Teacher (Laétitia) : Hi everyone, I’m Laétitia Mennesson, welcome back to Teachers Talks. Today, I am with Mathilde Choplain, a developmental psychologist and researcher, who worked on the Pedagogy of Creativity as it is going to be our topic for today. Indeed, we are going to talk about creativity: what it is, how it develops and how it is highlighted at school. Maybe we can start by giving a definition to it : is psychology and research what is creativity ?
Psychologist (Mathilde) : Creativity is the ability to produce or develop original works, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness. Analyses have failed to ascertain why one individual is more creative than another, but creativity does appear to be a very durable trait.
Teacher : So basically it is kind of the ability to think out of the box or be original. You said it is a durable trait. But is it something we are born with ? Can’t we develop it ? Does it evolve throughout life ? Can you explain to us how it works ?
Psychologist : Of course ! Creativity develops throughout life but we notice three periods during childhood in which it declines. The first one is at 5, the second at 9 and the last one at thirteen years old. One of the reasons is that children reach school and it demands a lot of new cognitive capacities. Children’s cognitive abilities are mobilised in learning and are no longer available for creative tasks or thinking.
Teacher : Alright. So as I understand, then school is maybe not good for children’s development of creativity? Because they do have some creative discipline taught at school with creative art for instance, isn’t that a way to help increase their capacities in creativity ?
Psychologist : No we can’t say that because it’s not that school is bad for creativity but it demands many new capacities, new social expectations and it can also come with a new environment. So because of that, processes involved in creativity are inhibited in aid of academic success. Moreover, although school may be the cause of these declines, it plays an important role for creativity development. Indeed, school’s aim is to enable children to adapt to the world by developing their adaptation and creativity capacities.
Teacher : Alright ! Before getting deep into the topic of creativity in school, can we talk about the processes involved in creativity ?
Psychologist : Yes, so there are many processes that children use with creativity. As I said before, creativity is the ability to produce new work so it requires problem resolving, observation capacities and divergent thinking. These capacities are linked with some executive functions which are flexibility, inhibition and updating in working memory. We develop them from the beginning of our childhood development to 25 years old on average, but we observe a particular improvement during the first three years of life. These three executive functions develop with what children learn and acquire at school. So school is important to develop cognitive capacities and executive functions which are really helpful to create new things.
Teacher : Alright! So now that we know a bit more about creativity, how it develops and what it involves, we can, maybe, talk about creativity in schools ? And How is it use ? Nowadays, in terms of discipline taught, in the French School curriculum : in elementary school children have some classes of art and music, in secondary school they also have arts and musical education. In high school, there are some optional teaching classes such as “creation et arts activities” or the option “arts”.
First, we can say that the proportion of time dedicated to those activities are decreasing with the advancement in the children’s school curriculum. And then that the approach evolved with the years as you said with the evolution of the academic demands and it gets less and less creative.
Psychologist : That’s so true! It is really time to give a real place to artistics learning. I mean, the Ministry of Education means well with their “charte pour l’éducation artistique et culturelle”, indeed, it is important that every child gets the opportunity to educate themselves on arts and culture and making it part of school curriculum is a way to provide equity at school. However, we cannot say that it provides adapted space for children’s creativity.
Teacher : Yes, absolutely! Children are not expected to be creative in these courses. They are taught a subject about art and they have to learn it or reproduce it: it’s not really about creativity at the end of the day. If you take Art History in Elementary School for instance, it’s an art subject but students are not being very creative in it.
Psychologist : Yes, yes! That’s definitely a drift in reformes and pedagogy. That’s why I promote the Pedagogy of Creativity at School.
Teacher : Yeah, actually it is by finding an article of yours on this subject that I started looking at what you do more in detail. And I absolutely loved the idea of your Pedagogy of Creativity. Can you summarize what it is for the people listening that maybe don’t know your work ?
Psychologist : Of course, with pleasure. The main idea is to help students to get facilitating emotions for learning and ease parasite emotions. We test our method in the situation of oral production thanks to the realisation of a support. Let me explain. Basically, there are multiple ways to do it. For instance students can be asked to produce a creative support linked to the learning course, to subsequently, expose it in front of the class in an oral production. Creativity is about leading the child to think on how to insert the academic contents in a creative object. In that way we can mixte cognitive demands for both typical academic learning and creativity thinking development.
Teacher : Yeah yeah. I, for instance, have been doing theatre with my students to get them to learn some poetries. I found it very interesting because all groups have very different ideas and I think it helps them think better about empathie. The more creative they get the more they seem to understand the other personnes, their situations, their emotions Which would not be the case if they just had to learn by heart a poem.
Psychologist : That’s definitely the point of our pedagogy.
Teacher : Alright! we might need to stop there for today’s podcast. Do you have a final thing you would like to have on this topic ?
Psychologist : According to my point of view, creativity and arts is not and should not be only a response to demotivation, academic disengagement and so on. It’s much more than that. It really questions the actual educational system based on the ideology of model replication whereas in creative pedagogy we aim to include intimate life experiments and emotions which are known to be good factors to help learning.
Teacher : That’s a good topic for reflection to end today’s episode. Thanks for being here with us Mathilde. I hope you like today’s chat, and I will see you guys in next week’s episode.
Teacher & psychologist : Good bye !