Creativity in Education - Heather Dyer

I've been reading Edward do Bono's Thinking Course in order to get some exercises for a class I'm teaching on Developing Creativity. A quote in the introduction floored me. He says, "schools waste two thirds of the talent in society and universities sterilise the other third." 

A little while later I came across another quote by Ken Robinson, in his TED talk Changing Paradigms (www.ted.com). He says, "most people leave education with no idea what their real abilities are."

 

What a horrifying thought! After eighteen years of education! I asked my students (most of whom are retired or at least middle-aged) whether they felt they knew what their abilities were when they left school. None of them did.  I certainly didn't. It’s only now that I’m beginning to see my strengths - and I'm in my forties. When I left school, I only knew my weaknesses. Is this what education is supposed to do?

All due respect to those hardworking teachers, but I know what my education didn’t do for me: it didn’t prepare me for life, or show me how to be happy. It also didn’t teach me how to fix a dripping tap without flooding my flat, or drive a car, or save a friend from choking. It didn’t teach me how to invest in the stock market (or anything else), grow my own food, or manage my emotions. It makes me wonder what I was doing all that time. No wonder I ended up graduating in the sciences and then spending twenty years trying to carve out a niche in the arts without any training.

Perhaps, as one of my students said, 'it's life that teaches us who we are'. Well…yes. But in that case, should we be spending eighteen years of our most formative years sitting in classrooms rather than experiencing 'life'? Did we really need all those days, weeks, years shut in one room in order to learn to read and write and do some basic arithmetic? I certainly can't remember more than a few random facts of what else I learned.
 

What about educating ourselves by following our bliss rather than having the information that other people think we need to know pushed into us? What about being encouraged to be creative in order to find out who we really are - which is surely the starting point for anyone?

But never in those eighteen years do I recall anyone ever asking me: Who are you? What makes you tick? What can you contribute?

The first time anyone helped me find myself was when I took a month-long government-run course for out-of-work ‘artists’ when I was living in Canada. I didn’t even consider myself an artist at the time – but the course was free and I was paying my rent with my credit card and didn't have a clue what I was good at. I had just graduated with a degree in the sciences and couldn't even get work as a temp...

The acronym for the course was SEARCH, and I forget what it stood for. But on this course they asked us who we were. They helped us put together our own mission statements. They helped us create resumes composed of our genuine skills, not just our employment histories. They told us that our only hope in life was to be who we really were. I was thirty-three.

 

For the first time since I was seven years old, I remembered that I was really a writer, and then found out how and where I could apply those skills. Two weeks after leaving that four-week course (and without any qualifications in writing; just certainty) I had a job that paid double what I’d ever earned before. Six weeks after that I had another job which paid double again. Two months later I had my first picture book published.

Do you know who you are? Who helped you to find out?

Creativity and Play - Heather Dyer

I've been teaching a class called Developing Creativity. It's a lifelong learning class, so there's a really interesting mix of ages and the class includes an abstract painter, two businesswomen, two poets, a watercolour artist and a forensic scientist.

Having only ever taught creative writing before, I was keen to introduce exercises that each of them could apply to their own projects. So, at the end of the second session I asked them all what they wanted from the course.

 

I was quite taken aback when, as one, they shouted: "FUN!!"

I rolled my eyes and I thought: "pearls before swine!"

 

But then I got to thinking that maybe they were right, and that it was they who had a thing or two to teach me about creativity, and not the other way around.

Because creativity and play have a lot in common.

In order to be creative, we need to develop the same attitudes and state of mind that we do when we play. Firstly, we must be completely absorbed but not too attached to the end product. We must remain fluid and able to respond spontaneously in the moment. We must let the game take us where it will - outside any preconceived notions or linear thought processes. We mustn't be too anxious when we play, or too self conscious (perhaps that's why adults play so little). Play requires that we forget ourselves, let go, and see what happens. Exactly the qualities required for creativity.

A long time ago I asked an older, wiser writer friend if she knew a cure for writer's block. She said she met with her fellow writer friends once a month just to do writing exercises. I told her I didn't have time for that and that I needed to focus on getting this book done. She replied that she found the exercises helpful because they helped her to 'take it all less seriously'.

There was a pause, during which we looked at one another and I knew that there was a lesson in there for me, somewhere. But I didn't take it. Now my students are teaching me the same lesson. Perhaps it's time I listened.