Editorial
The article originally appeared in English Teaching Professional, 95, November 2014.
Creativity for Change in Language Education
Brian Tomlinson UK, Jane Arnold, Spain, Rod Bolitho, UK, Rod Ellis, New Zealand, Peter Lutzker, Germany), Alan Maley, UK, Hitomi Masuhara, UK, and Chaz Pugliese, France
Menu
Abstract
Brian Tomlinson: What does creativity mean to me?
What do I think creativity can do?
Examples of what creativity can do
Jane Arnold: What is creativity?
Creativity and the language learner
Creativity and the language teacher
Creative materials
Rod Bolitho: Creativities
Creating a feeling of fulfilment
Ways of expressing creativity
Creativity and thinking skills
Rod Ellis: Creativity and the learner
Creative construction
Fostering creativity
Peter Lutzker: Creativity as a personal process
Frameworks for language learning
Attunement and teaching
Alan Maley: My take on creativity
Some issues
Factors for implementation
Four of applying creativity in the classroom
Some closing thoughts
Hitomi Masuhara: Creativity and correlates
Creativity and play
Implications
Chaz Pugliese: Creativity: a plea for change in education
Creativity is a must not an option.
Can it be taught?
Creativity strategies
What could go wrong?
Conclusiona: Brian Tomlinson
References
This article has been written by language educators who are all part of The ‘C’ Group: Creativity for Change in Language Education, a new group which aims to facilitate creative change in language education. It was written by one author writing the first ‘part’ and then passing the ‘article’ on to another author to write the next ‘part’ and so on until the article was complete. We hope we’ve achieved some coherence and most importantly a stimulus to be creative.
To me creativity involves transcending the conventional norm. This could result in something universally unique or just in something which has never been done in that context before.
When you are creative you think and do things differently. When you produce things which are different you can get other people to think and do things differently too. You can spark vital energy and enthusiasm too.
Here’s an example of language educators who responded creatively to unsatisfactory situations.
Creative Teaching
A teacher in a primary school in Vanuatu without any books told her class that they had got a television and then sat them in front of a cardboard box on which she had painted knobs and cut out a screen. She inserted into the box a rolling pin on which she had rolled up a local myth translated into English. She slowly turned the rolling pin and the engaged learners read the story as it was gradually revealed on the screen. After a while she turned it faster and the learners increased their reading speed.
In the same class the pupils created their own puppet characters and then used them to contextualise and personalise grammar lessons.
Creative Teacher Training
On the PKG Project in Indonesia groups of teachers met every Monday at somebody’s house for coffee, they reviewed the materials used in class in the previous week and wrote their own materials for the following week.
Creative Materials Development
A group of thirty secondary school teachers in Namibia produced a text-driven coursebook to implement the syllabus described above. This featured texts on topics requested by the learners, including such normally taboo topics as drug abuse and marital violence.
Creative Examining
In Kobe University I administered an examination in which the students had to think about ways of solving the problem of water shortages, rewrite a page on water shortages as a page for primary pupils, design a device for saving water, write a letter to an international company about their invention and give a presentation on their invention to the ‘company’.
None of the creative enterprises described above resulted in miraculously increased language acquisition but they all provided increased enjoyment whilst stimulating teachers and learners to think and do things differently. The products were creative but more importantly the processes were creative too.
Creativity is the movement from what I already know to what I can imagine, from where I am to where I can go. It happens when I am free to pass from the familiar routines to the unknown. Creativity takes us from repeating to doing, from reacting to acting. When we are creative, we are not living and working automatically but rather our energy is directed and has a productive purpose. When we create, we are in a sense created, we are more.
We know that in a classroom what is taught is not necessarily the same as what is learned and that motivated learners are better learners. It is an accepted principle that learning is more effective in an environment that is emotionally positive, and a very positive emotion in the learner is produced through creativity. The feeling of being engaged and enjoying the learning experience which appears when creativity is involved motivates intrinsically and opens the learner to be better able to absorb the language.
This was seen very clearly in a small scale project in Spain where the teacher taught one EFL lesson “according to the book”, and then in the next lesson she used only special activities which connected closely to learners’ lives and which let them work together in groups in a creative way. After each lesson the students filled in a short questionnaire. While statistics don’t always tell “the whole story”, here they were very revealing. For the following items the percentages on the first day and the second day were: I liked today’s activities: 36% /100%; I was able to express my ideas: 4%/82%; Today’s activities woke up my curiosity: 18%/67%; I would like to do more of these activities: 18%/96%. For one of the open questions which asked them to describe each session, many saw the first as boring while nearly all described the second class as fun, interesting, dynamic and a good way to learn. One student said it was a really big change, for the better.
The teacher plays an essential role in establishing the conditions in the classroom space for creativity to develop. As Stevick (1980:20) said, “we should judge creativity in the classroom by what the teacher makes it possible for the student to do, not just by what the teacher does.” There is a virtuous circle here obviously. A teacher develops activities that let students be creative and the satisfaction this produces in both stimulates the teacher to continue in the creative spiral. The “taste” of my class is not the same when we do a textbook activity, no matter how good it is, as when my students do and enjoy an activity I have created. There exists then a significant personal connection with the activity.
There is no doubt that students appreciate teachers who are imaginative, who show concern for their students by finding ways to make the learning process more interesting. This sends a powerful message to students. We need, however, to take into account that to be truly connected to creativity in teaching involves more than some fun and games on a Friday afternoon once in a while. It is not a case of a few new activities now and then but of a new vision of what we want to do and can do in the classroom and a continued effort to make the vision a reality.
Materials, whether published or teacher-prepared, exist on a scale of less to more creative. If we explore what puts them on the more creative end of the scale we might find things like: they engage learners’ attention on deeper levels, which will tend to lead to more permanent learning. This is, of course, something that is very important but the process of how to achieve it will have no fixed rules. We are talking about creativity which generally involves thinking outside the box and each person exploring in their particular context innovative ways to make students’ learning personally meaningful, as well as both fun and productive. In other words, to get it out of the rut and into the creative stream.
We ‘linguists’ seem to have a relentless need to define terms, as if by doing so, we establish some kind of ownership over a concept. Nonetheless, I have found two sources helpful when thinking about creativity, and both of them are essentially open-ended accounts of what it might be about.
Csikszentmihalyi (1996), without attempting a definition, writes:
“We share 98% of our genetic make-up with chimpanzees. What makes us different – our language, values artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology – is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning. Without creativity, it would be difficult to distinguish humans from apes.” (1996: 1-2)
Here, while I jib a bit at his reference to ‘transmitting through learning’, I am reminded of the poverty of educational experience that many learners are exposed to in formal educational settings, the straitjacket imposed on them and their teachers by timetables, curricula, examinations and textbooks, all of which sometimes seem to militate against any hope of working intuitively and creatively. At the same time I am certain that language education is a potential channel into the 2% that identifies our humanity and that, for whatever reason, this channel gets blocked and remains underused in many contexts, especially in post-primary education.
The opportunity is there, then, in educational terms, to offer learners experiences that lead to a kind of feeling of fulfilment, but how many teachers are able to open this up for their learners, and do learners always really want them to? If the spark of fulfilment is not to become devalued, perhaps creativity needs to be associated with stand-out ‘moments’, with times when intuition and spontaneity take over from planning and routines. Put another way, teachers and learners neither want nor are able to be creative in every lesson of every day. All the more important then, to help language teachers to identify the potential outlets for creativity that exist in their professional lives, and to help them escape, when they need to, from the fetters that tie them to sameness and repetitiveness from one day to the next.
I believe that these outlets are many, as Brian Tomlinson has illustrated with his examples above, and only if teachers are prepared to tap into creative potential in their minds will they find creative options that suit them and their learners. There are no recipes here, and teacher educators need to tread carefully if they are to avoid alienating or even intimidating teachers with well-meant demonstrations of creativity in action. There are plenty of people in language teaching who make a living by trading in conformity. Over many years now I have seen evidence that conformists in our field feel threatened by attempts to humanise language teaching by proposing more creative ways of being and of acting, resulting in the kind of primitive backlash that condemns drama in the classroom, for example, as ‘touchy-feely’ or liberal and ‘wishy-washy’.
The second ‘take’ on creativity that I find useful comes from the works of Anderson, Krathwohl et al (2001) on a revision of Bloom’s oft-cited Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom et al. 1956). The main purpose of the work on this taxonomy was to gain working understandings of cognition and the development of thinking skills. In the revision, ‘Creating’ replaces ‘Synthesising’ and assumes the final (highest order) place in the list of six thinking skills. Writing about this in a subsequent article, Krathwohl describes ‘Creating’ as “putting elements together to form a novel, coherent whole or make an original product” (2002: 215). The reference to ‘novel’ and ‘original’ here chimes neatly with Csikszentmihalyi’s assertion that “creativity leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.” (op.cit.:2). That will do for me as a way forward in language education. ‘Moments’ in our language classes or teacher education courses when learners or teacher participants are able to ‘produce’ something original or novel in ways which are facilitated but not in any way imposed by the teacher or teacher educator – this is a version of creativity that I can espouse and feel at home with.
My own contribution focuses on the learners and the role that creativity plays in their own use and learning of a language. We know that children learning their first language (L1) do not simply imitate their caretakers’ input but rather creatively construct their own utterances using whatever words they have picked up from the input. The L1 acquisition literature is replete with learner ‘creations’. Here is a sample I collected from one of my daughters when she was 2 years old:
Lie down Lwindi (she was just about to lie down)
Want pussy Lwindi (she was chasing a cat)
Lwindi pullover on (she was trying to put her pullover on)
Giving doggy bone (she was looking at a picture of a butcher giving a doggy a bone).
L2 learners are similarly creative. The examples below were taken from a ten year old classroom learner:
You milkman (He wanted to know if the teacher needed someone to fetch the morning milk)
Me milkman (He was offering to be the milkman)
Me breaktime (Stating he intended to leave the room as it was breaktime)
Me is morning finish (Stating that he intended to finish off his drawing the next morning)
There are differences in these two sets of utterances. My daughter made use of a variable word order (e.g. sometimes positioning the agent at the end or the beginning of an utterance); the L2 learner’s word order is clearly fixed with the word denoting agent (‘me’) always occurring sentence initially. Nevertheless, both learners display creativity. They deploy their available linguistic resources flexibly to formulate utterances that encode what they want to say.
Dulay, Burt and Krashen (1982) coined the term ‘creative construction’, which they defined as ‘the subconscious process by which learners gradually organize the language they hear, according to the rules they construct to understand and generate sentences’ (p. 276). Creativity in this sense is an inherent characteristic of L2 acquisition. It is unavoidable. It is a feature of the human capacity for language.
So too is the ludic use of language. Learners – like all users of language – engage in language play, defined by Cook (1997) as ‘behaviour not primarily motivated by human need to manipulate the environment and to share information’ (p. 227). Even beginner L2 learners enjoy playing with language. Another of the classroom learners I investigated produced the following sequence of utterances when another student had thrown his book into the waste bin:
Book in the bin.
You book in the bin.
My book in the bin.
You in the bin.
No writing in the bin.
You bin … in the bin, all right?
You writing in the bin.
It has been suggested that this kind of semantic play facilitates L2 development. Bushnell (2008) claims that language play of this kind creates ‘affordances’ for language learning, for example, by lowering affective barriers, helping learners to speak in other ‘voices’ and allowing learners to commit face-threatening acts in an acceptable manner. Language play has been observed in learners of all levels and in both young and adult learners.
Given the naturalness and inevitability of creativity in learner language – both in the sense of creative construction and language play – I find myself wondering why language teaching materials place so much emphasis on conformity to target language norms. So many of the EFL course materials I have inspected are directed at teaching linguistic ‘objects’ and ensuring that learners can use these objects accurately in their production. Clearly, there is a need to help learners develop conformity but surely language teaching materials also need to facilitate the creative use of language by learners. To my mind, however, this is not a question of making the materials ‘creative’ but rather of designing materials that create appropriate contexts (‘affordances’) for creative construction and language play. What this requires is not imaginative materials (although such materials can be important for fostering intrinsic motivation in learning) but of materials that encourage learners – right from the beginning – to treat language as a ‘tool’ for making meaning rather than as ‘objects’ to be studied and mastered. The main way of achieving this is to base materials on ‘tasks’ rather than ‘exercises’.
I would like to focus on an aspect implicitly present in all the previous contributions and which has been explicitly addressed in some of them, most directly by Jane Arnold. As she points out, creativity in teaching is less about being creative oneself than about creating a space wherein others can become creative. A creative teacher working with diverse and heterogeneous groups, will ideally provide each learner with the opportunity to enter into what is an intrinsically individual and personal process. It might seem illusionary to think that this is even possible, but as many best practice examples demonstrate, including those mentioned above, it can and does take place under the most varied of circumstances.
In trying to understand how this occurs, it is important to realize that those creative moments do not generally happen by themselves - certainly not in foreign language classrooms. They invariably require a conceptual framework in which pupils are consistently encouraged to engage with the target language in both a receptive and a creative manner, specific materials that offer rich and varied possibilities of response, and what Rod Ellis refers to as meaningful 'tasks', as opposed to traditional exercises. Such moments also depend on teachers who are attuned to their pupils to a degree which enables them to initiate such creative processes and then respond intuitively to what takes place as they unfold. Each of these criteria bears a closer look.
A framework in which the format and content of traditional course books determine the process of language learning will clearly be less conducive to fostering the more 'fully living of one's life' than a framework in which, for instance, the engagement with works of literature, exploring the possibilities of creative writing, and the performance of drama are deemed essential in language learning. In the latter case, that sense of playfulness which Rod Ellis has referred to as an essential aspect of language acquisition will be allowed to flourish, ideally in the spirit of Schiller's maxim that a human being is most fully human in those moments when he is playing.
There is a further consequence to be considered here. As Jane Arnold points out, the bottom line of creativity in language learning cannot be the occasional "fun and games on a Friday afternoon once in a while." Creativity understood as an imaginative capability which can also be further developed and refined, will, however, only develop if practiced in the sense that all creative and performing artists continually practice in order to improve. Within a framework of language learning in which affective and creative engagement are deemed vital, varied forms and ways of practicing will continually be sought and found. Such practice can over time be transformative. In a framework based on traditional course books, such forms of practice play no role as the materials are not designed for that purpose. Instead of practice there will be training - for the next unit, the next test, the next examination. This distinction between practice and training with respect to fostering creativity in language learning has significant implications which call for further exploration.
The word 'attunement' offers an essential insight into the underlying nature of the relation of the teacher to her pupils in facilitating creative processes. Just as the fine tuning of a musical instrument requires, above all, careful listening and sensitive adjustments made through such listening, the fostering of creativity in a classroom can be seen as also dependent on the continual fine attunement of the teacher to her pupils.
In our considerations of how creativity in language learning can be encouraged, I believe it will also be vital to explore ways of enhancing that perceptive openness of the teacher to her pupils which will enable both teachers and pupils to better develop their own creative possibilities very much in the spirit of play and, at the same time, with the realization that both how we teach and how we learn are tied to that most serious question of how fully we live our lives.
- Creativity is readily recognisable but difficult to define (Amabile 1996).
- ‘Creativity is at the heart of learning. But it is not usually at the heart of education. Institutionalized education depends on control, measurement and conformity. Creativity (rather like its cousin, Critical Thinking) is anathema to systems based on control. However much as they claim to be promoting creativity, institutions are dependent on a control paradigm, and thus resistant to anything which threatens that control. Creativity will always have a hard time of it.’ (Maley 2013)
Foreign language teaching, on the whole, rates rather low on creativity. Teaching is, by its very nature, a conservative profession. The institutionalization of teaching into regular classroom hours encourages the development of relatively comfortable routines. Examinations further encourage conformity. And, in the present global economy, market forces tend to discourage publishers from taking creative risks. See Casenave and Sosa (2007) for a sustained critique of this situation.
- The current obsession with smart technology, risks confusing novelty with creativity. We need to remind ourselves constantly that technology should be a tool in the service of creativity and not a substitute for it.
- Both Jane Arnold and Peter Lutzker have referred above to the need for teachers to ‘create a space for others to be creative.’ I heartily concur. The need for ‘perceptive openness’ is also key, especially in responding creatively, in the moment, to the unpredictable unfolding of the classroom event. (Underhill and Maley 2012) But I would argue that teachers themselves need to be creative, partly to offer a role model. Creativity is a mind-set which is constantly scanning for opportunities to do things differently.
Some of the findings from creativity theory (Amabile 1996; Boden 1990; Kaufman and Sternberg 2010; Koestler 1989) suggest the importance of the following:
- Playing around – with words, with ideas, with techniques… The playful element is key to creative learning and has been mentioned by other contributors to this article.
- Leaving room for ‘chaos’ to operate by offering rich, varied inputs, and challenging, open-ended activities
- Trying out new ways of adapting old practices. (Maley 2006; Maley 2013)
- Using heuristics and analogy to stimulate new thinking. (see below)
- Building in constraints, which scaffold creative activity. ‘Structure ignites spontaneity.’ (Nachmanovitch 1990) (see below)
- Using minimal inputs for maximum outputs. ‘…producing great results from scant means.’ (Beethoven)
- Allowing time and silence for ideas to incubate. This too contrasts with the current drive for speed and immediate returns on investment.
- Making unusual juxtapositions using the random-combination principle. (see below)
- Drawing on other domains, outside language pedagogy for inspiration.
- Being aware that novelty is not enough, and that the system we operate in has to be ‘ready’ – or made ready for it, and to perceive the relevance of creative ideas.
- Convincing learners that everyone has the capacity for creativity.
- Ensuring that we give due attention to the Preparation and Verification stages of the creative process. Not everything is fun and games.
- Keeping in mind, however, that delight and pleasure are an integral part of the process.
- Using constraints. For example, in creative writing, activities can be set up with rules which both stimulate and support creative language use, as in acrostics, stem poems, mini-sagas, etc. (Spiro 2004 )
- Using heuristics. The most famous of these is Fanselow’s (1970) ‘Do the opposite’. Other heuristics would include ‘expand’, ‘transfer to another medium’, ‘reverse the order’, etc. (Maley 1994, 1995). Heuristics may not always lead to positive outcomes but they help get us out of the rut of routine – and unless we try them, we will never know.
- Using the random principle. This involves putting things together which have no connection – and finding a connection. For example, making new metaphors by combining words from two lists at random, and using this as a basis for creative writing. (Spiro 2004)
- Using improvisation activities. Here we put people into a situation which they then have to work out together, simply by interacting with others in the moment, with no preparation. There are plenty of books with brilliant ideas for improvisation: Johnstone (1981); Johnstone (1999); Nachmanovitch (1990); Maley and Duff (2005); Wilson (2008).
‘The teacher’s art is to connect, in real time, the living bodies of the students with the living body of the knowledge.’ (Nachmanovitch 1990: 20)
‘The easiest way to do art (or teaching?) is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.’ (Nachmanovitch 1990: 135)
‘It would be a simple enough thing to do, if only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things.’ (Jung)
‘It is difficult
to get the news from poems;
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.’
(William Carlos Williams.)
I would like to seek implications from the literature on general creativity, supported by insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolution and animal behaviour studies.
For me, creativity is an inherent mechanism that the brain has cultivated in its evolution to ensure survival and development. The neural networks are constantly established, renewed and reconfigured according to external and internal environmental changes. In this sense, the brain itself is fundamentally creative. This seems to explain the unsuppressible manifestation of creativity. Creativity can be non-linguistic as well as linguistic but having language and conscious awareness enables humans to articulate, record and substantiate transient and ephemeral creativity in concrete forms. The implication of this neural view of creativity is that regardless of individual or cultural differences (Zhang and Head 2010) anyone is potentially capable of creativity, though there are evidently different kinds and levels of accomplishment.
Studies of ‘Play’ have attracted a lot of attention in recent years as a vital source for work on creativity and brain development. Brown (2010), for example, argues how ‘free play’ is a rich breeding ground for creativity in animals, children and adults. Narey (2010) points out that play goes beyond mud play in a nursery to development and innovative use of technology. ‘Free play’ means child-like, curiosity-driven, imaginative, spontaneous, open and unstructured fun activities using the mind, the body, objects, language and social interaction. There are no set goals or rules apart from the inclination towards enjoyment. No right or wrong. Free play may include ‘world play’ in which participants play roles, living in stories and fantasies.
Creativity must come from somewhere in evolution. Play also activates the midbrain, crucial areas that control emotional association and memory formation and retention. Researchers argue that play has evolved and persists because it encourages physical and mental agility and creativity that is a preparation for unexpected situations and new environments. Studies indicate that deprivation of play results in lack of divergent thinking and flexible social adjustment.
Wenner (2009) argues that free play should not be confused with structured play with predetermined rules, such as games of scrabble, sports and pre-school activities. Structured play may foster cognitive, physical and social skills but free play provides more opportunities to try out unconventional behaviours in response to environmental novelty (Pellegrini et al. 2007). Wenner (2009) notes worrying recent reports of free play being replaced by structured play and pre-school lessons, which may be taking away developmental opportunities for creativity.
What seems to emerge is that creativity is not an additional luxury but an indispensable part of development and self-fulfilment. In L2 teaching are we not biased toward linguistic communication and are we giving enough attention to non-linguistic expression of creativity? Stories, miming, drama, non-linguistic creative responses, for example, may not involve speaking but these engaging activities provide ample opportunities for exposure to and internalisation of language in use. If the learners are not threatened they are more likely to be more expressive and the teachers can attune to the learner’s non-linguistic as well as linguistic reactions. Do we give space or opportunities for learners’ voluntary free play in L2 teaching? Barker (2011) argues for the necessity and effectiveness of Unstructured Learner Interaction outside classrooms. Mourão is conducting research on the effect of teacher-led play classes followed up by L2 free play in which the learners are given time and space for enjoyment.
Social units, be it family, school or country, require order and conformity. Conservatism and scepticism may act as the salt of the earth. Too much salt, however, makes the soil barren. As the successful cases from various parts of the world above demonstrate, developing creativity can be resource/cost-friendly and doable in curriculum design, testing, teacher training, methodology, materials, teacher training and in classrooms, without drastic changes or demanding preparation. In fact, from a ‘Free play’ point of view, providing more takes away the space and opportunities for creativity. What we need is freedom and encouragement to try something different and fun.
We don't encourage imagination, especially in schools. We live in a time where everything is based on information, rather than allowing our minds to wander.
Roger McGough
Creativity is a must, not an option.
My vision calls for schools, educators and policy-makers to stop just paying lip service to creativity and start walking the talk.
Creative thinking and teaching is not an option, it’s not an add-on to the curriculum, and it’s not something to try out for kicks on a Friday afternoon. Rather more than that. It’s a way of looking at education, it is a state of mind, a declaration of war on conformity, a reflection on how we go about the business of educating people. Teaching creatively and promoting creativity in our schools requires a major shift, it entails a big, fundamental change in education.
Four strategies that seem to work for me: simplicity, combination, risk-taking and playfulness. Simplicity means working with minimum or no materials, using the people as our main resource. Combination entails a blend of your own creativity with someone else’s. So, devising an original idea around say, a dictation exercise, would be an example of combinational creativity. Risk-taking is about getting out of the comfort zone and stepping into the learning zone. It’s a necessity, rather than an option. Playfulness is the ability to play. As early as 1954, Carl Rogers remarked that the ability to toy with concepts and play spontaneously with ideas is often what distinguishes a creative individual. And to quote Csizkentmihalyi, ‘there’s no question that a playful attitude is typical of creative individuals, coupled with perseverance and endurance.’ (ibid.)
The question I’m interested to explore here is: how do we go about implementing the changes that are needed? In other words: how do we teach creativity? And can creativity be actually taught? Before we attempt to answer these questions, we need to say that creativity, the cluster of skills needed to produce an idea or manufacture a product that is original and valuable (Sternberg 2010), is not for just a few lucky gifted individuals. Creativity is not a fixed, unitary trait. Research has shown, time and again, that this is not so and that creativity is a dynamic phenomenon that may change over time. We also need to remind ourselves that creativity is a process, and that the journey is easier if we take into account three elements. The first is the creator’s motivation: the great Federico Fellini used to say that he needed an excuse for being creative. A very useful starting point, then, is: what do I need to be creative for? Once we’ve established that, we need to ask ourselves whether we have enough experience in our field to come up with something truly innovative. If I haven’t spent a considerable amount of time in a given field, I risk reinventing the wheel. The third element worth remembering is that we acquire creativity if we use strategies. Torrance has listed as many as 135. (1978).
Four strategies that seem to work for me: simplicity, combination, risk-taking and playfulness. Simplicity means working with minimum or no materials, using the people as our main resource. Combination entails a blend of your own creativity with someone else’s. So, devising an original idea around say, a dictation exercise, would be an example of combinational creativity. Risk-taking is about getting out of the comfort zone and stepping into the learning zone. It’s a necessity, rather than an option. Playfulness is the ability to play. As early as 1954, Carl Rogers remarked that the ability to toy with concepts and play spontaneously with ideas is often what distinguishes a creative individual. And to quote Csizkentmihalyi, ‘there’s no question that a playful attitude is typical of creative individuals, coupled with perseverance and endurance.’ (ibid.)
What’s just been outlined above, whilst it may facilitate the creative process, is no guarantee that creativity will indeed happen, for the road is paved with all sorts of obstacles. The most formidable of these obstacles is fear of changes. As teachers we are reluctant to embrace changes because we become what we teach, and our techniques, our methods, are inextricably linked with our own persona and become ‘us’. Teaching differently entails a temporary loss of identity which would outweigh the advantages of using more creative approaches to teaching. In addition to fear of changes, there are other nasty stumbling blocks: fear of other people’s reactions, fear of failure, fear of accepting failure, fear of disappointing, fear of ‘rocking the boat’, fear of uncertainty. Clearly, there can’t be any magic wand to make all these negative feelings disappear but perhaps these thoughts might help us deal with them:
- Create a climate for creativity. Create a sense of urgency, talk about changes, embed them in a vision, and then get other people to understand and accept this vision.
- Find your tribe. Being part of a like-minded community is invaluable in helping you find your creative voice.
- Find a mentor. Fostering your creative spirit often requires a guide, someone who believes in us, trusts and encourages us to take a creative leap and jump off the cliff.
A school that fosters a spirit of discovery and is not driven by grades, scores and tests can be done. Creativity can’t be the only answer but it would certainly constitute a step in the right direction.
We hope that in our article we’ve stimulated thought about creativity, provided useful sources for further investigation and suggested practical ways of making the language class a more creative experience. We think the most important point is give a little thought to how we can be creative prior to each lesson. If we do that, we can help our learners to be creative too.
Amabile, M.T. (1996). Creativity in Context. Boulder, CO: Westfield Press
Anderson, L.W. and Krathwohl, D.R. (eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.
Bloom, B.S. (ed.) (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay.
Boden, M. (1990). The Creative Mind. London: Abacus
Boss, M. (1979). Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology. New York: Jason Aronson.
Brown, S. (2010). With Vaugham, C. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, And Invigorates the Soul. New York: Penguin.
Burghardt, G. M. and Sutton-Smith, B. (2005). Genesis of Animal Play : Testing the Limits. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Bushnell. C. (2008). ‘Lego my keego!’: An analysis of language play in a beginning Japanese as a foreign language classroom. Applied Linguistics, 30: 49-69.
Casenave, C.P and Sosa.M (2007). Respite for Teachers:Reflection and Renewal in the Teaching Life. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Cook, G. (1997). Language play, language learning. ELT Journal 51:224-231.
Cook, G. (2000) Language Play. Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity. New York: Harper Collins.
Dulay, H., Burt, M. and Krashen, S. (1982). Language Two. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fanselow, J. (1987). Breaking Rules. London/New York: Longman.
Gardner, H. (1993). Creative Minds. Basic books.
Johnstone,K (1981). Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. London: Methuen.
Johnstone,K (1999). Impro for Storytellers. London: Faber and Faber
Kaufman, J.C. and Sternberg, R.C. (eds) (2010). The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Koestler, A. (1989. The Act of Creation. London: Arkana/Penguin.
Krathwohl, D.R. (2002). A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview. Theory into Practice 41/4.
Maley. A (1994). Short and Sweet. London: Penguin
Maley, A. (2006). Where do new ideas come from? in Mukundan, J (ed.) Readings on ELT Materials II. Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia.
Maley, A. (2013 forthcoming). Creative approaches to writing materials in B. Tomlinson (ed.) Developing Materials for Language Teaching. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. 167-187.
Maley, A. (2013). Winnowing the past: towards a principled eclecticism in J. Arnold and T. Y. Murphey (eds.) Meaningful Action: Earl Stevick’s Influence on Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maley,A.and Duff,A. (2005 new edition). Drama Techniques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mourão, S. http://sandiemourao.eu/pages/about
Nachmanovitch, S. (1990). Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. New York: Tarker/Putnam.
Narey, T. A. (2010). One thing leads to another: Evolution, play, and technology. ERIC. ED521381.
Pellegrini, A. D., Dupuis, D. and Smith, P. K. (2007). Play in evolution and development. Developmental Review, 27(2), 261-276.
Pugliese, C. (2010). Being Creative: The Challenge of Change in the Classroom. Delta Publishing.
Read, C. (2013). Seven ways to promote creativity in the classroom. IATEFL Voices 234, 3.
Root-Bernstein, M. and Root-Bernstein, R. (2006). Imaginary worldplay in childhood and maturity and its impact on adult creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 18(4), 405-425.
Spiro, J. (2004). Creative Poetry Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Sternberg, R. (2002). Creativity as a Decision. American Psychologist, 4.
Sternberg, R. and Lubart. (2010). The concepts of creativity: prospects and paradigms in R. Sternberg (ed.) Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stevick, E. (l980). Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Torrance, E.P. (1974). The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. STS.
Underhill, A and Maley, A. (2012). Expect the unexpected, English Teaching Professional 82. 2012.
Wenner, M. (2009). The serious need for play, Scientific American, January 28.
Wilson, K. (2008). Drama and Improvisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zhang, X. and Head, K. (2010). Dealing with learner reticence in the speaking class, ELT Journal, 64(1), 1-9.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
|
