Creativity and education: comparing the national curricula of the states of the European Union and the United Kingdom

Abstract

In the past 20 years the importance of creativity as part of young people's education has increasingly been recognised. The stimulus for the growing emphasis on creativity has come from diverse sources including drives for greater national economic prosperity and enlightenment visions of young people's education. One facet of creativity in education has been its place in the national curriculum texts of nation states. The research reported in this paper aimed to investigate the place of creativity in the national curricula of the 27 member states of the EU (EU 27) and in the UK. A content analysis of all statutory national curriculum texts for the EU27 was undertaken and implications compared to the answers of 7659 teachers to a survey. The findings showed that creativity was a recurring element of curricula but its incidence varied widely. It was also found that creativity was represented in arts subjects more than other subjects and that it was relatively neglected in reading and writing as part of the language group of subjects. The countries of the UK in general had maintained their historic attention to creativity but there was evidence of a shift from emphasis in primary settings to secondary settings. It is concluded that there is a need for much greater coherence between general aims for education and the representation of creativity in curriculum texts.

The effects of a cognitive pathway to promote class creative thinking. An experimental study on Italian primary school students

“…The interest in human creativity seems to have not led to either substantial advances in the understanding of creative processes nor to theory-based techniques for enhancing human creativity. Even if in the past 20 years the relevance of creativity emerged as a need to improve students' curricula (Wyse & Ferrari, 2015), in the Italian schooling system there are no standard defined techniques or methods teachers normally use to assess student skills and talents.…”

Epistemic insights: Contemplating tensions between policy influences and creativity in school science

“…These scientists applied their scientific and technological expertise and creativity to develop an air-filled pneumatic tyre, waterproof fabric and improved road construction, respectively. Wyse and Ferrari (2015) also emphasised the disparity between disciplines when they found that all current UK curriculum texts refer to creativity twice as much in the arts documentation as in other subject areas. This resonates with Robinson's (2009) belief that previous (and current) governments have not and do not appear to value, promote and explicitly support creativity within disciplines such as the sciences.…”

Leading by example: Exploring the influence of design examples on children's creative ideation

“…Similarly, other researchers have highlighted the importance of novelty as well as desired utility, appropriateness or value to the field within which it is applied to (Beghetto, 2005;Runco and Jaeger, 2012;Shah et al, 2003;Sternberg and Lubart, 1999;Wyse and Ferrari, 2015). Some definitions additionally include that the idea should be non-obvious or surprising in some way (Crilly and Cardoso, 2017;Howard et al, 2008).…”