International educators’ perspectives on the purpose of science education and the relationship between school science and creativity

Abstract

Background: Creativity across all disciplines is increasingly viewed as a fundamental educational capability. Science can play a potentially important role in the nurturing of creativity. Research also suggests that creative pedagogy, including interdisciplinary teaching with Science and the Arts, can engage students with science. Previous studies into teachers' attitudes to the relationship between science and creativity have been largely situated within national educational contexts.Purpose: This study, part of the large EU funded CREATIONs project, explores educators' perspectives on the relationship between Science and Creativity across national contexts drawn from Europe and beyond.Sample and Methods: 270 educators, broadly defined to include primary (age 4-11) and secondary (age 11-18) teachers and trainee teachers, informal educators and teacher educators, responded to a survey designed to explore perceptions of the relationship between science and creativity. Respondents were a convenience sample recruited by project partners and through online media. The elements of the survey reported here included Likert-scale questions, open response questions, and ranking questions in the form of an electronic self-administered questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was used to develop a combined attitude scale labelled 'science is creative', with results compared across nationalities and phases of education. Open question responses were analysed thematically to allow more nuanced interpretation of the descriptive statistical findings. Results:The findings show broad agreement internationally and across phases that science is a creative endeavour, with a small number of educators disagreeing about the 3 relationship between science and creativity in the context of school science. Those who disagreed were usually secondary science teachers, from England, Malta or outside Europe (primarily from the United States). The role of scientific knowledge within creativity in science education was found to be contentious. Conclusions:That educators broadly see science as creative is unsurprising, but initial exploration of educators' perspectives internationally shows some areas of difference.These were especially apparent for educators working in formal education, particularly relating to the role of knowledge with respect to creativity in science. With current interest in STEAM education, further investigation to understand potential mediating factors of national educational contexts on teachers' perspectives with respect to the role of disciplinary knowledge(s) in creativity and their interaction in interdisciplinary teaching and learning, is recommended.

STEAM teaching professional development works: effects on students’ creativity and motivation

“…Our findings are in line with the literature: the close connection between self-efficacy and creativity is evident when we examine the factors supporting them (Chappell et al, 2019;Conradty & Bogner, 2020b;Hetherington et al, 2020). Self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations (Bandura, 2012).…”

“…Self-efficacy seems to play a key role in both developing a healthy, productive personality and motivating people to learn. Creativity in STEAM revealed promising results in current research fostering motivation of students (Chappell et al, 2019;Conradty & Bogner, 2020b;Hetherington et al, 2020). In search of a solution, STEM in combination with Arts is discussed to help to bridge these barriers (Henriksen, 2014): STEAM could improve STEM's reputation, reintroducing creativity in the form of art.…”

Creative Pedagogy and Environmental Responsibility

“…Working across eleven countries, the project was situated in the context of the growing STE(A)M education movement with the aim of engaging more students with science. Research conducted as part of this project included: 1) an exploration of the role of dialogue and materiality/embodiment in science|arts pedagogy across four cases in three participant countries (Chappell et al, 2019); 2) European educators' perspectives on creativity in science (Hetherington et al, 2019b); and 3) monitoring students' creativity in science|arts contexts (Conradty & Bogner, 2018;Thuneberg, Salmi & Bogner, 2018). Underpinning this work was an extensive literature review and workshopping process in which a set of eight features of creative pedagogy were developed (Chappell et al, 2015) and used to design teaching and learning activities for approximately 100 different science|arts activities across Europe, including the one explored in this chapter.…”

“…We shifted to the term transdisciplinarity rather than interdisciplinarity, or the integration of disciplines, because for us it implies a sense of disciplinary equality that is not necessarily the case in interdisciplinary practices where one discipline supports the learning in the other. In transdisciplinary practice, then, creativity and innovation lie in the generation of and response to new questions whilst maintaining a connection to the ideas and processes embodied in existing, and ongoing, disciplinary knowledges, practices and creativities -acknowledging that creativity emerges and materialises differently in different disciplinary contexts (Colucci-Gray et al, 2017;Hetherington et al, 2019b). This leads to a question-driven approach to teaching for creativity through STEAM.…”

“…Related to Barad's concept of intra-action, we have elsewhere (Chappell et al, 2019), developing an earlier conceptualisation of "living dialogic space" (Chappell & Craft, 2011), articulated in detail how embodied dialogue can contribute to the enactment and materialisation of creative transdisciplinary pedagogies. Further, in Hetherington et al (2019bHetherington et al ( , 2019c we explore how bringing theory from Barad and Bakhtin together can help us consider where and how such an embodied dialogue can occur. Citing Shotter (2013), Carlile et al (2013) also note how the work of these two theorists can be usefully brought together as they both work with a relational ontology.…”