2. · Some creative abilities are Ôdomain specificÕ. Some of the specific skills and techniques of mathematics or physics or drawing or playing the piano are specific to those activities and do not necessarily transfer to each other nor to other areas.
Look and you will find it. What is unsought will go undetected. Sophocles
· The creative strengths of any one person may be specific to particular fields or types of activity: Creativity involves working in a medium. The medium may be conceptual, as in mathematics. It may involve a physical medium: an instrument, clay, fabrics or steel. For many people, creative ability is stimulated by the ÔfeelÕ of the materials and the activity in question. If a person does not find their best medium, they may never discover what their creative potential is, and never experience the pleasures, satisfactions and achievements that follow. Experience suggests that some, perhaps many people feel disaffected by education and suffer a sense of failure precisely because they have never discovered where their own unique abilities lie. For all of those reasons, schools need to promote a broad approach to creativity across the curriculum and a broad and balanced curriculum. In doing so, it is important to recognise two fundamental dynamics of creative processes.
Freedom and Control 51.
Creativity is not simply a matter of Ôletting goÕ. It is sometimes assumed that creativity only emerges from Ôfree expressionÕ and lack of inhibitions or constraints. This is very misleading. Freedom to experiment is essential for creativity. But so too are skills, knowledge and understanding. Being creative in music, or in physics, or dance, or mathematics, involves knowledge and expertise in the skills, materials and forms of understanding that they involve. It is possible to have a limited creative impact in some fields with little knowledge of them. But sustained creative achievement involves knowledge of the field in question and skills in the media concerned. Creativity in music requires increasing control in the production and dynamics of sound: creativity in mathematics or science requires increasing skills in numeracy. It is possible to teach all of these and not promote creative ability at all: indeed, to stifle it. But the alternative is not to disregard the teaching of skills and understanding, but
People assume that as an innovator, I break rules. I donÕt. I relish rules. I just like rewriting them.
Creative Education
NACCCE report
Lord Stone of Blackheath, Managing Director, Marks and Spencer
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