“Creativity” flickr photo by Melissa W Edwards shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license
What do people mean when they talk about creative pedagogies? Are they talking about pedagogies that support creativity, and produce creative learners, or are they talking about creative (i.e. novel) types of pedagogy?
According to Wikipedia, creative pedagogy was founded by Dr. Andrei Aleinikov, and this is how he defines it:
In its essence, creative pedagogy teaches learners how to learn creatively and become creators of themselves and creators of their future.
That’s what I would have expected it to mean, and that’s what I assumed was meant when I signed up for a collaborative experience about creative pedagogies last year. But it turned out that the facilitators had a different understanding of the term. What they were interested in talking about were:
inspir[ing] faculty towards creative/innovative ways of being in classrooms
So anything that’s not just a didactic lecture, probably? At any rate, the emphasis was on what people might do in the classroom, rather than on the theoretical underpinnings to these practices (pedagogy needs to be both, in my opinion).
Would I have signed up for the collaboration if I’d realised this? Probably not. Is it my fault for misunderstanding? Probably.
But once I did realise what was meant, I started to wonder about the whole initiative. If a particular pedagogy is just an approach to teaching and learning that is innovative, does it stop being a innovative pedagogy when it becomes commonplace? Presumably it does. So actually the ‘innovative’ in the description is not really helpful – because what is new to you might be usual practice for someone else. It’s probably better, in my opinion, to talk about alternative ways of teaching and types of assessment.
Of course, your creative (novel) pedagogy might actually be to encourage learners to be creative in another sense of the word – by getting STEM students to use poetry, or humanities students to use LEGO, by setting up assessments that students can be creative about – and submit a piece of knitting or embroidery that answers the question (and kudos for those who create rubrics to assess this type of submission). This is great, but I do think that there needs to be some thought about why these might be of benefit to student learning, rather than just being something novel (innovative) to do.
Personally I prefer something like Aleinikov’s definition. The aim of a creative pedagogy should be to create learners that can think for themselves, and have the confidence to think of interesting ways of answering questions, and to think of interesting questions to ask. And, for philosophy, to help future philosophers to create concepts that are immune from capitalist manipulation.
