Teaching Creativity In Education

Chapter 32

Teaching Creativity

The clash of neuroscience with the intense drive for testing learning outcomes has created an environment where creativity is the sacrifice made by the so-called successful educational systems. This essay examines how the neurological environment allows creativity to emerge.

The concept of creativity is a vexed one for science and philosophy and not surprisingly for teachers. There is no doubt creativity is a highly desired trait that all healthy societies value. It must be acknowledged that creativity is a threat to conservative values. But the case could be made that the success of our species is down to the advances that have come from great moments of creativity. As we have pushed up against the frontiers

There is general agreement that if we are to continue to develop on a sustainable and inhabitable planet we need newly created solutions to the emerging problems. Sir Ken contends that education must address the issue of teaching our students to be creative. It makes perfectly good sense to ‘teach’ creativity.

But how do you ‘teach’ creativity? By definition “Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created. How do you teach someone else to think about something that you don’t know and at the time neither do your students!

Not surprisingly there is a mountain of literature describing various theories about what are the characteristics of creativity, what defines it and the like but how can you articulate something that doesn’t exist. Any creative event only happens once, at that time it is unique and new. How do you teach that?

So here is where I express my dilemma; if I concede that all our prior ‘learning’ has been acquired either through our genetic inheritance or lessons from our physical, social or intellectual environment and is stored as memories, how do we produce something that is unique and

Any model of human computation must account for the emotional content of the situation and the memories, the beliefs the individual brings to that situation.

So, in the classroom the student gets information in, a stimulus from the environment. The stimulus is subjected to interrogation from the brain for recognition and predicted events. Through previous experiences stored as memories, implicit or unconscious (feelings) or explicit or cognitive (beliefs) we have an expectation of what will happen and act accordingly. This process takes place unconsciously.

This is the first of the conditions that build to the hypothesis presented in this paper. I argue that if we were asked whether we thought about what we were about to do we would claim we did. This implies our decision is determined by our conscious attention to our actions. This is the position of ‘free will’.

This is not the place for an argument about whether or not we have free will or if everything is determined, that is well beyond this paper. However, I will argue that at any given instant we will act, speak or move and we will do so because a decision has already been made. It is determined by our