RISK-TAKING, SAFE ENVIRONMENTS and ...

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

RISK-TAKING, SAFE ENVIRONMENTS and NURTURING CREATIVITY Dr Kim Wilson Lecturer in History Education, Macquarie University Dr Janet Dutton Lecturer in English Curriculum, Macquarie University

When teachers experiment with their own artmaking they, ‘Research, test, reflect, test, reflect and refine’ ‘Start with an element of making I already know, then try to wreck it.’ ‘I take risks, experiment with different mediums, styles and textures. I experiment with different brush strokes, colour palettes.’ ‘Try everything and often discover accidents and mistakes are the stuff of innovation.’ ‘Try something ambitious with knowledge I will fail.’ (Conference participant responses to keynote address, ‘Risk-taking, Safe Environments and Nurturing Creativity’, Art Gallery of NSW, Tuesday 27 March 2018)

Critical to experimentation is a context that nurtures feelings of security and safety. Teachers identified the following environmental features as enablers of experimentation. ‘Designated space in studio.’ ‘Fresh air and nature.’ ‘Light, quiet, encouraging, safe, “haven like”. Free from pressure or obligation.’ ‘Lots of imagery and materials. Time. Music.’ Messy, ground level, easy access to materials. Lots of time and low stress.’ (Conference participant responses to keynote address, ‘Risk-taking, Safe Environments and Nurturing Creativity’, Art Gallery of NSW, Tuesday 27 March 2018)

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

Teachers are passionate about their subject, they know ‘how to’ experiment themselves and, they’re cognisant of the benefits experimentation has for the creative process and product. The purpose of this article is to outline the key drivers of creativity development in the twenty-first century, discuss the barriers to risk-taking and to suggest a range of strategies that may help teachers develop the experimental disposition of their students with the ultimate goal of nurturing creativity in their classrooms.

What is Creativity?

(Conference participant responses to keynote address, ‘Risk-taking, Safe Environments and Nurturing Creativity’, Art Gallery of NSW, Tuesday 27 March 2018)

If you search through various English dictionaries (Collins, Oxford, Cambridge) you will find similar conceptual frames used to define the term creativity: invocation of imagination, development of new ideas, formation of new patterns (graphic or conceptual), ability to invent, and, production of a unique product or idea. In the ACARA General Capabilities, creative endeavour is defined as thinking that involves, students in learning to generate and apply new ideas in specific contexts, seeing existing situations in a new way, identifying alternative explanations, and seeing or making new links that generate a positive outcome. (2013)

Sir Ken Robinson, British author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts, adds to the concept of creativity the quality of usefulness.

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Sir Ken Robinson

Whilst we agree with Robinson’s inclusion of value to define a creative product (graphic or conceptual), the notion of usefulness is not something we promote in our strategies to encourage creative development in your classroom (see section below ‘Nurturing Creativity’).

Why nurture Creativity? The human being is usually defined as “homo faber,” man as toolmaker, or “homo sapiens,” man as knower. But it has been suggested by Dissanayake that we might define the human being as “homo aestheticus,” man as creator (Dissanayake, 1995, p. xiii). One of the defining characteristics of human beings is that we create. We construct culture and cultural artifacts. We are curious and have a drive to understand. We have a need to make sense of the world and our experience, and we shape our understanding into culturally significant forms. And some of these forms are characterized by an attention to form and an attempt to “make special” (Dissanayake, 1995, p. 42). (Bailin 2015, 2)

Nurturing creativity has become a key focus of twenty-first century educational and employment discourses. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (2008) commits the Australian government to ‘working in collaboration with all school sectors to support all young Australians to become … confident and creative individuals’ (8). The document describes successful learners as those who ‘are creative … and are able to solve problems’ (8). And confident learners as those who ‘are enterprising, show initiative and use their creative abilities’ (9).

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

Five years later and drawing on the Melbourne Declaration, the national Australian Curriculum enacts the call for generating creative learners by identifying ‘Critical and creative thinking’ as one of seven general capabilities (ACARA, 2013). In this document, the need for students to think creatively is a response ‘to the challenges of the twenty-first century’ – a context in which young people need ‘to be creative, innovative, enterprising and adaptable, with the motivation, confidence and skills to use critical and creative thinking purposefully’ (78). In response to, or concurrent with curriculum demands, the AITSL Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (2011) requires teachers at all levels to demonstrate the use of teaching strategies to develop student’s ‘knowledge, skills, problem solving and critical and creative thinking,’ (Standard 3.3).

Universities around the nation are also concerned with promoting creative qualities in their students and their staff. Macquarie University in their Learning and Teaching Strategic Framework: 2015-2020, sets out to ‘provide connected, creative and innovative learning experiences’ (4) for students. The University of Melbourne offers students ‘a range of firstclass professional graduate courses’ that will provide ‘the creative, problem-solving and communication skills necessary for career success’ (12). And in the Strategic Plan 20092018, The University of Technology Sydney wants to attract and retain ‘high quality people’ who are creative and engaged in research and professional communities (1).

The focus on developing creative thinkers is not surprising when we look to the burgeoning demands of twenty-first century employers. The World Economic Forum reports that by 2020 creativity will be one of the top three skills employers will look for in potential job applicants (2016). In this report, creativity is second to cognitive flexibility and ahead of logical reasoning and problem sensitivity. Andreas Schleicher, OECD Education Directorate noted in his 2010 case for 21st-century learning that ‘educational success is no longer about reproducing content knowledge, but about extrapolating from what we know and applying that knowledge to novel situations’. And in a LinedIn survey of 291 hiring managers in the U.S., Guy Berger reported that creativity is seventh in the list of the top ten most in-demand soft skills (2016).

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

The twenty-first century has seen a distinct shift away from the hard-skills associated with a knowledge economy towards the soft-skills needed for a creative economy. Richard Florida writes that ‘in the past few decades, human creativity has replaced natural resources and physical capital as the predominant driver of economic growth’ (Ref). There is a persistent and pervasive educational and social demand to develop twenty-first century students who are creative thinkers. However, the process of creative development is often uncomfortable and destabilising for our students. Engaging in creative endeavours is often perceived by students and teachers alike as risky business.

Barriers to Risk-taking In his 2006 TED Talk, ‘Do schools kill creativity?’, Sir Ken Robinson contends that young children (pre-schoolers) will take a chance if they don’t know what to do or say, that is ‘they’re not frightened of being wrong’. Whilst being wrong is not the same thing as being creative, as Robinson notes in the same Talk, ‘if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original’. The problem for teachers in high schools is that by the time kids are teenagers (and even before that) they have lost the capacity to take a chance because they have become ‘frightened of being wrong’. In school and many adult environments, mistakes are ‘stigmatised’ (Robinson). The individual who errs is criticised, disgraced, sometimes labelled with negative descriptions and in more extreme cases, isolated.

Student reluctance to take risks is often driven by fear of social stigma. In the subsequent section on ‘Nurturing Creativity’ we will suggest a range of approaches to help you develop risk-taking, or what we prefer to call the experimental disposition of your students. But before we do this, another piece of the puzzle must be put in place. We need to acknowledge teacher reluctance to encourage creativity in their students. And we believe the key reasons for this disinclination can be traced to High stakes testing and the subsequent narrowing of the curriculum.

A survey of the literature sheds light on how high stakes external testing can challenge the ways schools situate learning. Some of these ways are potentially negative and attest to the ongoing impact of tests such as NAPLAN on teachers’ pedagogy. Darling-Hammond (2011)

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

has reported extensively on how low-quality testing regimes and test preparation in the USA have led to a narrow curriculum which is increasingly disconnected from the higher-order skills required for success in today’s world. There is strong evidence that Australian teachers, often in response to explicit or implied ‘advice’, likewise change their pedagogy to strategically prepare students for NAPLAN or HSC examinations. Teachers are often highly critical of the English NAPLAN test for example, as it assesses limited components of literacy, emphasises simple answers and includes material not relevant to the students’ lives (Cormack & Comber, 2013). Despite this, researchers report that pedagogy aimed at NAPLAN success infiltrates everyday practice (Brass, 2015; Comber, 2012) influences resource allocation, creates ‘data-based’ teaching and assessment, and involves significant emotional labour on the part of teachers (Brass, 2015; Comber, 2012; Cormack & Comber, 2013; Parr, Bulfin & Rutherford, 2013). A further consequence can be a ‘narrowing of the curriculum’ (Berliner, 2011).

Berliner (2011) demonstrates, through evidence-based practice, that schools narrow the curriculum by increasing the lesson time of high stakes test content and skills. Data collected from surveys completed by a representative sample of almost 500 school districts in the US showed that ‘eighty percent of the school districts increased time in English/ language arts by at least 75 minutes a week … [and] sixty-three per cent of the districts reported they increased mathematics time by at least 75 minutes a week’ (p. 289). This time has to come from somewhere. In the same survey, schools reported that up to 35% of time previously devoted to subjects such as Social Studies, Physical education, Art and Music had been redirected to test preparation (p. 290). Even recess was not sacrosanct with some schools removing recess from the daily routine and scheduling just one break of 20 minutes for lunch (Berliner 2011, p. 291).

Whilst education in Australia and NSW more specifically has not affected a reduction in recess or lunch breaks, there is a narrowing of the curriculum by way of a reluctance to spend time on concept and skill development in favour of delivering content in preparation for external examinations. This leads to increased teacher-centered pedagogy and reduced opportunities for students to question or explore new ideas.

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

Creating Safe Learning Environments In a paper discussing how to teach writing ‘within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities’ (71) Ryan and Barton (2013) draw on Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) theory of spatiality to suggest teachers create a ‘Thirdspace’ ‘to attend to what is required for quality writing’ (73). Lefebvre (1991) calls the first space the ‘perceived’ space. In a school, this space refers to daily routines and the design, delivery and practice of syllabus content requirements. The second space is the ‘conceived’ space, this is the ‘ideal’ – according to those in power – of how a school or classroom should operate. AITSL Professional Standards for teachers, NAPLAN testing, NESA HSC examination requirements, government policy and even media reports create this conceived space. The ‘lived’ or what Soja (1996) coins the ‘thirdspace’ is the ‘space to resist, subvert and re-imagine everyday realities’ (Ryan and Barton (2013) p. 73). Most teachers across their professional and personal life engage in all three spaces; however, many classrooms only interact in the first two spaces. As research coming out of the US has shown (see references to Berliner 2011 above), in a context of high stakes testing (of which the NSW HSC is an example), teachers attend to the perceived space and deliver syllabus content pertinent to an external examination and respond to the conceived space by meeting the demands of Professional teaching Standards, HSC examination requirements, reporting of HSC results in the media, and pressure at school level for more Band 6 results. The attention required by the perceived and conceived (first and second) spaces often leaves no room for the thirdspace. But it is in the thirdspace that valuable critical and creative thinking – so important to twenty-first century schooling and employment – can take place and flourish. We need to actively and deliberately nurture students experimental disposition, to prepare them for life and employment in the twenty-first century.

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

Nurturing Creativity Nurturing creativity by encouraging experimentation in safe learning environments is essential in the 21st century classroom. Here are some of our key suggestions for developing an experimental disposition in your students and thus nurture creativity in your classroom.

1. Create your own ‘thirdspace’ and name it. We were thinking of ‘The Bubble’ as the title of our thirdspace. Students could enter the thirdspace, here referred to as The Bubble, at any appropriate time of the lesson. This space could be a demarcated area of the classroom or a metaphorical space where students explore, experiment and problem solve. We also recommend allocating a set period of time for The Bubble each week. Furthermore, we recommend some guidelines for your Bubble, these guidelines will help augment some of the ensuing key suggestions (specifically, numbers 2, 3, 6 and 7 below). Proposed guidelines could include, o When you enter The Bubble expect to, 

experiment with forms and play with ideas



make small and seemingly innocuous gains in knowledge, understanding and conceptual development



collaborate with others



finish with more questions than you started, and/ or,



make progress with nothing tangible to show!

2. Provide problems, not answers in The Bubble. ‘Creative or ‘open learning’ – where the outcome is unknown – requires an educational climate where students are able to use the senses, imagine, think and reason without having the ‘answers’ already proscribed (Miller, Looney, and Siemens 2011 in Lambert et al 2016, p. 17). 3. Build an expectation of the ‘ordinary’ in The Bubble. Creative endeavour involves a lot of plodding, every idea and experiment will not be brilliant, insightful or evocative. But plodding along builds application to the experimental disposition that over time, builds bodies of creative works.

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

4. Dispel the myth that creativity is for the elite few. Creative responses to problems can be evoked in all aspects of daily life. Whilst everyone does not have the capacity to generate a body of work like Picasso; everyone has the capacity to experiment and create an original to them response to problems and questions. 5. Model Creativity yourself. Teacher behaviour influences student engagement with classroom activities and learning. Whenever the opportunity presents, demonstrate how you experimented and resolved a pertinent or puzzling question or problem. 6. Nurture Resilience. Let your students make mistakes as they experiment and then celebrate those mistakes as part of the journey of creative endeavour. 7. Encourage Collaboration. Most modern innovations are not the result of the isolated genius discovering a unique solution. As Sawyer (2006) notes, ‘most innovative companies are the ones that have successfully tapped in to team collaboration’ He uses the company IDEO to explain the point. IDEO is an award-winning design firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, the Palm handheld, the stand-up toothpaste tube, and hundreds of other products … IDEO uses rapid prototyping to tap into the innovation process, blending innovation and execution throughout the project cycle, and creating multiple teams to work on the same project independently so that emergent insights can cross-fertilize and blend together. They … expect frequent failure. Employees are not assigned to teams; each team forms spontaneously and then splits up when its task is done (42).

Set your students collaborative problem-solving activities for The Bubble, you could set one problem per term and encourage fluid, self-selected groups over the course of the term. The product at the end will have less importance than the process that took place over the course of the term. This type of activity prepares well the twenty-first century student for life beyond school.

Conclusion: Nurturing Creativity, does it really matter? Of course, our answer is yes but what is the evidence for our claim? Apart from the demands of curriculum documents, strategic plans and potential employers, there is a growing body of

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

evidence emerging out of the US demonstrating that a reduction of time spent in creative endeavours affects students results negatively in the long-term.

Berliner (2011) provides the following example, Students who have experienced a narrow curriculum focus in the early grades are more likely to perform poorly on standardized reading and mathematics tests later because in the upper grades such assessments place more emphasis on comprehension and reasoning and less emphasis on simple decoding and algorithms. For example, Jerald (2006) reports that differences in reading scores among third graders were mainly due to how efficiently and fluently they decoded words, while variations in reading scores among tenth graders were mainly due to their vocabularies and comprehension skills. Thus, a test preparation strategy meant to improve reading scores in the early grades may actually depress reading scores in the long run. (p. 299)

A creative curriculum requires dedicated time, space and practice of conceptual skills. These skills have to be embedded in specific subject matter but practiced across multiple subject domains to encourage generalisation of the skill whenever possible. Commitment to a creative curriculum is a commitment to preparing our students for their twenty-first century life and employment.

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

REFERENCES

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2013) General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum. Retrieved from https://k10outline.scsa.wa.edu.au/home/teaching/general-capabilities-over/generalcapabilities-overview/Australian-Curriculum-General-Capabilities.pdf

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (2011). Retrieved from https://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/defaultsource/general/australian-professional-standands-for-teachers20171006.pdf?sfvrsn=399ae83c_12

Bailin, S. (2015). Developing creativity through critical inquiry. Teachers College Record, 117(10) 1-20.

Berger, Guy. Data Reveals the Most In-demand Soft Skills among Candidates. August 30, 2016. Retrieved from, https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/trends-andresearch/2016/most-indemand-soft-skills

Berliner, D. (2011). Rational responses to high stakes testing: The case of curriculum narrowing and the harm that follows. Cambridge Journal of Education, 41(3), 287-302.

Florida, Richard. (2006). Regions and Universities Together Can Foster a Creative Economy. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(4), B6-B8.

Lambert, K., Wright, P., Currie, J., & Pascoe, R. (2016). Performativity and creativity in senior secondary drama classrooms. NJ, 40(1), 15-26.

Ministerial Council of Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. (2008). Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. Retrieved from http://www.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/National_Declaration_on_the_Educational_ Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf

OECD. (2018). The Future of Education and Skills, Education 2030 (position paper). Retrieved from, http://www.oecd.org/education/2030/oecd-education-2030-position-paper.pdf

AGNSW Keynote Address, 27 March 2018

Robinson, Ken. (2006). Do schools kill creativity? TED2006. Retrieved from, https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity

Robinson, Ken. ‘To encourage creativity, Mr Gove, you must first understand what it is’, The Guardian, Sat 18 May, 2013. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/17/to-encourage-creativity-mr-goveunderstand.

Sawyer, R. Keith. (2006). Educating for Innovation. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 1(1), 4148.

Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places / Edward W. Soja. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.