are new and meaningful to the individual doing the connecting (Duffy, 1998).
The creative process enables children to:
* explore, comprehend and develop their understanding of the world around them
* communicate their feelings in non-verbal and pre-verbal ways and to express their thoughts
* think about and create new meanings
* solve problems, gain mastery and gain self-esteem
* experience beauty
* create a view of the world that is uniquely their own.
To develop this, it is important that the experiences offered to young children genuinely engage their creativity - we need to think about the difference between representation and reproduction.
Children need to make representations of their experiences, feelings and ideas if they are to preserve them and share them with others. When we represent, we make an object or symbol stand for something else. For example, we may use imagination to pretend that the toy doll is a real baby, or draw a picture that symbolises our experience of going to the zoo.
Spoken language is also a form of symbolic representation, with words standing for something in the real world.
There is a big difference between representing our experiences in ways that demonstrate our individual response to the world around us, and reproduction. McKellar (1957) explains that reproduction is about reproducing someone else's representation. It is about copying and using a single source of information. The result is predictable.
Exploring the work of others can be part of the creative process. It can be part of investigating an idea or concept. But if the process stops there.
It does not give children the opportunity to express their own creativity.
Representation, on the other hand, is about using information from various resources to create one's own unique image.
A few years ago I saw children's copies of Van Gogh's sunflowers on many walls in early years settings. Next copies of Monet's water lilies appeared, and now Matisse and Picasso have replaced these. These painting are wonderful images by highly creative artists. Young children should indeed be shown these images, but they should be used to inspire rather than simply to copy.
