Session Information
17 SES 01, The Concept Of Creativity In Educational Discourse: A Historical Approach
Symposium
Contribution
“Self-organisation combined with creativity gives us the powerful quality which any society badly needs to secure its own future: entrepreneurship (Laevers, 2005).” As this quote by the Belgian pedagogue Ferre Laevers makes clear, creativity has become a central concept in western models of education. It is thought to lead to problem-solving, flexible thinking, self-reliance and entrepreneurship: in other words, it is thought to produce the active citizens needed in an “ever-changing world”. In an educational system that aims for this sort of active citizenship, promoting creativity is no longer an option, but a necessity.
Some researchers have presented creativity as a phenomenon that has always existed, whatever name it might have had in the past. Historical evidence, however, shows that the noun “creativity” only emerged in the 1950s and that phrases like the “creative imagination” or “productive thinking”, which are often regarded as early synonyms, did not carry the same meaning and weight as the concept of creativity nowadays. When creativity became a fashionable term in the 1970s, philosophers were quick to point out that it was a social construction. In recent years, the same observation has been made by historians, cultural researchers, sociologists and some psychologists. Many educational researchers, on the other hand, have accepted the term uncritically. Their work seems to assume that there is a common-sense understanding of the concept and a broad consensus on its meaning. Both of these assumptions are problematic.
Contrary to some philosophers, who complained about the “high expectations of a weak notion” (Hartmut, 2000), we do not believe that its contradictions make the concept of creativity weak. As the German historian Reinhardt Koselleck remarked, the very ambiguity of a concept often points to the importance it takes within society. As in other core concepts like democracy and freedom, the meaning of creativity is not a given: it is constituted through the permanent discussion between different social groups. The emergence of the concept of creativity points to a shift in our mental framework. In spite of its ambiguity, it is now part of our “horizon of expectations” (Koselleck, 1985): it frames the way we think about the world in general and education in particular.
Our symposium will be built around a set of interrelated questions: what are the implications of the use of the concept of creativity in education? How has it changed our view on teaching, on schools, on pupils? How is the perceived necessity of creativity used by different social groups, with which intentions and with which results? And what are the forms of resistance arising from this emphasis on creativity?
The symposium will be held within the Histories of Education network of ECER, because our point of departure is the observation that the concept of creativity is a socio-cultural construction that emerged as a result of concrete historical circumstances. The researchers, however, will come from different fields: in that way, we hope to stimulate a discussion that transcends the boundaries between networks and disciplines.
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