Is there a place for creativity in the classroom?

Sir Ken Robinson in his video, “Do schools kill creativity?” poses a very poignant point in that public schools tend to educate the mind, the left side specifically, as students get older.  Information is presented, then memorized, then assessed with very little attention paid to developing skills.  Sir Robinson offered that every school system throughout the world has the same educational hierarchy:  math and language at the top with art and music at the bottom.  High schools seem to focus on preparing students for college, not life necessarily.

            Sir Robinson went on to say that he believed that creativity is as important as literacy.  Young children tend to be more creative as they are not afraid to make a mistake.  From these mistakes is where originality is derived.  Original ideas that have value are what he defines as creativity.  It is important that we value these mistakes and build upon them for deeper thinking then to just go for the correct answer and move on. 

            This is how I remember learning in high school.  I sat in class, took feverish notes, completed my homework each night, and then crammed for the assessment; normally some sort of standardized test.  Now looking back, I remember very little of what I was taught in high school.  What does stand out to me are the projects we created using the content.  Our goal as educators is to get our students to not only learn our content, but to be able to retain it and connect it to their lives.  By using both sides of our brains to embrace new content it is much more likely to happen.

            Gardner (2007) gives his understanding of the difference between someone who is creative and someone who is an expert.  “An expert is an individual who, after a decade or more of training, has reached the pinnacle of current practice in her chosen domain” (Gardner, 82).  We do need our experts in society, but a creative person should know the content just as well.  The difference, though, is that the creative person learned by trial and error.  A creative person wants to learn the content on her own terms even if that involves failing a few times; she does not want to rely on someone else to teach it to her. 

            This is where digital media falls in to play.  Through digital media, students can connect to the content on their own terms.  They can learn the content in a way that is most acceptable by them.  If students make a mistake, they are the only ones to know.  Sitting in a classroom listening to someone present the information not only takes very little creativity, it also does not leave any room for a student to expand on the content.  Through creative learning comes original thinking and the desire to learn more.  Digital media encourage us to both interact with and present the content we have learned in a way that connects it to our everyday lives.