Ken Robinson - What is creativity?

I was asked to say a few words to introduce this particular session on the importance of creative education and that's been a bit of a thing of mine for quite a long time I didn't start out with a particular or separate interest in creative education my interest initially when I got into education was more focused on the arts and I say that because a lot of people conflate creativity with the arts now there are some very important education and I'm a lifelong advocate of their importance and have done all I've been able to do to promote them and to try and secure better provision I have to say it's always in the face of a prevailing headwind because of many misconceptions about the arts but creativity is not a synonym for the arts creativity ranges much more broadly across the whole of the curriculum which is what I want to say a few words about but incidentally getting creativity higher up the agenda in education also confronts various obstacles you know I was asked well it's now almost 20 years ago by the then British government to put together a national strategy for creative education and I did that by convening a group of tremendous people who had a lot of expertise in different forms of creative work or I should say in different disciplines the backgrounds that very briefly was that in the UK at the time we had a national literacy strategy and a national strategy for numeracy and Tony Blair who was then the Prime Minister kept making speeches about that shortly after was elected about the importance of creativity in schools as well well quite a few Murs at the time we agreed that creativity should be very much higher at the agenda for education but we couldn't see that the policies the government was proposing to put in place working to do anything to encourage it while we believed that they were acting in good faith and so a group of us approached the then administration and said if you're serious Macke creativity be serious about it that we have a literacy strategy we have a numeracy strategy let's have a creativity strategy well you know how these things run if you put your head above the parapet and shout loud enough eventually somebody texture to one science as okay yeah you do it well I was invited to do it and I did do it with a whole group of people all I'll mention a little bit more about that in a minute and we did develop a national strategy if you're interested in taking a look at it it's called all our futures creativity culture and education and there's a link at the end of this video which will take you to a version of it one of the obstacles in putting this together was the various misconceptions about creativity about what it is and why it matters I remember the then Secretary of State for Education who commissioned the report saying to me before the Commission got underway that of course one of the problems with creativity's you can't define it and I wasn't being specious when I said you know I think the problem is you can't and and I meant that seriously because if you don't have a definite definition of creativity you're let into all kinds of myths and misconceptions about it there are three related terms which I think it's important to both distinguish and connect when we start to think about creativity in education the three terms are imagination creativity and innovation you know that they can be used interchangeably but I think it's wrong to do that because they do point to different core ideas imagination for me is where this all begins the imagination is the wellspring of creativity so if we're interest to cultivate creative who have to begin by stimulating and created in additions for stimulating our natural powers of imagination imagination as I Seve it and I'm not alone in considering in this way but at least let me let me put a stake in the ground here the imagination is the ability to bring into mind things about present to our senses with imagination you can visit the past in your mind's eye and interestingly of course the past isn't a settled domain it's my history is such a fascinating discipline the past is open constantly to interpretation and reinterpretation as we apply different filters to it but with imagination you can cast your mind back words into the past you can cast it forward into the future you can anticipate you can hypothesize you can speculate you can't always predict very comfortably particularly not in the world of human affairs not certainly not as comfortably as you can in the natural sciences but you can anticipate and speculate with imagination you can look into other people's points of view can try and see the world as they you do imagination for human beings daily rate is one of the seats of empathy and compassion it's the capacity to to see the world as others might see it to feel as they might feel creativity is a step on creativity is putting your imagination to work it's applied imagination you see to be creative you have to do something to be to dwell in your imagination you don't you can be imaginative all day long and never do anything you'll be lying in bed have a wonderfully imaginative time but never it may never result in anything in the external world creativity has outcomes in the public arena and the point about creativity is that it is an applied process and we know quite a bit about how it works and the conditions under which it flourishes innovation then is putting good ideas into practice so these three times imagination creativity and innovation are are central to to a strategy for creative education now the rest myths about creativity one of them is that only special people aren't creative that's simply not true if you're a human being that the power come with the kit we have immense natural capacities very much patience human beings and enormous Lea varied and sophisticated potential for creativity I say potential because creativity is not just a set of capacities it depends on a very wide-ranging set of practical abilities that we don't all cultivate them we don't all develop them in the way that we might so one misconception is about special people it isn't I mean obviously some people have a particularly creative gifts in in different domains but we all have creative capacity a second misconception is the creative it is about special things you know if you ask people have their creative very many people will say they're not and I think it's because what they think you ask them is whether they're artistic well as I say we can be tremendously creative in the arts but you can be creative to anything you can be creative in mathematics in in technology you can be creative in running or planning a business you can be creative in cuisine you could be creative in the way you teach you can be creative in anything whatever that engages human intelligence and imagination it's not a set of capacities that's limited to one activity or another so when we come to think about creative in schools it's for everybody and it's everything it's the whole curriculum and everybody in the school it's not just for a few people that we identify with particular talents there's a third misconception about creativity which is it's all about freedom I was reading an article two days ago in the Economist and you know they raised this old chestnut that some people who advocate for creativity seem to think it's it's something that is antipathetic to discipline or learning propositional information you know facts and another sorts of propositions it's of course it's not you can't be creative for example on a musical instrument if you can't play it now they're issues of pedagogy here but I don't play the piano and I can't be greater on the piano I mean I have some kind of emotional release by banging on the keys but that's not to be compared with the sort of creative work that could be produced by people with a sophisticated set of skills and understanding about how the instrument works and how music works it's not possible to be in the end creative in every way that we might want to remote in mathematics if you're in numerous so creativity is not the opposite it's not antipathetic to skills or understanding of particular disciplines in fact it depends upon them and people can become more creative as they become more adept in the skills and media on which creative work depends and there's a fourth myth which is that creativity can't be told well it can I mean there's a longer way of putting this but as time is short it can it depends how we think of teaching if we think of teaching only in terms of the direct instruction or conveying propositional knowledge well you don't teach creativity in that direct way but there is very long experience in many disciplines of the the truth of the ability to cultivate the conditions under which people can become more creative to help them develop the skills the attitudes the frames of mind upon which creative work flourishes so let me define I said that earlier that the secretary thought it was hard to define creativity it's not easy but let me tell you how I define it and this is a definition it came in part through the work of the Commission we had in the UK creativity as we define it is the process of having original ideas that have value the process of having original ideas that have value these three things are important it's a process it's not an event much more often creative work evolves in the making of it it's a conversation between the material and the idea and often the idea that we end up with or the piece of work we end up with during the course of creative process is not the one we had in mind when we started out it's an evolutionary process and it often depends on false starts on going down cul de sacs on having to back up on on failures of various sorts on unfulfilled ideas that ready didn't take you whether you thought they might go so it's a process it's about original thinking now it's important to say this too that it doesn't have to be original to the entire world but it has to be original at least to you it has to put your mind into a different shape as a consequence you know it would be a reasonable wouldn't it to look at the drawings of a five year old child and say well we've all seen this type of thing before you know well point to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and say oh look check this out you know come back when you've got something worth looking at it has to at least be original as the person doing it it may be original to the community in which they work and of course it may also be original to the whole of humanity but it has to have an element of rooting under the about it and the third element is value and what this means is that the creative work has to have some some purpose which is worthwhile now immediate of course people say well when you say value whose values do you have in mind well that's the whole point the first thing is to say that the creative process isn't just coming up with new ideas it's also applying critical judgments to the ideas you're developing if you're writing a book or writing a poem or composing a theorem or commit with a recipe whatever you're doing when you're trying to come up with some expression original there's a constant process of interrogation which wraps itself around is saying is this worthwhile this is working you see it all the time in writers drafts you know words across fact it wasn't quite right you sit in the early sketch the paintings you see it in work in science it's is this right does it feel right is it is it moving in the right direction so creative work isn't just about coming up with fresh ideas it's also judging whether or any good and of course a lot of work in the past has been judged to be worthless simply because I say simply but because the wrong criteria have been applied to them you know in 1939 the World's Fair was held in Flushing Meadow in New York and the exhibits included the first practical demonstration of a commercial system of television one of the papers at the time commented wryly on this that it was a very interesting innovation but that it simply wouldn't catch on it said the television will never replace the radio in America and they said it's perfectly clear why not because when you're listening to the radio you can get on and other things whereas to experience television you have to sit immobilized in a chair staring at a screen you know which became the very attraction of the entire system the setting of mobile in the chair park well you know they said the average American family simply doesn't have time for this well it turns out they did the average American family these days spends upwards of 20 hours a week sitting in front of this useless gadget the point is that this innovation was being judged within contemporary cultural values and television like many great technological innovations didn't simply insert itself silently into the culture it transformed the culture as a whole innovation has to be judged by appropriate values and judging what those values are as part of the process of creative education well why does all this matter creative education is important for personal reasons creativity is what sets us apart from the rest of life on Earth very little does but we don't live as other creatures do we mistake I think our relationship with with the natural world and we should reconnect it more thoroughly than we have done but human beings never live just as other creatures do we create virtual worlds we live in the world of theories we live in the worlds of ideas of multiple languages we live in systems of belief we live in great cities we live in a world that's been shaped by technology we live in other words within cold we create the world that we live in and when we create them together we create cultural ways of seeing creativity is at the very heart and pulse of humanity and if were concerned with an education system or developing an education system that cultivates the essential characteristics of humanity then we have to take creativity to the heart of Education it's vitally important for economic reasons this is one of the reasons why there's been this great movement for reform across the world particularly sadly through standardization and testing but innovation is at the heart of our economies and economies won't succeed unless we look at the multiple forms that innovation takes and create the capacities for innovation that come from the developed abilities in creative work and creative it is the at the very center of our cultural lives that lies of our communities it's represented not just in the arts but certainly in the arts it's represented in the humanities in our architecture in our ways of being together in our civic institutions and many of these need to be reformed and rethought now so creativity properly conceived is at the very heart of what it is to be an educated person at the very heart of what it is to be a civilized community and if those things matter to us then they should be at the heart of how we run our education systems well how's it done let me headline a few things it's about the curriculum it's about seeing creativity at the center of all disciplines and the board has really disciplines into connecting with each other it should be at the heart of art teaching there's a difference between teaching with creativity and teaching for creativity by teaching with creativity I mean encouraging teachers themselves to use their creative powers and abilities to make education more engaging to make lessons more interesting to provoke an inspired children's curiosity but they're also things to be learnt about how you encourage other people to be creative and that's what teaching for creativity is and this amount of professional development we need assessment systems which recognize that creative work doesn't have a single or predictable set of outcomes very often one of the people on the committee I mentioned earlier the all our futures committee was Professor Sir recruit oh who won the nobel prize for chemistry I asked Sir Harry how many of his experiments failed and he said well most of them like most scientists most of our experiments fail II said certainly not 2% of them but he said you know failure isn't really the right word here if you're on the track of something original if you're trying to come up with fresh ideas then you're bound along the way to discover many things that don't work before we discover what does work and that's true in every creative process it's iterative there are many false starts many many dead ends many cul-de-sacs many failed attempts and if we have an education system is predicated on assessment systems that only tolerate getting the right answer the first time or giving you a choice of four you already have built in a contradiction in the system itself to the approach to the creative powers that we that we want to celebrate and cultivate and it's about partnership schools shouldn't live in an oasis they should be connected with all the cultural resources available within the district and within a community more largely creativity is very often a collaborative process as much as it is an individual process so these areas of curriculum teaching assessment and school culture are all relevant to the proper promotion of creativity across our education systems I am convinced that we have all the resources we need in our schools among our teachers and in our communities to transform education through a more creative approach to teaching and learning we need to be creative in how we teach we need to be creative in how we run our systems and all of these things should be an interest of helping children cells to become more creative I'm also reminded you know of a short poem that was attributed to the writer Anais Nin and it's very short and it's it's called risk and she says of her own creative journey she became a right a right or a little later in her life and reflected on the frustration she felt when she hadn't found this creative outlet that became so transformative for it she said that came a time when the risk of remaining tight in a bud was greater than the risk it took to blossom I think this is very important because there is tremendous talent locked up in our schools in our teachers in our students in the community and in the administration of our systems and it's often the case that it takes more effort to contain all this talent than it would to release it and if we were truly said we'd see a harvest of achievement that we can't fully anticipate but we can absolutely depend upon thank you very much I look forward to talking to you a little later on

Channel: ARC

Views: 72,744

Keywords: creativity, innovation, imagination, arc, atlantic rim collaboratory, learnlab, imtec, edtech, learn, lab, growth, art, deep learning, performance, well being, equity, norway, ireland, us, canada, ontario, finland, aruba, vermont, iceland, scotland, california, sweden, sir ken robinson

Id: X1c3M6upOXA

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2017