Sir Ken states, "Creativity is as important as literacy in education, and we should treat it with the same status." Do you agree, disagree or fall somewhere in between?
According to this quote by Sir Ken, creativity is as important as literacy in education. I cannot help but agree with him whole heartily. I feel that creativity is what determines the great students from the good students. Unfortunately, many students believe that they can 'regurgitate' knowledge back to the teacher on a test, a written assignment or worksheet, but it takes a truly creative and very bright student to create something completely unique. I do believe that creativity is as important as literacy. I also believe that creativity should be treated with the same status because creativity allows students to exemplify their knowledge in new and sometimes unusual ways. In order for students to be creative with something they must first demonstrate adequate knowledge or literacy of the topic. Creativity allows students to move beyond their knowledge of the topic into actually demonstrating the application of that knowledge. I once heard that "you have to know the rules to break the rules" and I truly believe that literacy is important, but it is incredible when you see a student think on their own for the first time, without regard to a set of instructions or directions. We as teachers will give students the tools they need and the 'rules' to follow, but they must know when to use their imaginations as well. I feel that if we elevate literacy over creativity we would loose any creditability we had established in trying to help students to become life long learners. We would loose our future Leonardo DaVincis or Larry Pages and Sergey Brins (Google creators) or Mark Twains. These people are some of the most successful and world changing people in history. We do a great disservice to students by not allowing creativity to be as important as literacy and without creativity we could loose the future.
By: Anna Davison
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4 comments:
Anna, I agree with you on the idea of setting the framework for knowledge for our student as their fundamental basis but allowing them to explore how they feel about those things through their own creative processes. I do wonder however, how we as educators will try to break down those strictly reinforced boundries that tell students that the teacher's information is always right, and that it is disrespectful and unacceptalbe to challenge that authority?
Anna, I agree with you that "creativity allows students to exemplify their knowledge in new and sometimes unusual ways." I think that as educators, we must not leave the creativity to the students alone, but we must incorporate it into our lessons, as well. I also think that if we have students who are able to comprehend the content and are able to synthesize the material to develop something new and creative, then we have done our jobs as educators. The problem is that many teachers are not doing a great job in the classroom. They resort to worksheets/busy work which stifles creativity, in my view. However, I do not think that we should just throw-out "proven" traditional teaching techniques either. I think that we must come up with a good compromise of the two. What do you think?
Anna, I read your blog and completely agree with you and the man giving the speach in the video. I think that education has been extremely unfair the last couple years because creativity has been almost removed completely. I think we need to make learning equal for all students who learn in different ways.
I spoke in blog abou falling somewhere in between the agreeing with Sir Ken and not quite so. What I meant by this is struggle with completely agreeing with you that creativity outweighs literacy. Those people that you mentioned have to be able to read or they get nowhere in life. Then we give them tools to be creative. I think our problems lies in the fact that we give them the tools them push them to the breaking point. We want them to read what we want to read not what they want too.
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