creativity in education articles

Understanding Creativity

• Posted June 25, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

Understanding the learning that happens with creative work can often be elusive in any K–12 subject. A new study from Harvard Graduate School of Education Associate Professor Karen Brennan , and researchers Paulina Haduong and Emily Veno, compiles case studies, interviews, and assessment artifacts from 80 computer science teachers across the K–12 space. These data shed new light on how teachers tackle this challenge in an emerging subject area.

“A common refrain we were hearing from teachers was, ‘We’re really excited about doing creative work in the classroom but we’re uncertain about how to assess what kids are learning, and that makes it hard for us to do what we want to do,’” Brennan says. “We wanted to learn from teachers who are supporting and assessing creativity in the classroom, and amplify their work, and celebrate it and show what’s possible as a way of helping other teachers.”

Create a culture that values meaningful assessment for learning — not just grades

As many schools and districts decided to suspend letter grades during the pandemic, teachers need to help students find intrinsic motivation. “It’s a great moment to ask, ‘What would assessment look like without a focus on grades and competition?’” says Veno.

Indeed, the practice of fostering a classroom culture that celebrates student voice, creativity, and exploration isn’t limited to computer science. The practice of being a creative agent in the world extends through all subject areas.

The research team suggests the following principles from computer science classrooms may help shape assessment culture across grade levels and subject areas.

Solicit different kinds of feedback

Give students the time and space to receive and incorporate feedback. “One thing that’s been highlighted in assessment work is that it is not about the teacher talking to a student in a vacuum,” says Haduong, noting that hearing from peers and outside audience members can help students find meaning and direction as they move forward with their projects.

• Feedback rubrics help students receive targeted feedback from audience members. Additionally, looking at the rubrics can help the teacher gather data on student work.

Emphasize the process for teachers and students

Finding the appropriate rubric or creating effective project scaffolding is a journey. Indeed, according to Haduong, “we found that many educators had a deep commitment to iteration in their own work.” Successful assessment practices conveyed that spirit to students.

• Keeping design journals can help students see their work as it progresses and provides documentation for teachers on the student’s process.
• Consider the message sent by the form and aesthetics of rubrics. One educator decided to use a handwritten assessment to convey that teachers, too, are working on refining their practice.

Scaffold independence

Students need to be able to take ownership of their learning as virtual learning lessens teacher oversight. Students need to look at their own work critically and know when they’ve done their best. Teachers need to guide students in this process and provide scaffolded opportunities for reflection.

• Have students design their own assessment rubric. Students then develop their own continuum to help independently set expectations for themselves and their work.

Key Takeaways

• Assessment shouldn’t be limited to the grade a student receives at the end of the semester or a final exam. Rather, it should be part of the classroom culture and it should be continuous, with an emphasis on using assessment not for accountability or extrinsic motivation, but to support student learning.
• Teachers can help learners see that learning and teaching are iterative processes by being more transparent about their own efforts to reflect and iterate on their practices.
• Teachers should scaffold opportunities for students to evaluate their own work and develop independence.

Additional Resources

• Creative Computing curriculum and projects
• Karen Brennan on helping kids get “unstuck”
• Usable Knowledge on how assessment can help continue the learning process

Usable Knowledge

Connecting education research to practice — with timely insights for educators, families, and communities

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What creativity really is - and why schools need it

Associate Professor of Psychology and Creative Studies, University of British Columbia

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Liane Gabora's research is supported by a grant (62R06523) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Although educators claim to value creativity , they don’t always prioritize it.

Teachers often have biases against creative students , fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

Why the disconnect between educators’ official stance toward creativity, and what actually happens in school?

How can teachers nurture creativity in the classroom in an era of rapid technological change, when human innovation is needed more than ever and children are more distracted and hyper-stimulated ?

These are some of the questions we ask in my research lab at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia. We study the creative process , as well as how ideas evolve over time and across societies. I’ve written almost 200 scholarly papers and book chapters on creativity, and lectured on it worldwide. My research involves both computational models and studies with human participants. I also write fiction, compose music for the piano and do freestyle dance.

What is creativity?

Although creativity is often defined in terms of new and useful products, I believe it makes more sense to define it in terms of processes. Specifically, creativity involves cognitive processes that transform one’s understanding of, or relationship to, the world.

There may be adaptive value to the seemingly mixed messages that teachers send about creativity. Creativity is the novelty-generating component of cultural evolution. As in any kind of evolutionary process, novelty must be balanced by preservation.

In biological evolution, the novelty-generating components are genetic mutation and recombination, and the novelty-preserving components include the survival and reproduction of “fit” individuals. In cultural evolution , the novelty-generating component is creativity, and the novelty-preserving components include imitation and other forms of social learning.

It isn’t actually necessary for everyone to be creative for the benefits of creativity to be felt by all. We can reap the rewards of the creative person’s ideas by copying them, buying from them or simply admiring them. Few of us can build a computer or write a symphony, but they are ours to use and enjoy nevertheless.

Inventor or imitator?

There are also drawbacks to creativity . Sure, creative people solve problems, crack jokes, invent stuff; they make the world pretty and interesting and fun. But generating creative ideas is time-consuming. A creative solution to one problem often generates other problems, or has unexpected negative side effects.

Creativity is correlated with rule bending, law breaking, social unrest, aggression, group conflict and dishonesty. Creative people often direct their nurturing energy towards ideas rather than relationships, and may be viewed as aloof, arrogant, competitive, hostile, independent or unfriendly.

Also, if I’m wrapped up in my own creative reverie, I may fail to notice that someone else has already solved the problem I’m working on. In an agent-based computational model of cultural evolution , in which artificial neural network-based agents invent and imitate ideas, the society’s ideas evolve most quickly when there is a good mix of creative “inventors” and conforming “imitators.” Too many creative agents and the collective suffers. They are like holes in the fabric of society, fixated on their own (potentially inferior) ideas, rather than propagating proven effective ideas.

Of course, a computational model of this sort is highly artificial. The results of such simulations must be taken with a grain of salt. However, they suggest an adaptive value to the mixed signals teachers send about creativity. A society thrives when some individuals create and others preserve their best ideas.

This also makes sense given how creative people encode and process information. Creative people tend to encode episodes of experience in much more detail than is actually needed. This has drawbacks: Each episode takes up more memory space and has a richer network of associations. Some of these associations will be spurious. On the bright side, some may lead to new ideas that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.

So, there’s a trade-off to peppering the world with creative minds. They may fail to see the forest for the trees but they may produce the next Mona Lisa.

Innovation might keep us afloat

So will society naturally self-organize into creators and conformers? Should we avoid trying to enhance creativity in the classroom?

The answer is: No! The pace of cultural change is accelerating more quickly than ever before. In some biological systems, when the environment is changing quickly, the mutation rate goes up. Similarly, in times of change we need to bump up creativity levels — to generate the innovative ideas that will keep us afloat.

This is particularly important now. In our high-stimulation environment, children spend so much time processing new stimuli that there is less time to “go deep” with the stimuli they’ve already encountered. There is less time for thinking about ideas and situations from different perspectives, such that their ideas become more interconnected and their mental models of understanding become more integrated.

This “going deep” process has been modeled computationally using a program called Deep Dream , a variation on the machine learning technique “Deep Learning” and used to generate images such as the ones in the figure below.

The images show how an input is subjected to different kinds of processing at different levels, in the same way that our minds gain a deeper understanding of something by looking at it from different perspectives. It is this kind of deep processing and the resulting integrated webs of understanding that make the crucial connections that lead to important advances and innovations.

Cultivating creativity in the classroom

So the obvious next question is: How can creativity be cultivated in the classroom? It turns out there are lots of ways ! Here are three key ways in which teachers can begin:

Focus less on the reproduction of information and more on critical thinking and problem solving .

Curate activities that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as by painting murals that depict biological food chains, or acting out plays about historical events, or writing poems about the cosmos. After all, the world doesn’t come carved up into different subject areas. Our culture tells us these disciplinary boundaries are real and our thinking becomes trapped in them.

Pose questions and challenges, and follow up with opportunities for solitude and reflection. This provides time and space to foster the forging of new connections that is so vital to creativity.

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Review article, a conceptual graph-based model of creativity in learning.

• 1 Educational Technology Lab, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, Germany
• 2 Computer Science Education/Computer Science and Society Lab, Institute of Informatics, Humboldt-University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• 3 Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel
• 4 School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Teaching creativity is one of the key goals of modern education. Yet, promoting creativity in teaching remains challenging, not least because creative achievement is contingent on multiple factors, such as prior knowledge, the classroom environment, the instruction given, and the affective state of the student. Understanding these factors and their interactions is crucial for successfully integrating creativity in teaching. However, keeping track of all factors and interactions on an individual student level may well exceed the capacity of human teachers. Artificial intelligence techniques may thus prove helpful and necessary to support creativity in teaching. This paper provides a review of the existing literature on creativity. More importantly, the review is distilled into a novel, graph-based model of creativity with three target audiences: Educators, to gain a concise overview of the research and theory of creativity; educational researchers, to use the interactions predicted by theory to guide experimental design; and artificial intelligence researchers, who may use parts of the model as a starting point for tools which measure and facilitate creativity.

1. Introduction

Fostering creative problem solving in students is becoming an important objective of modern education ( Spendlove, 2008 ; Henriksen et al., 2016 ). However, psychological research has found that creativity in classrooms is contingent on many contextual variables ( Kozbelt et al., 2010 ; Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ; Amabile, 2018 ), that negative myths regarding creativity are abound ( Plucker et al., 2004 ), and that creativity is in tension with other educational goals like standardization ( Spendlove, 2008 ; Henriksen et al., 2016 ). As such, it appears highly challenging to successfully integrate creativity in teaching, alongside a wide variety of other educational goals that have to be achieved ( Spendlove, 2008 ).

Artificial intelligence may point a way forward by monitoring and enhancing the creative process in students without putting additional workload on teachers ( Swanson and Gordon, 2012 ; Muldner and Burleson, 2015 ; Roemmele and Gordon, 2015 ; Clark et al., 2018 ; Kovalkov et al., 2020 ; Beaty and Johnson, 2021 ). However, for such systems to be successful, we require a model of creativity that can be implemented computationally ( Kovalkov et al., 2020 ). In this paper, we review the existing literature on creativity in learning to provide a starting point for such a model–although our conceptual model must still be translated to a computational version. Few reviews of creativity research have focused on education and none, to our knowledge, have attempted to integrate the research result into a single model. We close this gap in the literature.

More precisely, we develop a conceptual, graph-based model of creativity in learning (see Figure 1 ), which we distill from prior research from the fields of psychology, education, and artificial intelligence. We design our model with three criteria in mind. It should be

• Comprehensive , in the sense that it includes all variables and interactions that are important for creativity in teaching, according to the existing literature,

• Minimal , in the sense that it does not introduce variables or interactions beyond what has been found in prior literature and restricts itself to variables that are relevant to creativity in teaching, and

• Consistent , in the sense that it remains a valid causal graph without loops or disconnected nodes.

Figure 1 . Our conceptual, graph-based model of creativity. Each student/personality, process, and product corresponds to a replicate of a plate in this graph. Red-colored nodes refer to interventional variables, orange nodes to observable variables, and blue nodes to hidden variables.

We note that there is tension between these goals. Namely, comprehensiveness encourages more nodes, whereas minimality encourages fewer nodes. Comprehensiveness means including nodes and relationships which are in conflict, whereas consistency means avoiding such conflicts. During the construction of our model, we will make note of such tensions and how we chose to resolve them. Thus, we also provide insight into consensus and lack thereof in the literature.

Following the 4P framework of Rhodes (1961) , our model has four components, namely the (social) place or press in which creativity occurs, the person who performs a creative task, the creative process itself, and the product of the task. For each component, we distinguish between latent variables, observable variables, and intervention variables. This distinction is useful to design practical strategies for promoting creativity: we can manipulate an intervention variable, monitor observable variables, and thus make inferences regarding the effect of our intervention on latent variables.

Consider the example of a math course. One variable we can intervene upon is the difficulty of a math task. But even this simple intervention may influence creativity very differently, depending on a multitude of factors: if we make a task easy, some students may be bored such that they disengage and submit a basic and uncreative solution. Other students may be motivated to solve a boring task in a particularly creative way to make it interesting. Conversely, a harder task may lead some students to submit particularly unoriginal solutions to solve the task at all, whereas other students may be engaged by the challenge and thus more motivated to find a particularly clever solution.

The purpose of our conceptual model is to make such mechanisms more transparent, to make creative achievement more predictable and, as a result, enable interventions to facilitate creativity. Accordingly, we believe that our proposed model is not only useful for artificial intelligence researchers, but also for teachers and educational researchers to inform their instructional strategy and their study design, respectively.

In this paper, we focus on providing three main contributions:

(1) Reviewing the existing work on creativity in learning,

(2) Distilling a conceptual, graph-based model of creativity in learning from our review, and

(3) Discussion of potential applications and challenges of putting the developed conceptual model into practice.

The paper is structured as follows: First, we provide a detailed discussion on the evolution of creativity definitions and creativity research to date (Section 2). The discussion is intended to show more clearly the multifaceted nature of creativity. Consequently, we discuss prior works on how artificial intelligence techniques have been used to generate creative behaviors in computers and in humans (Section 2). The third section presents the methodologies used for gathering the necessary literature for the conceptual model (Section 3). In the fourth section (Section 4), we present the proposed conceptual model of creativity, in four different creativity plates namely place, person, process, and product. Finally, we discuss limitations and points to future work (Section 5).

2. Background and related work

The roots of creativity research date back at least to the 19th century, when scholars attempted to define creativity philosophically ( Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ). The motivation for such scholarship was to find a shared trait that enabled creative geniuses to achieve works of art and science ( Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ). Accordingly, creativity was mostly seen as an innate trait of a small elite, a gift to create things both useful and beautiful ( Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ). Creativity was defined much broader after the second world war, in attempts to develop creativity tests which quantify creative problem solving skills in the general population ( Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ). Creativity tests broadly fell into two classes: First, tests that pose creative problem-solving tasks and measure creativity as the success in solving these tasks (e.g., Torrance, 1972 ; Williams, 1980 ; Runco et al., 2016 ). Second, autobiographic surveys which measure creativity as the sum of past creative achievement (e.g., Hocevar, 1979 ; Diedrich et al., 2018 ). Importantly, both classes of tests frame creativity as the trait of a person . In the words of Guilford (1950) : “creativity refers to the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people”. The implicit view 1 of the time seems to be that creativity is an innate property of people that is either present or not, independent of context. This view has been criticized in the decades to come, especially by Amabile (2018) and Csikszentmihalyi (2014) , who emphasized that creativity is dependent on a host of contextual factors such as individual motivation, ability to solve a problem from multiple perspectives, the domain in question ( Baer, 2010 ), and who gets to be the judge of creativity. Table 1 shows an overview of creativity definitions in the literature and how they relate to education.

Table 1 . Definitions of creativity in prior literature.

The current discussion about creativity research is characterized by two aspects: the variety in creativity theories and creativity definitions, and the challenges of applying creativity models for pedagogical implementations. The aspect of pedagogical implementations is important because there still exists potential barriers to computationalize the definitions of creativity. To address this complex phenomenon, we discuss existing works on creativity and works on artificial intelligence for creativity in learning.

2.1. Prior reviews on creativity

Multiple other scholars have already provided reviews of this long research tradition, complementary to our present work. Mumford (2003) summarizes book chapters on creativity, covering multiple theories that existed at the time, as well as empirical findings on the role of factors such as expertise, motivation, affect, situational factors, and development. These findings form one of the bases for our own model.

Cropley and Cropley (2008) propose a theory that divides a creative activity into seven phases, namely preparation, activation, cogitation, illumination, verification, communication, and validation. A key motivation for this phase model is to resolve paradoxes in creativity, e.g., that convergent thinking both hampers and supports creativity. In the phase model, convergent thinking is crucial in the preparation, illumination, and verification phases, but detrimental in the activation phase, where divergent thinking is required. More generally, Cropley and Cropley (2008) relate each phase to the four P's—press, person, process, and product—of Rhodes (1961) . Our own work follows the example of Cropley and Cropley (2008) in that we try to provide a consistent model that is compatible with the wider literature. However, our perspective is slightly wider, in that we do not only focus on a single creative activity but an entire course or tutoring system.

Kozbelt et al. (2010) reviewed theories of creativity and classified them into ten different classes, namely developmental, psychometric, economic, process, expertise-based, problem-finding, evolutionary, typological, and systems theories. Given the wide variety of perspectives, they recommend to not attempt a “grand unifying theory” but to include the perspectives relevant to a certain application. We aim to follow this recommendation. In particular, we limit ourselves to theories that apply to creativity in learning, but we aim to be comprehensive for this setting, including the developmental, process, expertise-based, and systems perspective, and we try to be explicit how our model is situated in the broader landscape of creativity research.

Sawyer (2011) reviews neuroscience studies of creativity, especially studies involving EEG, PET, and fMRI recordings. He highlights that neural activation during creative activity is not localized in a certain brain area but involves a wide variety of areas (such as psychological and cognitive areas; Guilford, 1950 ; Vosburg, 1998 ; Mumford, 2003 ; Sawyer, 2006 ; Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ; Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ; Kaufman, 2016 ; Zhou, 2018 ) that are also active during everyday activity ( Khalil et al., 2019 ); that subconscious processes appear to be crucial for creativity, such as mind wandering; and that the importance of domain-specific knowledge is confirmed. Despite this complexity, the work of Muldner and Burleson (2015) indicates that creativity can be detected from EEG signals (in combination with skin conductance and eye tracking) at least for a geometry problem.

Similarly, Zhou (2018) reviews creativity-related studies involving fMRI and EEG signals to assess human brain function while performing creativity-related cognitive tasks. In line with Sawyer (2011) 's findings, the author highlights studies that show neural activities are not limited to a particular region in a human brain, and in fact, some studies ( Liu et al., 2012 ; Takeuchi et al., 2013 ; Vartanian et al., 2013 ) show that neural efficiency (i.e., most efficient brain functioning or more focused brain activation) in creative thinking can be attained through cognitive training, as well as targeted training on fundamental cognitive abilities such as attention and working memory ( Vartanian et al., 2013 ). Our review is different because our focus is not neuroscience but, rather, creativity as an outcome of a cognitive process that depends on personal and context variables.

Runco and Jaeger (2012) review the history of creativity research leading up to what they call the standard definition of creativity , namely that creativity combines originality with effectiveness (alternatively: usefulness, fit, or appropriateness). We include this standard definition to define creativity in products, but we also go beyond the standard definition by including place, person, and process in our model.

Finally, Schubert and Loderer (2019) review creativity-related tests and classify them according to their relation to the 4P model ( Rhodes, 1961 ) and their method (self-report survey, expert judgment, psychometrics, and qualitative interview). We incorporate such techniques as observable variables in our model.

Overall, we build upon all these prior reviews but also provide complementary value in our focus (creativity in teaching), our scope (all variables related to a course), and our approach (a graph model).

2.2. Artificial intelligence and creativity

Our goal is to facilitate the construction of artificial intelligence tools that measure and support human creativity. This is in contrast to most prior work in artificial intelligence on creativity, which has been focused on generating creative behavior in computers (computational creativity; Jordanous, 2012 ; Mateja and Heinzl, 2021 ). In this field, the work of Boden (1998) has been foundational. Boden understands creativity as three operations on a knowledge base, namely

• Exploration: Computing the knowledge space corresponding to a given domain,

• Recombination: Combining existing ideas in a new context or fashion, and

• Transformation: Giving the knowledge space new rules by which it can be processed (a distant reminder of SWRL rules in OWL, as proposed by Horrocks and Patel-Schneider, 2004 ).

While these three operations do not necessarily describe creativity in human thinking, we do believe that it can be useful to distinguish between ideas that emerge by insight/illumination and ideas that result from recombining existing ideas. Accordingly, we translate this distinction into our model.

Ram et al. (1995) elaborate Boden's model by discussing the difference between knowledge and thinking. The authors add the task, situation, and strategic control of inference as dimensions and claim that only a combination of these will constitute the basis for thought. We believe that these extensions are suitably covered in our model by the process and person variables.

Similar to the standard definition of creativity, Boden states that creativity requires novelty and a positive evaluation of the creative product (i.e., appropriateness). In terms of novelty, Boden distinguishes between P-creativity (an idea is novel only to myself), and H-creativity (an idea is novel with respect to the entire society). Lustig (1995) suggests to generalize this distinction to “novelty with respect to a reference community”, which is also the view we take.

Jordanous (2012) argues that it is crucial to evaluate computationally generated products with a shared (fair) standard. Just as in human creativity, optimizing for originality alone is insufficient, one also requires a domain-specific usefulness standard. Accordingly, most seminal works in computational creativity have invested much effort into finding domain-specific rules to explore in a way that is more likely to generate appropriate results ( Baer, 2010 ; Colton and Wiggins, 2012 ). A lesson for our model is that the “appropriateness” measure of creative products needs to be well-adjusted to the task in order to make sure that we do not misjudge creative products. Further, there is debate whether it is sufficient for evaluation to judge the final product or whether the computational process must be included in the evaluation. We account for this by including the process in our model.

Recently, machine learning models and, specifically, generative neural networks have been utilized to generative computationally creative works ( DiPaola et al., 2018 ; Berns and Colton, 2020 ; Mateja and Heinzl, 2021 ). This is somewhat surprising as generative models are intrinsically novelty-averse as they are trained to model and reproduce an existing data distribution ( DiPaola et al., 2018 ; Berns and Colton, 2020 ). Still, by cleverly exploring the latent space of such models, one can generate samples that appear both novel and domain-appropriate, hence indicating creativity ( DiPaola et al., 2018 ; Berns and Colton, 2020 ). Such an approach searches for novelty between existing works and can, as such, be viewed as recombination ( DiPaola et al., 2018 ), which we also include in our model.

2.3. Artificial intelligence for creativity in education

Using artificial intelligence to measure and support creativity in education is a relatively recent approach. Huang et al. (2010) developed an “idea storming cube” application for collaborative brainstorming which automatically measures creativity by the number of distinct generated ideas. Muldner and Burleson (2015) used biosensors and machine learning to distinguish high and low creativity students in a geometry tasks. Kovalkov et al. (2020 , 2021) define automatic measures of creativity in computer programs in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality, following the work of Torrance (1972) . Hershkovitz et al. (2019) ; Israel-Fishelson et al. (2021) quantify the relation between creativity and computational thinking in a learning environment. Finally, Cropley (2020) highlights the need to teach creativity-focused technology fluency to make use of AI and other novel technologies. Given the relative paucity of such works, we believe there is ample opportunity for further research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, education, and creativity, which we wish to facilitate with our model.

3. Literature search

To scan the literature for relevant contributions, we used two techniques.

First, we performed a snowball sampling ( Lecy and Beatty, 2012 ), meaning we started with the foundational seed papers of Boden (1998) and Runco and Jaeger (2012) and branched out from there, following their references as well as papers that cited them, recursively.

Second, we started a structured keyword search. Here we focused on the application of creativity measurement in the area of learning and formal educational institutions. The keywords used were “creativity AND measure”, “creativity AND analytics”, “creativity AND learning”, “creativity AND tutoring”, as well as “creativity AND [school subject]”. For the list of school subjects we used the German secondary curriculum.

We searched for the keywords in the following data bases (with the number of initial search results in brackets).

• Google Scholar (107)

• ACM digital library (8)

• ScienceDirect (17)

• Elsevier (344)

• IEEE Explore (20)

• Jstor (2)

Note that there are duplicates between the searches.

In order to narrow down the relevant literature for the goal of constructing a model of creativity that is easy to use in the field of educational technologies, content filters were applied. These are not as succinct as the keywords as they usually consist of two or more dimensions that function as decision boundaries whether to keep a paper for the output model or not. For example, we encountered one paper that dealt with creativity as part of design. On the one hand, it fit our lens because it provided a clear and operational definition of creativity. However, it did not satisfy the rule that the creativity definition should be generic regarding the fields of learning.

In the following we provide list of dimensions that were used to filter the literature.

• A general definition of creativity beyond a single domain,

• a clear and well-defined concept of creativity,

• creativity is seen as measurable,

• the concept of creativity does not contradict its use in the learning field, and

• the creativity definition contains either a measurement or a product component.

In the end, 77 papers remained after applying our filters (marked with a * in the literature list). Of these, eight cover artificial intelligence approaches.

Note that it is still possible that interesting related works are not covered because they evaded our particular search criteria. Nonetheless, we aim to be comprehensive and representative. We distill our results into a graph-based model in the following section.

4. A conceptual graph-based model of creativity

In this section, we provide a conceptual, graph-based model of creativity (refer to Figure 1 ), based on a review of the existing literature. As noted in Section 1, we aim for a model which is comprehensive, minimal , and consistent . To achieve these objectives, we opt for a conceptual, graph-based model ( Waard et al., 2009 ). A graph enables us to include all variables and their relationships, as stated in the literature (comprehensiveness), aggregate variables that fulfill the same function in the graph (minimality), and avoid cycles in the graph (consistency). We keep our model abstract enough to cover a wide range of positions expressed in the literature but specific enough to understand how creativity in learning comes about. Therefore, we model the network structure but avoid quantitative claims regarding the strength of connections.

In particular, we represent a relevant variable x as a node in our graph and a hypothesized causal influence of a variable x on another variable y as an edge/arrow ( Waard et al., 2009 ). We further distinguish between three kinds of variables: Intervention variables (red) are variables that educators can manipulate to influence creativity, namely the curriculum and task design. Observable variables (orange) are variables that we can measure via tools established in the literature, such as sensors, creativity tests, or teacher judgments. Finally, latent variables (blue) are all remaining variables, i.e., those that we can neither directly observe nor intervene on, but which are nonetheless crucial for creativity. Most importantly, this includes the creative process inside a student's mind. Importantly, we only include a node if the respective variable is named in at least one of the 77 papers we reviewed; and we only include an edge if the respective connection is indicated in at least one of these papers. In Figures 2 – 5 , each edge is annotated with the literature it is based on.

Figure 2 . A closer look at the place (or environment) plate. It highlights a (few) external factors that influences an individuals' knowledge and behavior. Citations: A1 ( Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ; Amabile, 2018 ), A2 ( Runco et al., 2017 ; Castillo-Vergara et al., 2018 ).

Finally, we group our variables into plates according to the four Ps of Rhodes (1961) , namely place, person, process, and product. We use this particular structure for three reasons. First, the paper of Rhodes (1961) can be regarded as a foundational paper of the field (cited 3,099 times according to Google scholar) such that the basic structure of the four Ps can hopefully be regarded as accepted–we did not find evidence to the contrary, at least. Second, the four Ps comprehensively cover a wide variety of topics and are, thus, well-suited for a literature review. Third, the four Ps provide a well-defined framework which allows us to sort existing work according to scope (from societal to personal) and time scales (from societal change over years to second scale).

Consider the example of a math course. For each relevant social group in our class, we need a copy of the “place” plate that models the respective socialization. For each student, we need a copy of the “person” plate, describing individual domain knowledge and creative affinity. For each learning task and each student, we need a copy of the “process” plate which describes the student's work on this particular task. And finally, for each submitted task solution in the course, we need a copy of the “product” plate.

In the remainder of this section, we will introduce each plate in detail and justify nodes and edges based on the literature.

In our model, the term “place” or “press” (press was the original word used by Rhodes, 1961 ) covers environmental factors influencing creativity which go beyond a single learning task or student. Prior work has covered, for example, the social group in which students learn ( Amabile, 2018 ), students' socio-economic status ( Hayes, 1989 ), and the broader culture, where notions of creativity change over decades and centuries ( Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ). Following this work, we define “place” as the aggregation of all variables outside of a student's individual cognition which may influence their creativity. To make this definition more practically applicable, we introduce two separate nodes in our graph: the learning environment and the socialization.

In more detail, we define the learning environment as the collection of variables that educators or system designers can intervene upon but which go beyond an individual student or task, such as the teaching staff, the access to auxiliary resources, the quality of such resources, and the prior curriculum that the students were exposed to before entering the current course. By contrast, we define the socialization as the collection of variables which we are outside educators' control but nonetheless influence students' creativity beyond a single person or task. While the socialization, as such, is hidden, we can measure proxy variables, such as gender, socioeconomic status, or ethnicity ( Runco et al., 2017 ; Castillo-Vergara et al., 2018 ), which can also be captured in digital learning environments or intelligent tutoring systems.

While not the focus of this work, we note that students are oftentimes subject of (structural, indirect) discrimination based on such proxy features and special attention must be paid to promoting equity instead of exacerbating existing biases in society ( Loukina et al., 2019 ). For example, one can try to adjust the learning environment to deliberately counterbalance the differential impact of socialization on creativity.

Note that there is no consensus in the literature how strongly different aspects of socialization or learning environment influence creativity. Amabile (2018) ; Csikszentmihalyi (2014) would argue for a strong influence of socialization, for example, whereas (some) creativity tests (implicitly) assume that it is possible to quantify creative affinity independent of context, in a lab setting ( Torrance, 1972 ; Williams, 1980 ). Further, the relationship between socialization and observable, easy-to-measure demographic variables is complex and one can argue for different scales ( Buchmann, 2002 ). Our model is abstract enough to accommodate either position: If one believes that socialization has a small or large influence, one can apply a small or large weight to the respective arrow. Similarly, one could fill the “demographic features” node with different scales, depending on which aspects of socialization should be measured.

4.2. Person

In our model, a person is a student who is enrolled in a course or an intelligent tutoring system and has an individual capacity for creative achievement within this course.

A large number of prior works has investigated which personality traits or skills facilitate creativity. For example, Hayes (1989) argues that creative thinking can be broken down into a combination of other skills, like domain knowledge, general education, mental flexibility, different representations of knowledge, and hard work. Hayes (1989) also claims that there is no relation between general intelligence and creativity, after controlling for domain knowledge and education. By contrast, Guilford (1967) argues that intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity, which sparked an ongoing series of empiric studies (e.g., Jauk et al., 2013 ; Weiss et al., 2020 ). Beyond intelligence and cognitive skills, there has been ample research on the connection between personality traits, especially openness to experiences and extraversion in the big-five inventory (e.g., Eysenck, 1993 ; Sung and Choi, 2009 ; Karwowski et al., 2013 ; Jauk et al., 2014 ).

Most tests for of a person's capacity for creativity assess either the amount of past creative achievement via biographic questions ( Hocevar, 1979 ; Diedrich et al., 2018 ), or confront a person with a specific, psychometrically validated creative task and measure their performance in this task ( Torrance, 1972 ; Williams, 1980 ; Runco et al., 2016 ). Such tasks typically consist of a prompt, in response to which a person is asked to come up with as many ideas as possible. The number (fluency), distinctness (flexibility), and novelty (originality) of these ideas is then used as a measure of creativity ( Torrance, 1972 ; Kim, 2006 ).

Note that all these tests share an implicit assumption, namely that creativity is, to some degree, generalizable. In other words, if a person behaves creatively in one context, this translates to creativity in other contexts. This is in tension with the view that creativity can only be judged in context ( Amabile, 2018 ). Sternberg (2005) proposes an intermediate position: knowledge is domain-specific but there also exist thinking styles and other factors that are domain-general. This view is also mirrored in cognitive science. For example, ( Burnard, 2011 , p. 141) writes: “Especially important is the notion that creative learning is a mediated activity in which imaginative achievement and the development of knowledge have a crucial role.”, and ( Mumford et al., 2011 , p. 32) adds: “Knowledge is domain-specific. Moreover, multiple alternative knowledge structures may be employed in creative thought within a domain, schematic, case-based, associational, spatial, and mental model knowledge structures, and these knowledge structures appear to interact in complex ways.” In this quote, Mumford also indicates that domain-specific knowledge and domain-general skills influence the creative process in different ways. We will account for this difference in our process plate later.

In our model, we represent a person—that is, a student—by two nodes, namely domain knowledge and creative affinity. Domain knowledge includes declarative, procedural, and conceptual knowledge for any domain that is relevant to the current course. By contrast, creative affinity includes all variables that vary between people but are domain-general, such as openness to experiences, extraversion, (general) intelligence, and generalized creative capacity. To measure domain knowledge, we suggest domain-specific knowledge tests, which we do not cover here for brevity (refer, e.g., to Schubert and Loderer, 2019 ). To measure creative affinity, literature suggests personality tests 2 and/or creativity tests, as listed above, yielding the graph in Figure 3 . In the overall model ( Figure 1 ), we also include incoming arrows that account for possible influence of the (social) context on both domain knowledge and creative affinity.

Figure 3 . A closer look at the person plate. This plate includes variables describing the creative capacity of a single student. We provide examples of such variables from the literature in transparent nodes. Citations: B1 ( Hayes, 1989 ; Sternberg, 2005 ; Mumford et al., 2011 ; Schubert and Loderer, 2019 ), B2 ( Eysenck, 1993 ; Sung and Choi, 2009 ; Karwowski et al., 2013 ; Jauk et al., 2014 ), B3 ( Torrance, 1972 ; Hocevar, 1979 ; Williams, 1980 ; Diedrich et al., 2018 ).

Our model refrains from making any assumptions regarding the weight of each edge or the specific form of the influence because there is no consensus in the literature regarding these questions. Some authors might argue that there is no general “creative affinity” at all, but only context-dependent affinity ( Amabile, 2018 ), whereas some creativity tests would argue that domain-general creative affinity does exist ( Runco et al., 2016 ). There is also professional debate regarding the value of personality tests to measure creative affinity ( Schubert and Loderer, 2019 ), which creativity test is best suited to measure creative affinity ( Runco et al., 2016 ), or how knowledge tests ought to be constructed ( Schubert and Loderer, 2019 ).

4.3. Process

In our model, a process refers to the chain of cognitive activities a student engages in while trying to solve a specific learning task, from receiving the task instructions to submitting a solution attempt.

Researchers have developed multiple theories how the creative process is structured. Rhodes (1961) lists four different steps, namely preparation, incubation, inspiration, and verification. Preparation refers to the pre-processing of input information; incubation to the conscious and unconscious further processing, revealing new connections between known pieces; inspiration to the actual generation of an idea during incubation; and verification to the conversion of a rough idea to a creative product. Cropley and Cropley (2008) splits “incubation” into “activation” (relating a problem to prior knowledge) and “cogitation” (processing the problem and prior knowledge), renames “inspiration” to “illumination”, and adds two new phases at the end, namely “communication” and “validation”. These new phases account for the social context of creativity, namely that a creative product only “counts” if it has been communicated to and validated by other people.

In contrast to these models, Treffinger (1995) argues that creative problem solving does not occur in strict phases but by inter-related activities such as problem-finding and solution-finding. Similarly, Davidson and Sternberg (1984) suggest the following three processes:

1. Selective encoding: distinguishing irrelevant from relevant information,

2. Selective combination: taking selectively encoded information and combining it in a novel but productive way, and

3. Selective comparison: relating new information to old information.

Davidson and Sternberg's view aligns well with Boden's model of artificial creativity ( Boden, 1998 ). In particular, selective encoding can be related to exploration, combination and comparison to recombination, and comparison to transformation. An alternative computational view is provided by Towsey et al. (2001) , who argue that creativity can be described as an evolutionary process. From a set of existing ideas, the ones that best address the current problem are selected (selective comparison and encoding) and recombined to form a new set of existing ideas (selective combination), until a sufficiently good solution to the problem is found.

Multiple scholars agree that repurposing and combining prior knowledge is crucial for creativity. For example, Lee and Kolodner (2011) relate creativity to case-based reasoning, where a new problem is compared against a data base of known problems and the best-matching solution is retrieved and adapted to the present case. Such case-based reasoning can be regarded as creative if the relation between the past case and the present case is non-obvious but the solution still works. Similarly, Hwang et al. (2007) argue that creativity is related to making ordinary objects useful in a novel and unexpected way. Sullivan (2011) names this repurposing process “Bricolage” in reference to the work of Levi-Strauss (1966) .

There is some disagreement in the literature regarding the creative process. Nonetheless, we aim to provide a model that is as widely compatible as possible while remaining useful. In particular, we include three cognitive processes, namely incubation, recombination, and insight. Incubation refers to processing the existing set of ideas to support idea generation. Recombination refers to generating new ideas by combining existing ones. Finally, insight refers to generating new ideas beyond combination, e.g., via re-purposing. Both recombination and insight generate ideas which the student needs to validate against the problem at hand ( Cropley and Cropley, 2008 ). After validation, the ideas become part of the “idea bundle”, that is, the current working set of ideas that may end up as parts of the solution. Note that our model is compatible both with models that emphasize the order of different phases ( Cropley and Cropley, 2008 ), as well as models which focus more on the different types of operations used to generate creative ideas, without regard for their order ( Davidson and Sternberg, 1984 ; Treffinger, 1995 ). Across theories, there is broad agreement that ideas can be generated via recombination or insight and that they get filtered or validated before they become part of a solution to a learning task.

The final component of our process model is the affective state. Amabile (2018) argues that the affective state influences creativity, which is confirmed by several empiric studies. For example, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) finds that a positive affective state (such as flow state) is identified in individuals when they are being highly creative; Vosburg (1998) find that positive mood facilitates divergent thinking; and the review of Davis (2009) finds that (moderate amounts of) positive also affect enhances creativity. However, George and Zhou (2002) also point to scenarios where bad mood is related to better creativity outputs, especially when short moments of frustration motivate refinement and improvement ( Muldner and Burleson, 2015 , as described by), which could be seen as an aspect of incubation. Further, Baird et al. (2012) ; Sawyer (2011) found that absent-mindedness or mind-wandering are crucial to incubation. Accordingly, we include an arrow form the affective state to incubation, yielding the graph of blue nodes in Figure 4 .

Figure 4 . A closer look at the process plate. The nodes represent different stages of the student cognitive process to generate and validate creative ideas, namely insight, incubation, and recombination, as well as the affective state which influences the process and the idea bundle as result of the process. Citations: C1 ( George and Zhou, 2002 ; Sawyer, 2011 ; Baird et al., 2012 ), C2 ( Rhodes, 1961 ; Cropley and Cropley, 2008 ), C3 ( Davidson and Sternberg, 1984 ; Boden, 1998 ), C4/C5 ( Cropley and Cropley, 2008 ), C6 ( Cooper et al., 2010 ; Blanchard et al., 2014 ; Muldner and Burleson, 2015 ; Pham and Wang, 2015 ; Faber et al., 2018 ), C7 ( Kim, 2006 ; Huang et al., 2010 ; Bower, 2011 ; Sullivan, 2011 ; Liu et al., 2016 ), C8 ( Amabile et al., 2002 ; Baer and Oldham, 2006 ).

Figure 5 . A closer look at the product plate. It describes the creativity of a product in terms of correctness, fluency, flexibility, and originality. Citations: D1 ( Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ), D2 ( Torrance, 1972 ; Huang et al., 2010 ; Muldner and Burleson, 2015 ; Yeh and Lin, 2015 ; Kovalkov et al., 2020 , 2021 ).

In line with Cropley and Cropley (2008) ; Amabile (1982) ; Baer (2010) , we emphasize that different cognitive skills contribute to different parts of the creative process. For example, domain knowledge is required for both insight and recombination of ideas, whereas creative affinity more broadly may also affect incubation ( Burnard, 2011 ), as summarized in Baer (2010) . Within creative affinity, one may also distinguish between divergent thinking, which is crucial for recombination and insight, whereas convergent thinking is crucial for filtering ideas before they get added to the idea bundle ( Cropley and Cropley, 2008 ).

While the process is, in principle, hidden because it occurs inside a student's mind, there do exist approaches to measure different aspects of the creative process as it happens. First, we can monitor a students' affective state via biosignals, as is evidenced by the literature on the detection of mind-wandering via skin conductance ( Cooper et al., 2010 ; Blanchard et al., 2014 ; Muldner and Burleson, 2015 ), heart rate ( Pham and Wang, 2015 ), or eye movement ( Iqbal et al., 2004 ; Schultheis and Jameson, 2004 ; Muldner and Burleson, 2015 ; Faber et al., 2018 ). Second, we can indirectly observe how the student's idea bundle develops over time. For one, we can ask students to verbalize their thinking while it happens (“think aloud” protocols). Such techniques are particularly promising for collaborative work where students need to interact and communicate their incomplete creative process with their group partners anyways ( Kim, 2006 ; Huang et al., 2010 ; Bower, 2011 ; Sullivan, 2011 ; Liu et al., 2016 ). Third, if students work inside a digital learning environment or intelligent tutoring system, we can log student activity and thus gather insight into their process ( Greiff et al., 2016 ).

As an example, consider a simple math multiplication question, such as 25·12. We could now ask the student to write down all intermediate steps they take. One student may apply a long multiplication, which requires the initial insight that long multiplication can be applied, the decomposition into 25·10 and 25·2, the solution of these intermediate steps (250 and 50), and finally the combination to the overall answer (250 + 50 = 300). Another student may connect the multiplication with geometry, draw a rectangle of 25 cm x 12 cm on a grid and count the number of grid cells covered. Finally, another student may recognize that 12 factors as 4·3, work out 25·4 = 100 and 100·3 = 300. In all cases, the different creative process becomes apparent by inspecting an activity log of the intermediate steps the students took.

This example also illustrates how the process is influenced by personal or contextual factors: If a student hasn't learned long multiplication, the first strategy is unavailable. If a student lacks time, or if the learning environment does not supply a grid, the second strategy is unavailable. If a student lacks experience in factorizing or is too stressed, the third strategy is unavailable.

Importantly, we can intervene on the creative process by designing task instruction and/or task environment in a specific way.

For example, Baer and Oldham (2006) found that time pressure influences creativity. In a workplace context, experienced time pressure was generally detrimental for creativity, except for participants with high openness to experience and high support for creativity, who performed best with a moderate level of time pressure. Similarly, Amabile et al. (2002) suggest that moderate levels of time pressure are endogenous within a team project, as it only allows an individual to be positively challenged, in turn triggering creativity. For our multiplication example, we would discourage the second strategy by imposing a strict time limit, which prohibits the time-intensive re-representation via geometry. Conversely, we would encourage the third strategy by providing the prime factorization of 12 as a hint in our instruction.

We aggregate all options of educators/designers to influence how a task is processed in a node we call “task features”. Following the terminology of VanLehn (2006) , task features include all aspects of the “inner loop” of our tutoring system, whereas the “learning/environment” in “place” includes the “outer loop”.

4.4. Product

We define a creative product as the result of translating a student's idea bundle into something tangible that can be inspected by a teacher, such as a response to a math question, including a log of all intermediate steps. This translation is lossy: Depending on the task features, a student may be more or less able to translate ideas into a product. Further, even the ideas that do get translated into a product may not be picked up by the sensors of our system because they lie outside our expectations when designing the system. As Hennessey et al. (2011) put it: creativity may be difficult to formalize in all its richness, but people recognize it when they see it. Accordingly, they suggest to assess creativity via a consensual assessment technique (CAT), using the judgment of a panel of human domain experts. Unfortunately, though, a panel of multiple experts is usually not available in education, especially not in automated systems. Accordingly, we turn toward notions of creativity in products that are easier to evaluate automatically.

There is wide agreement that two abstract criteria are necessary for creativity in products, namely novelty and appropriateness (sometimes with different names; refer to Sternberg and Lubart, 1999 ; Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ). For example, submitting a drawn flower as solution to an multiplication task is certainly novel, but it is inappropriate for the task. However, if the drawn flower encodes the right answer (e.g., via the number of petals), it is both novel and appropriate, thus counting as creative. Note that both criteria are context-dependent: appropriateness depends on the current learning task and novelty on the reference set to which the current solution is compared ( Sternberg and Lubart, 1999 ; Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ; Amabile, 2018 ). In other words, if all students in a class submit flowers, this representation seizes to be novel.

Creativity tests provide further detail. For example, Torrance (1972) suggests multiple scales including

• Fluency: the number of generated ideas,

• Flexibility: the number of distinct classes of ideas, and

• Originality: the infrequency of ideas compared to a typical sample of students.

These three scales are particularly interesting because they have been applied in recent work on artificial intelligence for creativity in education. In particular, Huang et al. (2010) , Muldner and Burleson (2015) , and Kovalkov et al. (2020) all use fluency, flexibility, and originality to measure the creativity of student solutions (namely in a collaborative brainstorming task, geometry proofs, and Scratch programs, respectively). The Digital Imagery Test of Yeh and Lin (2015) measures creativity by the amount of unique associations (fluency/flexibility) in reaction to an ambiguous, inkblot-like picture. There is also some evidence that combining measures of fluency, flexibility, and originality with artificial intelligence can approximate human ratings ( Kovalkov et al., 2021 ).

We believe this body of work establishes that at least fluency, flexibility, and originality can be automatically assessed with computational methods and thus introduce these three dimensions as observable nodes in our model. Additionally, we include appropriateness as required by the “standard definition of creativity” of Runco and Jaeger (2012) . However, we call our node “correctness” to be more in line with the educational setting.

Returning to our math example, consider an assignment of multiple multiplication questions. We can measure correctness by counting how many answers a student got right; we can measure fluency by counting the number of different strategies the student employed; we can measure flexibility by measuring how different those strategies are; and we can measure originality by counting how often these strategies were used in a typical sample of students with the same amount of prior knowledge on the same assignment.

5. Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we reviewed the research on creativity and distilled a conceptual, graph-based model which captures all crucial variables as well as their relations (refer to Figure 1 ). This model can serve teachers to get a clearer understanding of creativity and how to measure and facilitate it in the classroom by adjusting task features/instruction. More specifically, Cropley and Cropley (2008) discuss how to improve instruction for creativity based on different phases of the creative process; and several interventions investigate automatic measurement and support for creativity in educational technology ( Huang et al., 2010 ; Muldner and Burleson, 2015 ; Hershkovitz et al., 2019 ; Israel-Fishelson et al., 2021 ; Kovalkov et al., 2021 ).

The proposed model can also be useful for educational researchers as a basis for study design, that is, which measures to include in a study and which connections to investigate. Finally, we hope to provide a starting point for the construction of artificial intelligence tools that measure and facilitate creativity, e.g., in intelligent tutoring systems. For example, one can use our model as an initial graph for a Bayesian network ( Barber, 2012 ) or a structural causal model ( Pearl, 2009 ). Such an implementation would permit probabilistic estimates for every variable and every individual student at every point in time, thus giving students and teachers a detailed view of creative developments and highlighting individual opportunities for higher creative achievement. We note that some approaches already exist which assess creativity in an educational setting, using AI components. For example, Muldner and Burleson (2015) classify high vs. low creative students from biosensor data, and Kovalkov et al. (2021) estimate the creativity of multimodal computer programs using regression forests.

Still, we acknowledge serious challenges in putting our model into practice. First, while we justified our nodes and edges via literature, we do not provide precise structural equations, as required by a structural causal model; nor probability distributions, as required by a Bayesian network. Any implementation needs to fill our model with “mathematical life” by making reasonable assumptions regarding connection strengths and the relation of incoming influences at each variable. Some of the following questions can help designers who aim to implement our conceptual model for a specific application scenario. Is the broader (social) context crucial in the scenario or are personal variables sufficient to model individual differences? Which knowledge domain is concerned and how can we measure domain-specific knowledge? Is a “generic” creativity affinity plausible in the scenario or is the contextual influence more important? Which aspects of a student's affective state are important for the scenario? Which theory of the creative process appears most plausible; e.g., a phase model or an “unordered model”? None of these questions is easy to answer and answers will require application-specific considerations. Nonetheless, the works cited in this paper can serve as inspiration.

Second, it is technologically challenging to implement a sufficient number of sensors (i.e., the orange nodes in Figure 1 ) to accurately estimate all latent variables (i.e., the blue nodes) in our model. Some sensors are domain-specific and thus need to be developed for any new domain, such as correctness, fluency, flexibility, and originality ( Kovalkov et al., 2020 ). Further, some of the sensors raise privacy concerns, especially biosignals. As such, it may be pragmatically advisable to limit the number of sensors. However, fewer sensors mean that it may become impossible to estimate (some) latent variables with sufficient certainty. Accordingly, one also needs to consider whether to exclude/simplify some latent variables for pragmatic reasons.

Third, creativity is not value-neutral. If a system judges a student/product as more creative than another, this judgment is value-laden and should not be made lightly. This is especially critical as even a full implementation of our model is unlikely to capture the full richness of creativity, including elements of aesthetic beauty, surprise, and other hard-to-formalize dimensions ( Runco and Jaeger, 2012 ). All that non-withstanding, we believe it is crucial to face the full complexity of creativity and to be explicit where we simplify the model to comply with practical constraints.

Beyond our existing model, further extensions may be useful in the future: First, our process model does not include cognitive load as explicit construct, which is a crucial variable for classroom instruction ( Longo and Orru, 2022 ) and is likely related to creativity ( Sun and Yao, 2012 ). Second, our current model is focused on individual creativity and does not explicitly include group work. If students work in groups, we need to copy the “person” and “process” plate in the model for every group member and draw additional arrows between the idea bundles of the group members, referring to their communication. Third, our model currently does not account for personal development over time. Such an extension would require a copy of the “person” plate for a next time step and drawing arrows from the creative product in the previous time step to the domain knowledge and creative affinity variables in the next time step.

Finally, we note that future work should validate our model beyond its utility as a distillation of the literature: In particular, empiric studies in education may reveal the actual strength of influence between variables; educational researchers should investigate whether the model can be used to assess instruction from the perspective of creativity; educators may validate the model's utility for teaching, and AIEd engineers may extend the model to a full-fledged computational model for practical applications. Such research does not only benefit our model but will deepen our understanding of creativity in education in its own right. As such, we hope that our model will form a symbiotic relationship with future research: being improved and revised by research, but also being useful as a conceptual tool to guide and support research.

Author contributions

JD and AK performed the original literature review and wrote the initial draft. BP performed the main revision work and distilled the initial graphical model. SK performed revision for text and model. KG and NP supervised the research and performed additional revision. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant numbers PI 764/14-1 and PA 3460/2-1. The article processing charge was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 491192747 and the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

1. ^ Not promoted by Guilford (1950) , one should add; his paper already mentions that creativity research should investigate not only how to detect creative potential but how to ensure circumstances in which creative potential can be realized.

2. ^ For brevity, we subsume intelligence tests under personality tests, even though that is inaccurate.

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Keywords: creativity, 4P model, graph-based model, literature review, artificial intelligence in education

Citation: Paaßen B, Dehne J, Krishnaraja S, Kovalkov A, Gal K and Pinkwart N (2022) A conceptual graph-based model of creativity in learning. Front. Educ. 7:1033682. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2022.1033682

Received: 31 August 2022; Accepted: 24 October 2022; Published: 07 November 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Paaßen, Dehne, Krishnaraja, Kovalkov, Gal and Pinkwart. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Niels Pinkwart, niels.pinkwart@hu-berlin.de

This article is part of the Research Topic

New Teaching and Learning Worlds - Potentials and Limitations of Digitalization for Innovative and Sustainable Research and Practice in Education and Training

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What is creativity in education?

• Curriculum integration
• Health, PE & relationships
• Literacy (primary level)
•   Practice: early literacy
• Literacy (secondary level)
• Mathematics

Diverse learners

• Gifted and talented
• Neurodiversity
• Speech and language differences
• Trauma-informed practice
• Executive function
• Movement and learning 
• Science of learning
• Self-efficacy
• Self-regulation
• Social connection
• Social-emotional learning
• Principles of assessment
• Assessment for learning
• Measuring progress
• Self-assessment

Instruction and pedagogy

• Classroom management
• Culturally responsive pedagogy
• Co-operative learning
• High-expectation teaching
• Philosophical approaches
• Planning and instructional design
• Questioning

Relationships

• Home-school partnerships
• Student wellbeing NEW
• Transitions

Teacher development

• Instructional coaching
• Professional learning communities
• Teacher inquiry
• Teacher wellbeing
• Instructional leadership
• Strategic leadership

Learning environments

• Flexible spaces
• Neurodiversity in Primary Schools
• Neurodiversity in Secondary Schools

Human beings have always been creative. The fact that we have survived on the planet is testament to this. Humans adapted to and then began to modify their environment. We expanded across the planet into a whole range of climates. At some point in time we developed consciousness and then language. We began to question who we are, how we should behave, and how we came into existence in the first place. Part of human questioning was how we became creative.

The myth that creativity is only for a special few has a long, long history. For the Ancient Chinese and the Romans, creativity was a gift from the gods. Fast forward to the mid-nineteenth century and creativity was seen as a gift, but only for the highly talented, romantically indulgent, long-suffering and mentally unstable artist. Fortunately, in the 1920s the field of science began to look at creativity as a series of human processes. Creative problem solving was the initial focus, from idea generation to idea selection and the choice of a final product. The 1950s were a watershed moment for creativity. After the Second World War, the Cold War began and competition for creative solutions to keep a technological advantage was intense. It was at this time that the first calls for STEM in education and its associated creativity were made. Since this time, creativity has been researched across a whole range of human activities, including maths, science, engineering, business and the arts.

The components of creativity

So what exactly is creativity? In the academic field of creativity, there is broad consensus regarding the definition of creativity and the components which make it up. Creativity is the interaction between the learning environment, both physical and social, the attitudes and attributes of both teachers and students, and a clear problem-solving process which produces a perceptible product (that can be an idea or a process as well as a tangible physical object). Creativity is producing something new, relevant and useful to the person or people who created the product within their own social context. The idea of context is very important in education. Something that is very creative to a Year One student – for example, the discovery that a greater incline on a ramp causes objects to roll faster – would not be considered creative in a university student. Creativity can also be used to propose new solutions to problems in different contexts, communities or countries. An example of this is having different schools solve the same problem and share solutions.

Creativity is an inherent part of learning. Whenever we try something new, there is an element of creativity involved. There are different levels of creativity, and creativity develops with both time and experience. A commonly cited model of creativity is the 4Cs [i] . At the mini-c level of creativity, what someone creates might not be revolutionary, but it is new and meaningful to them. For example, a child brings home their first drawing from school. It means something to the child, and they are excited to have produced it. It may show a very low level of skill but create a high level of emotional response which inspires the child to share it with their parents.

The little-c level of creativity is one level up from the mini-c level, in that it involves feedback from others combined with an attempt to build knowledge and skills in a particular area. For example, the painting the child brought home might receive some positive feedback from their parents. They place it on the refrigerator to show that it has value, give their child a sketchbook, and make some suggestions about how to improve their drawing. In high school the student chooses art as an elective and begins to receive explicit instruction and assessed feedback. In terms of students at school, the vast majority of creativity in students is at the mini-c and little-c level.

The Pro-c level of creativity in schools is usually the realm of teachers. The teacher of art in this case finds a variety of pedagogic approaches which enhance the student artist’s knowledge and skills in art as well as building their creative competencies in making works of art. They are a Pro-c teacher. The student will require many years of deliberate practice and training along with professional levels of feedback, including acknowledgement that their work is sufficiently new and novel for them to be considered a creative professional artist at the pro-c level.

The Big-C level of creativity is the rarefied territory of the very few. To take this example to the extreme, the student becomes one of the greatest artists of all time. After they are dead, their work is discussed by experts because their creativity in taking art to new forms of expression is of the highest level. Most of us operate at the mini-c and little-c level with our hobbies and activities. They give us great satisfaction and enjoyment and we enjoy building skills and knowledge over time.  Some of us are at the pro-c level in more than one area.

The value of creativity in education

Creativity is valuable in education because it builds cognitive complexity. Creativity relies on having deep knowledge and being able to use it effectively. Being creative involves using an existing set of knowledge or skills in a particular subject or context to experiment with new possibilities in the pursuit of valued outcomes , thus increasing both knowledge and skills. It develops over time and is more successful if the creative process begins at a point where people have at least some knowledge and skills. To continue the earlier example of the ramp, a student rolling a ball down an incline may notice that the ball goes faster if they increase the incline, and slower if they decrease it. This discovery may lead to other possibilities – the student might then go on to observe how far the ball rolls depending on the angle of the incline, and then develop some sort of target for the ball to reach. What started as play has developed in a way that builds the student’s knowledge, skills and reasoning. It represents the beginning of the scientific method of trial and error in experimentation.

Creativity is not just making things up. For something to meet the definition of creativity, it must not only be new but also relevant and useful. For example, if a student is asked to make a new type of musical instrument, one made of salami slices may be original and interesting, but neither relevant nor useful. (On the other hand, carrots can make excellent recorders). Creativity also works best with constraints, not open-ended tasks. For example, students can be given a limit to the number of lines used when writing a poem, or a set list of ingredients when making a recipe. Constrained limits lead to what cognitive scientists call desirable difficulties as students need to make more complex decisions about what they include and exclude in their final product. A common STEM example is to make a building using drinking straws but no sticky tape or glue. Students need to think more deeply about how the various elements of a building connect in order for the building to stand up.

Creativity must also have a result or an outcome . In some cases the result may be a specific output, such as the correct solution to a maths problem, a poem in the form of a sonnet, or a scientific experiment to demonstrate a particular type of reaction. As noted above, outputs may also be intangible: they might be an idea for a solution or a new way of looking at existing knowledge and ideas. The outcome of creativity may not necessarily be pre-determined and, when working with students, generating a specific number of ideas might be a sufficient creative outcome.

Myths about creativity

It is important that students are aware of the components that make up creativity, but it is also critical that students understand what creativity is not, and that the notion of creativity has been beset by a number of myths. The science of creativity has made great progress over the last 20 years and research has dispelled the following myths:

• Creativity is only for the gifted
• Creativity is only for those with a mental illness
• Creativity only lives in the arts
• Creativity cannot be taught
• Creativity cannot be learned
• Creativity cannot be assessed
• Schools kill creativity in their students
• Teachers do not understand what creativity is
• Teachers do not like creative students

The science of creativity has come a long way from the idea of being bestowed by the gods of ancient Rome and China. We now know that creativity can be taught, learned and assessed in schools. We know that everyone can develop their creative capacities in a wide range of areas, and that creativity can develop from purely experiential play to a body of knowledge and skills that increases with motivation and feedback.

Creativity in education 

The world of education is now committed to creativity. Creativity is central to policy and curriculum documents in education systems from Iceland to Estonia, and of course New Zealand. The origins of this global shift lie in the 1990s, and it was driven predominantly by economics rather than educational philosophy.

There has also been a global trend in education to move from knowledge acquisition to competency development. Creativity often is positioned as a competency or skill within educational frameworks. However, it is important to remember that the incorporation of competencies into a curriculum does not discount the importance of knowledge acquisition. Research in cognitive science demonstrates that students need fundamental knowledge and skills. Indeed, it is the sound acquisition of knowledge that enables students to apply it in creative ways . It is essential that teachers consider both how they will support their students to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in their learning area as well as the opportunities they will provide for applying this knowledge in ways that support creativity. In fact, creativity requires two different sets of knowledge: knowledge and skills in the learning area, and knowledge of and skills related to the creative process, from idea generation to idea selection, as well as the appropriate attitudes, attributes and environment.

Supporting students to be creative

In order for teachers to support students to be creative, they should attend to four key areas. Firstly, creativity needs an appropriate physical and social environment . Students need to feel a sense of psychological safety when being creative. The role of the teacher is to ensure that all ideas are listened to and given feedback in a respectful manner. In terms of the physical environment, a set of simple changes rather than a complete redesign of classrooms is required: modifying the size and makeup of student groups, working on both desks and on whiteboards, or taking students outside as part of the idea generation process can develop creative capacity. Even something as simple as making students more aware of the objects and affordances which lie within a classroom may help with the creative process.

Secondly, teachers can support students to develop the attitudes and attributes required for creativity , which include persistence, discipline, resilience, and curiosity. Students who are more intellectually curious are open to new experiences and can look at problems from multiple perspectives, which builds creative capacity. In maths, for example, this can mean students being shown three or four different ways to solve a problem and selecting the method that best suits them. In Japan, students are rewarded for offering multiple paths to a solution as well as coming up with the correct answer.

Thirdly, teachers can support the creative process . It begins with problem solving, or problem posing, and moves on to idea generation. There are a number of methods which can be used when generating ideas such as brainstorming, in which as many ideas as possible are generated by the individual or by a group. Another effective method, which has the additional benefit of showing the relationships between the ideas as they are generated, is mind-mapping. For example, rather than looking at possible causes of World War Two as a list, it might be better to categorise them into political, social and economic categories using a mind map or some other form of graphic organiser. This creative visual representation may provide students with new and useful insights into the causes of the war. Students may also realise that there are more categories that need to be considered and added, thus allowing them to move from surface to deep learning as they explore relationships rather than just recalling facts. Remember that creativity is not possible without some knowledge and skills in that subject area. For instance, proposing that World War Two was caused by aliens may be considered imaginative, but it is definitely not creative.

The final element to be considered is that of the outcomes – the product or results – of creativity . However, as with many other elements of education, it may be more useful to formatively assess the process which the students have gone through rather than the final product. By exploring how students generated ideas, whether the method of recording ideas was effective, whether the final solutions were practical, and whether they demonstrated curiosity or resilience can often be more useful than merely grading the final product. Encouraging the students to self-reflect during the creative process also provides students with increased skills in metacognition, as well as having a deeper understanding of the evolution of their creative competencies. It may in fact mean that the final grade for a piece of work may take into account a combination of the creative process as observed by the teacher, the creative process as experienced and reported by the student, and the final product, tangible or intangible.

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[i] Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The four C model of creativity .  Review of General Psychology,  13(1), 1-12.

By Tim Patston

PREPARED FOR THE EDUCATION HUB BY

Dr Tim Patston

Dr Tim Patston is a researcher and educator with more than thirty years’ experience working with Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education providers and currently is the leader of consultancy activities for C reative Actions . He also is a senior adjunct at the University of South Australia in UniSA STEM and a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne in the Graduate School of Education. He publishes widely in the field of Creative Education and the development of creative competencies and is the featured expert on creativity in the documentary Finding Creativity, to be released in 2021. 

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Connecting for Creativity in Higher Education

• Open access
• Published: 13 May 2022
• Volume 48 , pages 127–143, ( 2023 )

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• John Rae   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4694-9604 1  

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Creativity is an important goal for higher education yet there is limited guidance on how to facilitate it at an organisational level. This arts-based exploration of the experiences of three award-winning academics who have been recognised for their creative work identifies that creativity can emerge from three interrelated factors — conversations and relationships, liminal space and leadership. These factors combined form a useful model that offers higher education institutions a means for enhancing creativity at a time when arguably it has never been needed more. The three factors are easily articulated, not resource-dependent or contingent on specialist knowledge or skill and will likely be well accepted by academics, academic leaders and others who participate in higher education.

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Introduction

Educators and researchers agree that creativity in higher education is relevant (Jahnke & Liebscher, 2020 ). It is the basis of discovery (Tanggaard, 2018 ), considered a key skill for twenty-first century learning (Egan, et al., 2017 ) and is drawn on in times of stress, for example during the current COVID pandemic (Mercier, et al., 2021 ). It would be reasonable to argue, as Tosey ( 2006 ) foretold, that there has not been a time when higher education needs creativity more. This is not only because of COVID; the concern goes even deeper than that and includes the neoliberal project that higher education has been drawn into. Here is an issue that has implications for not only students and academics, but for higher education institutions and government authorities, as well as the industries and communities that higher education serves. How can creativity, a concept for which no precise meaning exists (Gilmartin, 1999 ), be thought about and facilitated in higher education? This is the question addressed in this research, a question directed at an organisational level — the university level.

To think differently about creativity requires one to go beyond the so called ‘interactionist approach’, where individual creativity cascades into group creativity, which in turn cascades into organisational creativity (Woodman et al., 1993 ). One also has to go beyond, say, how to develop students’ creativity, as has been discussed by Norman Jackson and Christine Sinclair ( 2006 ), or how to assess students’ creativity, which has been dealt with by John Cowan ( 2006 ), or how to develop academics to teach more creatively (Wisdom, 2006 ). Here I am interested in what Andrew Hargadon and Beth Bechky describe as the ‘fleeting coincidence of behaviours that triggers moments [original emphasis] when creative insights emerge’( 2006 ) — a ‘supraindividual’ (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006 ) or perhaps ‘supragroup’ or ‘supreinstitutional’ perspective, though I should declare my reservation about Hargadon and Bechky’s ‘moments’ as times when creativity emerges, which may merely be when creativity surfaces and becomes visible, out of a process of continual development.

To think differently about creativity also requires a fresh starting point, one unencumbered by tradition or stifled by traditional research methodologies. I start this exploration with a mental picture of creativity in organisations based on the image of the sea. I use a ‘sea of creativity’ (Rae, 2018 ) metaphor to help think about organisational creativity, including creativity in higher education. I imagine movements of water molecules creating waves that are the sea; not just something passing over it. In the same way, ‘creativity does not happen at the edge but in the reconfiguration of the centre itself’ (Moran, 2009 ). So, in the higher education institution, and no doubt other types of institutions, creativity would be considered omnipresent. The beach, where the waves meet the less yielding aspect of an organization, that is, the shore, is betwixt and between, or liminal. This is where these ‘moments’ of creative insights are triggered (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006 ).

Methodology and Methods

This research draws from Margaret Somerville’s concept of postmodern emergence (Somerville, 2007 ) and relatedly, her epistemology of ‘generating’ and ontology of ‘becoming’, which fit well with my practice of using art to think differently about concepts such as creativity, in this case creativity in higher education. Art is ‘well-positioned to provide deep understanding of higher education’ (Metcalfe and Blanco, 2019 ) and offers a critical perspective and a means for resistance at a time when, as Catherine Manathunga et al. ( 2017 ) argue, ‘the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack’. That said, arts-based methods help to defamiliarize the lived experience of academic life (Mannay, 2010 ) and this is important because I am also a participant in higher education.

I appreciate the generative qualities of art that offers ‘an iterative process of representation and reflection through which we come to know in research’ (Somerville, 2007 ). The notion of ‘becoming’ is also important here because ‘becoming-other’ is a ‘condition for generating new knowledge' (Somerville, 2007 ), sometimes through inanimate objects such as paper, paints, brushes and wax ‘that we humans have chosen to use to create’(Somerville, 2007 ).

I want to understand academics’ perspectives on creativity, so I selected and interviewed three academics from a single Australian university who had received national awards for their novel and useful work, two criteria of creativity (Amabile & Mueller, 2008 ). I postulated that if creativity is in fact omnipresent, getting back to the sea of creativity, I may be able to ‘trap [it] in the wild’, or more appropriately, better understand and facilitate it. With human ethics committee permission, and a decision to use pseudonyms to preserve anonymity, I met up with Richard Chatterfield who received an award for his academic leadership, Jane Strickland, similarly recognised for her work in pedagogy and the fact that she developed a virtual environment to teach fire investigation, and Stuart Truman who had a highly regarded approach to teaching philosophy. In fact, I had two conversations with Richard, Jane and Stuart. Between each of the first and second conversations I made artworks and I took these back at each of these second interviews. This allowed me to probe deeper and to decontextualise and recontextualise the participants’ ideas so that new families of association and structures of meaning (Carter, 2007 ) were established.

Metaphor assisted here too; the ‘partial and ambiguous applicability to the object of study stimulates theory builders to be creative in their interpretations and to generate new insights’ (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011 ). This practice goes back to Aristotle who observed how metaphors can offer fresh understandings, in a way that ordinary words cannot (as cited in Miller, 1996 ). In this study, art and metaphor were used together. Both were useful generative devices, individually and collectively. They also helped to render the research materials –  transcript material or research notes – ‘strange’, referring back to Paul Carter ( 2007 ). In this way, arguments challenged each other, contradictions and generalisations were identified, complexities of dichotomies were disentangled, alternative readings were sought and marginalised voices (Grbich, 2012 ) were acknowledged.

When I carefully reviewed all six transcripts (two for each of the three participants) I found that there were four interrelated themes that could be used to understand and potentially facilitate the process of creativity in higher education. These themes were academics in conversation, scholarly relationships, liminal spaces, and academics as leaders for creativity.

Academics in Conversation

These things are often a convergence of different conversations around different tables ... each time you have a conversation with someone, who’s in a position of influence, they’re influencing you, you’re influencing them, and collectively you contribute to that sort of messy discourse that leads to the outcome (first interview with Richard Chatterfield).

This comment by Richard Chatterfield relates to his development of a strategic plan for learning and teaching and illustrates how such work evolves through discourse : ‘T hat’s where new projects are sort of, have their beginnings in those sorts of conversations’ said Richard at our first interview, and this would not be the first time that organisational creativity and conversation have been linked. Paul Tosey, coming from a complexity science perspective, considers creativity to be ‘a process through which locally developed new ideas and practices become engaged in, and are taken up through wider conversations’ (Tosey, 2006 ). A similar claim has been made about the importance of conversations for organisational innovation (Monge, et al., 1992 ), which is the actual implementation of creative ideas (Bourguignon, 2006 ). Conrad Kasperson has explored the association between creativity and conversations amongst scientists too, which he claims is related to ‘the utility of people at conventions, meetings, and the like’ ( 1978 ). He wrote that ‘creative scientists are distinguished from other scientists in their use of people as sources of information and [because] they receive information from a wider field of disciplinary areas’( 1978 , p. 691).

This link between creativity and conversation can be understood in a variety of useful ways. For example, Vlad-Petre Glaveanu ( 2011 ) used a sociocultural frame:

The person is guided in his/her creative process by a broad cultural frame which is the personal representational space …. By exploring/communicating these unique representational spaces members come to “realize” other ways of understanding or doing things. It is by communicating or sharing such resources (in the form of ideas, experiences, procedures, etc.) that unique representational spaces open themselves (although never completely) to the common representational space. This “fusion” facilitates the emergence of a new representational space, the space of the creative solution (action or material outcome)’ ( 2011 )

Glaveanu’s ( 2011 ) new representational space resonates with the concept of the ‘third space’ (or third man) that French philosopher Michel Serres ( 1982 ) wrote about in The Parasite. Here two people have a conversation, differences or disagreements emerge and a new space is required where the relationship is intercepted, and mediation occurs. Another frame from which Richard Chatterfield’s comments can be considered is through the work of Andrew Hargadon and Beth Bechky ( 2006 ) who underscore the importance of social interactions to organisational creativity. Hargadon and Bechky ( 2006 ) draw on the work of Teresa Amabile ( 1988 ), Andrew Van de Ven ( 1986 ), Karl Weick ( 1979 ), and Hargadon and Sutton ( 1997 ) and take the view that ‘creative solutions are built from the recombination of existing ideas’ (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006 ) through help seeking, help giving, reflective framing, and reinforcing ( 2006 ). Paul Schepers and Peter van den Berg add that ‘Knowledge sharing fosters creativity because it exposes employees to relevant feedback and to a greater variety of unusual ideas ( 2007 )’. In a similar vein: ‘communication in social networks expose people to new knowledge that enables them to create radical concepts and transform them to workable technologies’(Grieve, 2009 ).

Social interactions, personal representational spaces, recombining existing ideas and enhancing opportunities for new knowledge are all helpful approaches for locating Richard’s comments about conversations and creativity conceptually, but here it was more important to explore Richard’s line of reasoning. I did this by making a water colour triptych (Fig.  1 ) that depicted Richard in conversation with a colleague.

Connecting with people

As Richard and I examined this picture at a second interview, he commented:

We meet at conferences and stuff quite often as well so we’ll often — we’ve probably had a beer in lots and lots of different locations looking out at something. But then at the same time we’re also looking inwards, I guess, at common research problems. And that — so it’s sort of a shared visual experience but also a shared conceptual experience that brings the ideas out, I guess.

As I contemplated Richard’s words, I recalled that in assembling the triptych I came to understand that these conversations must rely on something deeper — relationships, which is a concept apparent in most of the theoretical frames already referred to here: intercepted relationships (Serres, 1982 ), knowledge sharing (Schepers & van den Berg, 2007 ), help giving (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006 ) and social networks (Grieve, 2009 ).

Scholarly Relationships

It looks as though — it looks a bit as though the two — there’s a relationship between the two figures of either sides. And so maybe there’s something in that landscape in the middle that’s connecting two people together (second interview of Richard Chatterfield).

Productive conversations deepen relationships and deeper relationships link with shared experiences ‘because you’re both in that space’ (second interview with Richard Chesterfield). Of course, these conversations and relationships are not simple linear interactions as much as a ‘network of multiple projects in terms of the research and different combinations of people’ (second interview with Richard Chesterfield). Relationship, then, is an important extension to the notion of ‘conversation’ as facilitators of creativity. Visions are shared through conversations, becoming ‘shared visions’, and as Richard pointed out, ‘if there is a shared vision it emerges through the conversation rather than existing in advance’ (second interview with Richard Chatterfield). This, according to Richard, is different from grand visions. That is:

There isn’t a grand vision and organisations don’t operate through a grand vision. And even if somebody thinks they do, actually they don’t because not everyone buys into the grand vision. Not everyone interprets the grand vision the same way. And it’s the nitty gritty things going on in all the different parts of the organisation. Those sorts of conversations playing out that results in change rather than the grand vision.

The next step was to consider the extent that Richard’s story resonated with the discussions I had with the other participants, including Jane Strickland. Following on from my initial interview with Jane I prepared a small sculpture in wax (Fig.  2 ) that was intended to represent her experiences developing a tool to teach fire investigation by creating footage of an actual house fire. I had hoped that synergies between the materiality of the wax and other media that I was using, along with my memories of my discussion with Jane, might lead to some fresh insights about creativity.

Looking through the fire

The original idea for this sculpture was established almost immediately after my first meeting with Jane, and as I made notes which are reproduced below.

I had fairly early on a view that it would be Jane perhaps climbing through, but then later peering through, a window, and this would be a window of a house on fire and that window would be contained in a sheet of glass - thick glass, perhaps tinted orange to represent fire and that way you would be able to see through the glass and observe the sculpture from the other side of the glass as well. Jane would be supported, peering through the window by a colleague dressed in fire-fighting overalls. The sculpture would be done in wax and glass.

The sculpture created a platform from which I could question Jane in more detail about her creativity. When I went back to see her for the second interview, Jane responded to my sculpture enthusiastically. The focus on the artworks seemed to have created a much more engaging, and perhaps less threatening, climate for this subsequent conversation. The sculpture, and especially the window that the subject of the sculpture was peering through (see Fig.  2 ), posed a question to Jane, to which she responded:

That tells me, that's fire …. I'm not looking into the fire; I'm looking through the fire to what's going to be on the outside …. okay, I went to that, the burning of the house, I went to the fire, but what was important to me was, what was this going to be used for, and what was going to happen on the other side of that?

I was taken by how Jane spoke about her collaborators, and when I considered the stories of both Richard and Jane together, it was other people who featured heavily. However, where Richard spoke about conversations and relationships, Jane spoke about relationships and faith:

I feel like, when I look at the sculpture I'm on somebody else's shoulders and the somebody else is somebody who has faith in me, and therefore is prepared to lift me up and allow me to see through that window — but I also have faith in them because I'm sitting on their shoulders …. so we’re standing on firm ground, and I guess the analogy there is, I'd be standing on firm ground in the sense that, I had faith in those that were guiding me, and my school, and those people around me had faith in what I was going to produce, so that's about that solid foundation.

Jane’s notion of ‘faith’ fits with, and even expand upon, Subrata Chakrabarty and Richard Woodman’s ( 2009 , p. 192) types of creative relationships. Chakrabarty and Woodman identified four such types — no creative relationship, inspiring relationships, integrating relationships (actors mutually divide their roles for creative action) and synergysing relationships, which are characterised by ‘intense collaborative action’ ( 2009 ) that ‘encourage[s] each other’s progress, affirm[s] confidence in each other’s capability and arouse[s] mutual interest’ ( 2009 ). Synergising relationships must surely include an element of faith, or some similar emotion. Indeed, the inclusion of an emotional component such as this, according to Deborah Munt and Janet Hargreaves ( 2009 ), is in fact a characteristic feature of creativity. This might at first glance seem at odds with the work of Jill Perry-Smith who found that ‘weak ties facilitate creativity and that strong ties do not’( 2006 ), on the basis that weak ties are characterised by ‘low levels of closeness and interaction’ (Perry-Smith, 2006 ) and are considered to be associated with nonredundant information, more diverse perspectives, and less conformity (Perry-Smith, 2006 ). However, one can argue that relationships cannot be satisfactorily categorised in such binary terms, like ‘strong’ or ‘weak’. There must be gradations of relationship strength, even a waxing and waning. The creative relationships that Richard Chatterfield spoke of could be described as weak in the sense that it was outside his immediate network, yet strong in other regards. It is likely that an element of faith, or trust, as Barbara Lombardo and Daniel Roddy ( 2011 ) put it, exists in such an apparently synergistic creative relationship. Anna BrattstrÖm et al. ( 2012 ), through their empirical research, showed that in their case, ‘goodwill trust’, that is, trust in the moral integrity of, say, a collaborator, is a mediating factor of creativity.

Stuart Truman, another participant, also referred to conversations when he spoke about his practice of teaching philosophy:

Each person’s progress is connected with every other person’s progress, so that it’s a synthesis as well as a whole lot of individual things.

Stuart is talking here about students’ learning through conversation, which parallels the creative path that Richard and Jane spoke of. This hints at some common ground between creativity and learning, and organisational creativity and the learning organisation, as has already been noted by Palmira Juceviciene and Ieva Ceseviciute ( 2009 ) and also the European University Association ( 2007 ).

Liminal Spaces

Recalling the sea of creativity metaphor, the beach emphasises the betwixt and between — the liminal: ‘parts of it are successively revealed and then swamped by tidal action’(Mack, 2011 ), akin to fusion and emergence (Glaveanu, 2011 ), a factor of creativity (Govan & Munt, 2003 ). This describes many higher education environments as new partnerships develop, when leadership changes, where academics work across networks, disciplines, research groups or institutions, and where diversity is embraced, which is something that has also been associated with creativity in higher education (European University Association, 2007 ).

My conversation with Jane Strickland led me to believe that she was also in a liminal space:

The whole project was just about stepping inside and some of that was stepping outside a comfort zone, and stepping inside, because this was going to be a whole new world to me …. I was stepping into a world that I didn’t actually know a lot about.

It was my interviews with Stuart Truman that really highlighted the place of liminality in this discussion about creativity in higher education. Stuart explained to me how he is able to straddle the ‘world of ethics’ and the ‘practical world’:

I've always been a bit of a fish out of water [emphasis added] in philosophy because I'm not a philosopher’s philosopher in the sense that I don’t love doing esoteric philosophy at the expense of everything else. I've always been just as much at home in the practical world as in the very academic world, but I've had a concern with connecting the two worlds.

When I pressed Stuart to talk about any advantages of this, he offered the following:

The disadvantage is that you don’t have an exact niche in either place but it does mean you can have a foot in both worlds or both camps and that means you're not a bad bridge builder across them, whereas the very focussed medic thinks don’t waste my time on philosophy, or the very focussed philosopher who doesn’t want to soil their mind with these practical concerns — neither of them would be well placed to do that bridge building exercise.

To explore Stuart’s ‘fish out of water’ analogy, I made a watercolour painting that featured fish cut-outs that were placed against a rich yellow background (Fig.  3 ).

Fish out of water

I showed this to Stuart at our second meeting where he described ‘abstracts of swirl and sort of a cloud of both confusion and chaos and possibility’. I was able to use this metaphor as a prompt to further our discussions about being ‘betwixt and between’ as an academic. This elicited the following comment from Stuart:

There is an inherent discomfort in that position but it’s a discomfort which is essential to a certain kind of job that if I were more comfortably in one place or the other, I wouldn’t be able to play the role that I do play. Now I think all of us to some extent are that way. I think I am just a bit more than some in having a foot firmly in both of those areas.

Stuart seemed clear about the benefits of his liminal state, saying at our second interview that it was ‘useful for making connections to people who don’t live in that world’ and that ‘there can be a fertility from each direction’. This word ‘connection’ took my thoughts back to my interview with Richard Chatterfield when I first realised how vital conversations are as a means of connecting people, forming relationships and facilitating creativity. I observed too that whilst Stuart and Richard had used similar terms, they applied them to different organisational levels — Stuart spoke of the student-academic context and Richard referred to the organisational level. And in terms of the nature of these connections, Stuart made the following point:

I’ve found that the most useful discussions were with people that I got quite close to as colleagues, even as friends because then there was the level of sort of trust and openness that was really useful for deep conversations about these things.

So here the word ‘trust’ gets used again, taking us back to Glaveanu ( 2011 ) and noting that: ‘Simply putting people together never guarantees that these processes will take place’ ( 2011 ). This also takes us back to the importance of relationships, and Stuart provided me with an illustration of how relationships do matter:

If you put a surgeon and a philosopher in the same room you may find that the pure philosopher isn’t terribly enamoured by the surgeon and the surgeon certainly isn’t particularly enamoured with the pure philosopher who thinks that this person has nothing to offer that’s of any significance to his or her professional pursuits and there’s a complete lack of connection — but if, as I’ve done, you actually get to know some of these guys and to the point where you develop a real level of familiarity and trust and sharing of things., there are all sorts of possibilities.

Apart from further challenging the idea that strong ties limit creativity, this comment of Stuart’s suggests that liminality associated with relationships between people who have dissimilar backgrounds or viewpoints can be very productive. It also serves to highlight the interrelatedness of conversations, relationships and liminality.

‘Possibilities’ was a term used by both Stuart and Richard and this is something that can be linked to a psychological approach to creativity and in particular, divergent thinking (Russ & Fiorelli, 2010 ). Of course, taking an imagined possibility to creative action does require leadership.

Academics as Leaders for Creativity

I'm the learner and the leader. The learner because it is all new to me, and I am being guided by experts in various areas — but the other side of it is I'm the leader because this is new to them as well, and I'm saying this will be okay, look I can do this, so you can too (second interview of Jane Strickland).

This comment by Jane Strickland took my thinking another step forward. She added a dimension that was still within the realm of relationship but more about the attitude that creative leaders adopt regarding relationships. Linking creativity and leadership is not unusual; creativity is often thought to be an attribute of effective leadership (Cook & Leathard, 2004 ; Sternberg & Vroom, 2002 ). However, what Jane was saying was that the process of creativity requires leadership. To return to our sea of creativity metaphor again, creative actors must also be navigators. This is in fact something that creativity scholars (DiLiello & Houghton, 2006 ; European University Association, 2007 ; Mumford et al., 2002 ; Shalley & Gilson, 2004 ) have already highlighted. Arménio Rego, Filipa Sousa and Miquel Marques found that ‘authentic leadership predicts employees’ creativity, both directly and through the mediating role of employees’ psychological capital’ ( 2011 ). Authentic leadership comprises self-awareness, balanced processing (visible objective decision making), an internalised moral perspective (high standards for moral and ethical conduct and actions that are congruent with this), and relational transparency (an open and authentic self), as well as psychological capital that comprises self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience (Rego et al., 2011 ). Min Basadur ( 2004 ) helps out here too by broadening the discussion and differentiating between leading process and leading content:

a process leader keeps track of ‘how’ the group works on a problem. What is the flow of the process steps and what behaviours and attitudes are needed to make the flow work? The process leader’s job is to help everyone work together toward a useful solution ( 2004 ).

Helping people move through the creative process, suggests Basadur: ‘requires the leader to know how to synchronise the thinking of others. It involves building skills in being a process leader — not simply a content expert’ ( 2004 ). Jane Strickland illustrated this when I showed her the painting represented as Fig.  4 that I had produced in response to our first interview. Jane reflected:

The white and the person in the dark is saying to me, the white is about leading and about going forward, and the dark there is about, we’re solid and we’re behind you, but it's the light that's going to shine and go forward …. that's about supporting the person to try and achieve, and the analogy there with what I did is that the school and all the people I was working with supported me in what I was doing, in my endeavours. So, my supervisor from my masters, everybody who was involved who has supported me …. I wasn't held back. Every opportunity was given to me to achieve.

We’re solid and we’re behind you

Conversations (analogous to water molecules in the sea of creativity) can cause ‘waves’ of creativity but facilitating these conversations within and across institutions is easier said than done, especially for larger higher education institutions. Alan Robinson and Sam Stern ( 1998 ) suggest that ‘real leverage lies in ensuring that every employee has a sufficient understanding of the organisation’s activities to be able to tap its resources and expertise. The more employees know about their organization, the greater the chances that they will be able to make connections and get the information they need for a creative act’ ( 1998 ). Higher education institutions also need to ‘[t]ap into global expertise networks [and] .... build ad hoc constituencies of those sharing goals’, suggests Lombardo and Roddy ( 2011 ), and Jill Perry-Smith ( 2006 ) recommends that higher education institutions ‘blend’ academics, use ‘minisabbaticals’, as well as ‘bringing in visitors to fill complementary roles ...’ ( 2006 ). If there is a cultural element to developing creativity, as Maryam Piran et al. ( 2011 ) suggest is the case, higher education institutions might develop visions of what types of conversations would be most helpful. ‘Building connections, especially across boundaries’ (Jackson, 2003 ) and initiating well informed and open conversations can even be considered the foundations for higher education creativity. The leadership required for this should be authentic and process focused, where leaders ‘foster an autonomous work environment, thereby increasing subordinates’ psychological empowerment’ (Sun et al., 2011 ). This is something that Amabile et al. ( 2004 ) point out too:

Several behaviours deserve particular emphasis in the leader’s repertoire, behaviours requiring the following: skill in communication and other aspects of interpersonal interaction; an ability to obtain useful ongoing information about the progress of projects; an openness to and appreciation of subordinates’ ideas; empathy for subordinates’ feelings (including their need for recognition); and facility for using interpersonal networks to both give and receive information relevant to the project ( 2004 ).

Paul Schepers and Peter van den Berg ( 2007 ) include ‘adhocracy’ to the list of organisational factors associated with a perception of workplace creativity: They suggest that ‘individuals who perceive their organization as an adhocracy, and who experience high levels of participation and knowledge sharing, perceive their work environments as creative’( 2007 ). Note that Schepers and van den Berg write of ‘perception’ of creative work environments, rather than the actual presence of a creative work environment, which was something that a Amabile et al. ( 1996 ) noted also.

The facilitation of well-informed and open conversations of this nature is not necessarily easy and Stuart Truman offers some sage advice: ‘It takes some doing’, he said, and one of the barriers that Stuart identified is that:

We don’t have nearly as much room as I think would be good for us to stop and reflect, stop and think very carefully and make time to talk with people, particularly in other disciplines in ways that could be very mutually beneficial.

Referring to creativity in higher education specifically: ‘we’ve got to find other ways of doing it’, said Stuart. He was a good storyteller and, without prompting, told me about an earlier era of academia that supported his point about having time to be creative:

That sort of creativity — um, won’t come nearly as naturally as it might have in an older style academic institution of that kind and so we’ve got to find other ways of doing it. If we’re going to achieve it yeah. …. Newman in his idea of university in his 19 th Century treatise on what a university is about — talks about university being a place and he uses the term “Leisure” quite a lot. Now we might think lazy, so and so’s — that’s not what he means. He means having the time free of the normal pressure of making a living and getting through life that way, that you’ve got time to learn and reflect and do that cooperatively. It’s a social enterprise, not just an individual enterprise’ (second interview of Stuart Truman)

Jackson ( 2003 ) also identifies a lack of time as a barrier to creativity in higher education, along with other barriers such as staff and student attitudes, as well as structural, procedural and cultural factors. These structural and cultural factors, proposed Jackson ( 2003 ), can only be addressed by persuading leaders and decision-makers that is worth doing, a point that Stuart Truman also made: ‘Creativity in learning, teaching and research is being crowded out …. our academic masters need to have that very clearly before them’. This sort of thing is something that Richard Chatterfield also saw as a barrier to creativity in higher education, although not so much in terms of time constraints as constraints on autonomy:

I think that something that frustrates me sometimes with the way, say, the university operates is that sometimes it’s almost that there’s an assumption that individuals don’t have the nous or the creativity to really be given autonomy to make their own call on things. And instead there’s thousands of checks and balances put everywhere on the assumption that everyone’s going to underperform unless they’ve got to tick some box to prove that they’ve done x, y and z. And I prefer to go from the premise that people are professional, and you try and lay the fertile ground to allow them to teach well and research well. And give them the resources they need to do that and assume that they will do that and celebrate their achievements, rather than trying to find ways to manage people to death, if you know what I mean.

I think that where Richard bemoans the ‘checks and balances’ and a tendency to ‘manage people to death’, he is referring to a lack of empowerment, which takes us back to Schepers and van den Berg’s earlier comments about adhocracy ( 2007 ). Empowerment is something that has been identified as having a positive impact on creativity (Çekmecelioğlu & Günsel, 2011 ) so I asked Richard: Do you think most people respond in that sort of situation? He responded:

I think they do, actually. I think that even — I even found that people who I’d been led to believe were poor performers or unmotivated people or whatever seem to respond well to having a manager who was actually encouraging them and expectinged them to actually initiate new projects and do things they haven’t done perhaps for a while. And all — it seemed to me that all it took was for them to be encouraged and supported.

Richard’s ‘checks and balances’ and reference to tight managerial control could also be construed as a basis for the tensions that are a critical part of creativity in higher education. ‘Creative and habitual actions represent competing behavioural options’(Ford, 1996 ), and of course ‘individuals will prefer and/or resort to habitual actions, regardless of the conditions present related to creativity’ (Ford, 1996 ). On the other hand, the IBM study of creative leaders suggested that: ‘leaders who embrace the dynamic tension between creative disruption and operational efficiency can create new models of extraordinary value (Lombardo & Roddy, 2011 ). This sort of tension is continuous, so that the organisation is always becoming and evolving. It is where today’s creative thinkers question yesterday’s mental models, and their mental models will be questioned by future creative thinkers (Lozano, 2011 ) — where today’s ways, which came from questioning yesterday’s ways, become the tension for tomorrow’s creative action.

This discussion locates much of the current thinking about creativity in higher education institutions in a model with interrelated components that are easily articulated and would likely be well accepted by those who participate in higher education. Further, what is being proposed is not resource-dependent, contingent on, for example, international student enrolment numbers or even face-to-face gatherings, as COVID has taught us. The approach proposed here is also a starting point in pulling creativity back from the neoliberal narrative of financialisation that prioritise, for example, workplace readiness of graduating students (Gormley, 2020 ). The challenge for higher education institutions wanting to pursue creativity as a strategic goal is to refocus some of these ‘unplugged’ facets of higher education life, and ramp up the strategies, say, around open communication, that many higher education institutions will already have in place. The approach taken here envisages the higher education institution as a ‘sea of creativity’, to be sustained and benefited from, rather than being places of isolated creative events by clever individuals or teams. Such a conceptualisation places pressure on all higher education participants to engage in this ‘sea’ and to contemplate their own response to the subject of creativity.

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Rae, J. Connecting for Creativity in Higher Education. Innov High Educ 48 , 127–143 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-022-09609-6

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Promoting creativity in early childhood education

Yakup yildirim.

1 Department of Preschool Education, Faculty of Education, Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey

Yeşim Yilmaz

2 Preschool Teacher, Ministry of National Education, Alanya, Turkey

Associated Data

All "Promoting Creativity in Early Childhood" files are available from the openicpsr database (accession number(s) https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/195022/version/V1/view , https://doi.org/10.3886/E195022V1 .).

This study aims to find out the opinions and experience of teachers and teacher candidates on promoting creativity and creative thinking in the early childhood stage within the scope of the current preschool educational program. The method of the study is the basic qualitative research design. The study group consists of 25 preschool teachers employed in the province of Alanya in the city of Antalya, and 25 preschool teacher candidates who were students in their 3 rd and 4 th year at Akdeniz University, Faculty of Education, Department of Preschool Education. Open-ended questionnaire form was used for getting the opinions of teachers and teacher candidates. The data was analyzed within the principles of content analysis. According to the results of the study, statements on the prominence of creative thinking mainly emphasized the child being able to express her/his emotions and thoughts effectively, developing the child’s problem-solving skills, forming cause- effect relationships, and being able to create a different point of view towards events and situations. As for developing creative thinking, the opinions that come to the forefront are going on trips with the children, conducting art activities, focusing on drama activities, conducting science and maths activities based on research, and motivating children to create authentic products with different materials. On the whole, teachers and teacher candidates expressed that the present preschool educational program has positive contributions to promoting creative thinking in children.

Introduction

What kind of atmospheres and situations in class and out of class should we create or what should we do to discover and promote the real potential of children? We have tried to seek answers to these questions from those closest to the child. Creativity may emerge when the child has the opportunity to combine different experiences in appropriate situations especially in the preschool period. This may sometimes display itself while creating a solution to a simple problem or when obtaining new knowledge by using higher skills. Creating an environment which enables the child to develop a new point of view is a leading element of creativity. Preschool is a stage during which the creativity of the child is at its peak as they have unlimited imagination.

The preschool stage, which is defined as the stage from birth to the time the child starts primary education, and a time when the child acquires the psychomotor, social- emotional, cognitive and linguistic development that will play an important role in children’s life, and a developmental and educational process during which the character of the child is shaped with the education provided by the parents and pre- school institutions [ 1 – 6 ] is the most critical period in life as it affects the future life of the child in terms of knowledge, skills, gaining habits and developing these traits. The preschoolperiod is a stage when mental development and synaptic connections are experienced the fastest and highest [ 7 ]. Mental development plays an important role during the preschool stage for the cognitive, linguistic, motor, social and emotional development of children.

Children grow rapidly in the preschool stage—the first six years of their life display rapid results in developmental areas [ 8 ]. This enables the child to realise herself/himself and become a productive member of society. The preschool period is the stage which is most affected by environmental factors. In this respect, the environment affects the preschool child and facilitates learning motivation for children who are in this stage. The child’s ability to discover and learn is closely related to how supportive the child’s environment is, and which opportunities are presented to the child [ 7 ].

The child, who matures and becomes competent rapidly, realises her/his own potential and starts to become a productive individual. Creativity has a prominent impact on how the child develops herself/ himself. Creativity and judgement skills enable individuals to consider problems using different views, to create new products as well as enabling them to reach a decision by forming cause- effect relationships [ 9 ]. It is necessary to create new ideas and consider events in a different way, and create new solutions to a problem. It is also important to respect different ideas [ 10 ]. It is going beyond the presented knowledge in order tocreate something authentic by using methods which are not traditional. It is defined as the skill to create innovative and authentic solutions to problematic situations by realizing problems and shortcomings within the light of experiences [ 11 ], and it may be said that it makes the child self- confident and independent and enables her/ him to develop herself/ himself and the environment, makes the child responsible towards her/his environment, makes them productive and sensitive individuals. Creativity can be enhanced by creating connections between similar or different areas [ 12 ]. Preschool children may activate their creative thinking skills when they use an object for a different purpose, when they find an extraordinary solution to a problem, while displaying motor skills, when day dreaming, while forming an emotional relationship with a peer or an adult, or in other situations which require a creative process [ 13 ].

Children who have suitable conditions for using and practicing their creative thinking actively may strengthen their cognitive skills. These conditions also contribute to the children’s social skills development such as discovering their emotions and values, understanding their own cultures and other cultures, thinking, and communicating with others [ 14 ]. Thus, different teaching approaches that will increase children’s motivation and cultural understanding could support creativity [ 15 ].

Creativity is a phenomenon needed and used in all stages of life, is a prominent factor in the development and advancement of society. In societies which have individuals who have high levels of creativity and who can use creative thinking effectively, the level of welfare increases and the opportunities for people depending on their interests and talents are equally higher. There is a positive relationship between the educational backgrounds of people and the increase in their creativity. In order to maintain progress, guarantee advancement and to have a good place in life, individuals need to get the opportunities to strengthen creativity both in the family and at home starting from the preschool stage. In an educational environment which is based on rote learning and which is teacher- centred, promoting creativity and creative thinking is more difficult compared to a child-centred environment [ 16 ].

Teachers who can create a child-centred environment and processes in which the children can develop their creativity contribute to the development of the children in all aspects as well as playing a prominent role in the progress and development of the society in which the children live. Thus, along with the development of creativity and creative thinking, some inventions result in increase in production and the economic situation of the society. Similarly, life standards increase in a society which has a developing economy. Consequently, promoting creativity in a society which lacks productive skills can be difficult [ 17 ]. The technological infrastructure, knowledge and skills of integrating technology into teaching and learning practices, and students’ creative skills of using technology is essential to promote higher thinking skills (i.e. creativity) [ 18 ].

Individuals who can think creatively become individuals who are open to change as they can adapt to the rapidly changing world. There is a positive correlation between the level of development in a country and the creativity and creative skills of the people in that society. In order to promote the development of a country, the development of creativity should be facilitated by focusing on production and innovation in different areas [ 19 ]. The adaptive skills may involve having cultural understanding of inclusive education, not only integrating children into the classroom, but also having a teaching program that will support children with special educational needs in creativity [ 20 ].

To promote creativity and creative thinking important skills for both the individual and the society, families and teachers have important roles. The family also has a prominence for developing creativity and creative thinking in children along with teachers. There are differences between the educational backgrounds of families, and this may hinder creativity in some situations. Families may be asked to help children concerning this topic by offering training to parents and educating them on creativity and creative thinking [ 21 ]. It is seen that children whose creativity is supported in the family environment offer different ways of solutions while expressing their emotions and thoughts, discover new games, are curious and are interested in travelling and observation [ 16 ].

Teachers and families may offer opportunities to children to promote their creativity and creative thinking by considering the traits that preschool children display. As the way each individual shows her/ his creative potential, and the way this potential is supported may display differences. The opinions of teachers and teacher candidates on how they discover and support the creativity of children is very important. Therefore the best way to understand these thoughts is to analyze the explanatory information they would express qualitatively. The aim of this study is to determine the prominence of creativity in preschool education, to determine the creative skills of children as well as making evaluations on what kind of studies should be conducted to develop creativity, and to determine methods and suggestions on developing creative thinking. For this purpose, answers were sought to the following questions:

• Why are creativity and creative thinking important in preschool education?
• What should we do to promote the creativity and creative thinking of children in the preschool stage?
• What are your in-class and out of class activities that you use to promote the creativity and creative thinking of preschool children?
• How did the 2013 Preschool Education Programme contribute to the development of creativity and creative thinking of children?

Materials and method

The research design.

This study, which has been conducted to determine strategies to promote creative thinking in the preschool stage, and to create suggestions for solutions, used the basic qualitative research design, which is a qualitative research pattern. Basic qualitative research aims to find out how participants comprehend their experiences within the scope of the topic studied, and which meanings they place on their experiences [ 22 ]. Thus, this method was preferred in this study in order to determine feelings, thoughts, perceptions and experiences of teachers and teacher candidates on the prominence of creativity and the promotion of creative thinking in the preschool stage, and to study their opinions in more detail. The open-ended questionnaire template which was developed to get written opinions was used for data collection. A comprehensive literature review was conducted for the study to reach its aims. In addition, the conceptual structure of the subject was stated within the framework of the aims and limitations of the study. Following that, open ended questionnaire forms were prepared for both teachers and teacher candidates as appropriate to the aims of the study. Thus, the purpose was to study in detail the awareness of the participants on the prominence of creativity in the preschool stage and developing creativity as well as the methods they used for this purpose.

The study group

The study group consists of preschool teachers who are employed at preschools in the province of Alanya in the city of Antalya, and preschool teacher candidates who were students in their 3rd and 4th year at Akdeniz University, Faculty of Education, Department of Preschool Teaching. The 25 preschool teachers and 25 teacher candidates who met this criteria and who participated in the study group were determined by using the purposive sampling method [ 23 ]. The main purpose for preferring this sampling method is that the participants are chosen according to certain criteria determined by the researchers beforehand [ 24 ]. When choosing the participants among the teacher candidates attending their third and fourth year at university, the main determining factor was that they had taken the classes which were ‘creativity, school experience and/ or teaching practice’. Another point which was given priority during the study was ensuring that preshool teachers and teacher candidates gave sincere answers to the questions which were included in the data collection tool, and which were directed towards the experiences and practices of the participants. For this reason, special care was taken to make sure that the preschool teachers participating in the study had spent a certain amount of time working with the children so that they were able to get to know the children better, and that they could express their experiences more clearly. In addition, special care was taken to ensure that the professional seniority of the teachers were different from each other and that met the desired criteria in terms of seniority (See. Table 1 ). The data on the professional seniority of the preschool teachers participating in the study are presented in the table below:

Data collection tools

When the data collection tool of the research was being prepared, the related regulations and the Ministry of Education Preschool Educational Program [ 7 ] was studied as well as the related literature review. As a result of the theoretical knowledge in the related literature and the interviews conducted with experts, ‘open-ended questions were prepared’ in order to determine the opinions of teachers and teacher candidates for the aims of the study. The steps to develop the data collection tool is listed in Table 2 . Due to the pandemic, the opinions of teachers and teacher candidates were obtained using online methods. After the subject and aims of the study were explained to teachers and teacher candidates, open-ended online questionaire forms were sent to volunteers, and they were asked to answer the questions in the data collection tool. The participants were told that it was prominent that they put emphasis on their personal experiences and pay attention to their practices or future practices while offering suggestions. The first part of the data collection tool includes the personal information of teachers and teacher candidates. The second part of the data collection tool focuses on the prominence of creativity and creative thinking in the preschool stage. The third part contains what should be done in order to promote creativity and creative thinking during the preschool stage while the fourth part focuses on in- class and out of class activities that affect creativity and creative thinking. The fifth part includes the suggestions of preschool teachers and teacher candidates on the contribution of Preschool Educational Program on the development of creativity and creative thinking in children.

The data collection stage and ethical procedure

During the data collection process, it was stated that teachers and teacher candidates were to pay attention to certain criteria while filling in the open-ended questionnaire forms.

• The open-ended questionnaires were sent to teachers via online methods as it was impossible to conduct face-to-face interviews with the participants because of the pandemic. These open-ended questionnaire were conducted between March 15 th 2021 and June 28 th 2021.
• Before filling in the open-ended questionnaire forms, written consent form was signed by adult participants to make sure that they are aware of the ethical issues.
• Each teacher and candidate teacher was told that that codings would be used instead of their names, and that their real names would not be used so as to ensure that the participants would answer the research questions sincerely.
• The data obtained in the pilot study was not included in the final findings of the study.
• - Teacher 1 (T1)   - Teacher Candidate 1 (TC1)
• - Teacher 2 (T2)   - Teacher Candidate 2 (TC2)

This study is approved by Social Sciences and Humanities Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee of Akdeniz University.

Data analysis

The content analysis method was used for analyzing the study data of the participants in the open-ended questionnaire form by applying a child-centred data analysis method (see Fig 1 ). The main purpose of content analysis is to reach concepts and connections that would assist in explaining the comprehensive data obtained in the study. Data, which is summarized descriptively and commented on broadly, is studied in detail using content analysis, and new concepts and connections are discovered. The basic process here is to gather related data within the framework of specific themes and concept and present the data in a meaningful and organized way [ 24 , 25 ]. The themes were created according to the results of the analysis obtained using content analysis. The codes that emerged during creating the themes were presented to the opinion of an expert for reliability (Reliability = consensus / consensus + disagreement) as suggested by Miles and Huberman [ 26 ]. The reliability of the experts and researchers for the relationship between the codes and the themes was calculated as 89%. The themes which were created were presented as items in findings, and the information on the preschool educational program and regulations were added to the end of each theme in order to compare the data obtained from participants for each theme. Statements were presented in the findings of the study in order to maintain the reliability of the study.

This part presents the findings obtained from the participants within the framework of the themes of the study. Themes and subthemes were analysed by presenting the tables for the subthemes of each theme. The findings of both preschool teachers and teacher candidates were presented after the tables.

Theme 1. Awareness on creativity

• The Opinions of Preschool Teachers on Theme 1

When Table 3 is studied, it is observed that preschool teachers participating in the study mentioned the following categories on the prominence of creativity and creative thinking in the preschool stage:

• a) The relationship between imagination and creativity enables the child to express her/ his thoughts
• b) It enables the child to gain communicative skills
• c) It develops the child’s problem-solving skills
• d) It enables the child to create cause- effect relationships
• e) It enhances the child’s curiosity and the wish to discover
• f) Contributes to scientific research
• g) Enables the child to develop a different point of view
• h) It provides hands-on learning to the child

It may be said that the categories least mentioned by the teachers are that it makes each child feel special, it enables self-realization, and it contributes to the social skills development of the child.

A general evaluation on subthemes of the first theme

When the opinions of preschool teachers on the theme ‘the prominence of creativity and creative thinking’, are studied it is observed that teachers believe that creativity and creative thinking develop the most when children use their imagination and the power of thought, and that the preschool stage was a very important stage for developing these skills as their imagination is at its peak during the preschool stage. When the teachers were stating their opinions on the prominence of creativity and creative thinking during the preschool stage, they focused on the fact that it would help children to express their emotions and thoughts, and help them in gaining communicative skills. They have also stated that the problem-solving skills of children would develop, and that they could understand cause- effect relationships between events in this way. Examples for the teachers’ opinions on the first theme and its subthemes are presented as follows:

• Creative thinking and using imagination. This stage, in which imagination is unlimited, is a stage that should not be missed to promote creativity and creative thinking skills. For most children, creativity is at its peak before the age of six (T1).
• The preschool stage is a world during which imagination and cognitive skills are unlimited. Developing this world starts with discovering the creative thinking of the child (T14).
• It is important because the children can learn to express themselves (T19).
• Children who have creative thinking skills also develop their communication skills (T23).
• It is important to promote creative thinking so that they can find authentic solutions to problems (T8).
• Helping students to form cause- effect relationships plays a very important role in children’s discovering their talents. Children who have creative thinking skills also develop their skills for communication, problem solving, practice, following instructions, and starting and maintaining projects (T23).
• The Opinions of Preschool Teacher Candidates on the First Theme

The opinions of teacher candidates’ preschool children on the prominence of creativity and creative thinking in preschool children are presented below:

When Table 4 is studied, it may be said that the preschool teacher candidates participating in the study mostly focused on the following categories on the prominence of creativity and creative thinking in preschool education:

• It helps the child to create a different point of view
• It develops the problem-solving skills of the child
• It affects the child’s life
• It develops the child’s imagination
• Creativity and creative thinking are very important in the preschool stage

The categories least mentioned by teacher candidates for the theme ‘the prominence of creativity and creative thinking’ were the following:

• It enables the child to discover and get to know herself/ himself
• It contributes to the developmental aspects of the child
• Creativity contributes to the child’s learning
• It helps us to understand the child
• It enables the child to express her/ his feelings and thoughts

A general evaluation of the subthemes of the first theme

In their opinions on the theme ‘awareness for creativity’ teacher candidates drew attention to the fact that creativity and creative thinking was an important factor in helping the child realize her/ his potential, and in strengthening the child’s self-realization. Teacher candidates, who focused on the fact that creativity and creative thinking developed the imagination and the potential of the child, also mentioned the contribution of creativity and creative thinking on the social and cultural life of the child. The fact that creative thinking makes life easier for the child and would provide proactive conditions to the child in social life and in problematic situations in the future is the opinion of teacher candidates that stands out in the subthemes of the first theme. Example statements of teacher candidates that express that developing creativity and creative thinking presents positive contributions to different developmental aspects of the child are as follows:

• If we can help them to discover their creativity and develop this potential in this stage, they may create more practical solutions to situations they may experience in the future and have different content (TC4).
• The schemes created by the child in this stage contributes to the child’s creativity in the future (TC1).
• The child discovers and gets to know herself/ himself with creative thinking (TC2).
• The child may discover herself / himself by thinking differently (TC9).
• It is important as they can find different and authentic solutions to problems they may encounter throughout their lives (TC17).
• The activities which are used during this stage affect the creative skills of the child in the coming years (TC12).
• It is effective for the cognitive, social, emotional, and psychomotor development of the child (TC11).

Theme 2. Promoting creativity

• The Opinions of Preschool Teachers on Second Theme

Table 5 presents the suggestions and the subthemes created by preschool teachers for the theme ‘promoting creativity’. Preschool teachers suggested creating environments in which the child can ask questions and express herself/ himself, providing them with creative environments, having structured activities, motivating children for creative thinking by asking them open-ended questions, creating environments that would arouse interest, designing activities and games, and enabling children to discover themselves and their environment for promoting creativity. When the sub themes for the second theme are studied, the topics least mentioned by teachers were that they need to discover the inner world of the child, conducting attention and coding activities, and giving children some responsibilities in the family.

A general evaluation of the subthemes of the second theme

The suggestion most emphasized by teachers for promoting creativity in the preschool stage is the need for creating an environment that keeps the curiosity of the child active and enables the child to express herself/ himself. It was stated that a process in which children are asked open-ended questions that would make them think would contribute to promoting creative thinking in children. Teachers stated that activities which are not structured and ones which the child could shape using her/ his interest are more functional, and that they are an important factor that supports creativity. It may be said that especially manipulative materials enable children to think in different ways. The prominence of games, the fact that games open the doors to the inner world of children, that children may face different challenges and create authentic solutions through games are among the suggestions of teachers. The following statements of teachers draw attention in their suggestions for promoting creativity and creative thinking in children:

• Creativity develops in environments in which the child can express herself/ himself with self- confidence and show her/ his curiosity (T1).
• Children should be supported to express themselves by asking open-ended questions (T15).
• Open-ended questions, art, music, movement, and dance activities enhance creative expression. They should be given opportunities to create their own stories by looking at illustrations in books. Children may create new objects using their imagination by using games such as puzzles and building blocks. Using play dough may be effective in gaining creative skills by creating the objects in their imagination (T1).
• We may give them different materials and ask them to create new things, or we may give the same materials at different times and expect them to create different things each time (T3).
• We may encourage them to think by asking open-ended questions (T22).
• In order for them to discover creative thinking, games and activities should be designed to increase their curiosity (T2).
• Children should be provided environments that can arouse their curiosity. We should trigger their curiosity by offering opportunities for play and give them a chance to experience their creativity (T10).
• We should open a door to their inner world by using games and determine their needs (T5).
• We should not stereotype them while they are making these discoveries (T16).
• The Opinions of Preschool Teachers Candidate on the Second Theme

The opinions of preschool teacher candidates on promoting creativity and creative thinking in preschool stage children are presented below:

When Table 6 , which presents the suggestions of teacher candidates for promoting creativity and creative thinking in children, is studied, the suggestion that is most emphasized is the need to offer an environment of freedom to the children. It is emphasized that creating a rich environment by presenting different materials to children is another important factor that promotes children’s creativity. Another major opinion of teacher candidates for the second theme is creating authentic activities for children and providing hands-on learning.

A general evaluation of subthemes for the second theme

Creating a suitable environment in which the child can think freely was greatly emphasized by teacher candidates as a suggestion for promoting creativity and creative thinking in children. Having different materials that motivate children to think in a different way may be stated as another suggestion that supports creative thinking. Example suggestions by teacher candidates for adding variety to materials, the quality of the questions to be asked, the children participating actively in the learning process, guiding children to create solutions to problematic situations are as follows:

• We may design and implement activities in which the children can use their imagination (TC4).
• We must give them opportunities to discover without intervention. We should help them with hands-on learning (TC11).
• We should motivate them to use hands-on learning (TC11).
• We may ask children divergent questions and motivate them to think and develop their creativity (TC7).
• Asking them questions directed at their creativity while conducting activities in class (TC19).
• We must present different stimulus to motivate the child (TC1).
• It may be necessary to conduct different activities with children using different materials. Learning centres at nursery schools are in direct proportion with this topic (TC8).
• We must respect children’s thoughts and ideas and pay attention to what they wish to do (TC13).

Theme 3. Strategies for promoting creativity

• The Thoughts of Preschool Teachers on the Third Theme

Table 7 presents the strategies of preschool teachers for promoting creativity and creative thinking. It is observed that for the third theme the teachers mainly drew attention to the following categories:

• a) Enabling the children to express themselves by asking open-ended questions
• b) Making use of art activities, and using activities different from standard ones
• c) Enabling the children to create authentic products by using different materials
• d) Enabling the students to express their emotions and thoughts individually during Turkish language classes
• e) Using structured and semi-structered activities
• f) Using different methods and techniques in activities
• g) Enabling children to express themselves through drama and game activities
• h) Using science and math activities
• i) Making use of out- of- class activities
• j) Observing children during play and while they are not playing
• k) Motivating children to carry out activities with their families in the home

A general evaluation of the subthemes for the third theme

Teachers have emphasized that acting according to standard practices for in-class and out-of- class activities for promoting creativity hinders creative thinking, and that it is necessary to conduct activities with which the children can reflect their individual performance to the maximum, either during in-class or out-of- class activities. Teachers mentioned the prominence of trips and observation in out-of- class activities and stated that it would be useful to talk to the children about the activities following practice. They stated that using techniques such as scamper, brainstorming, dramatization that attract the attention of children and enable them to think in a different way in in-class activities should be used. Examples for the teachers’ statements for the third theme and its subthemes are as follows:

• Asking children for their opinions, asking open-ended questions, creating a model, praising creative thinking. Organising out-of- school trips and observations, and later chatting to the students about what they have seen and learnt (T8).
• I would encourage them to express themselves by asking open-ended questions during in-class activities and out-of- school activities (T2).
• I would make them create products using their creativity by using natural materials such as fabric, pinecones and twigs during art activities (T15).
• During classes I use techniques such as games, drama, scamper, and brainstorming (T8).
• I introduced them to activities that would motivate them to do research and create what they think. (STEM activities, coding, algorithm, recycling, ecology and nature activities, the Young Inventor and his Inventions, drama and the Orff approach, audio stories, games, scamper activities etc.) (T16).
• We frequently make use of experiments and maths activities (T1).
• Patterns with buttons of different sizes, measuring the length of objects, finding pairs, ordering, making comparisons. Science and nature studies in the garden, creating appropriate environments for them to study and discover stones and leaves (T10).
• They should be allowed to act freely and flexibly in the classroom without being dependent on a model, with the guidance of the teacher (T7).
• Preparing comprehensive activity plans that enhance creativity instead of steoretype activities (T17).
• Families should accept that each child in the family is an individual, determine targets parallel to the interests and talents of their children. In addition, they may cooperate with teachers to conduct activities that reinforce the school program and that are related to real life. These activities should be conducted starting from simple to difficult ones, and from the known to the unknown (T23).
• The Opinions of Preschool Teacher Candidates on the Third Theme

The strategies of preschool teacher candidates on developing creativity and creative thinking in preschool children are presented below:

When Table 8 is studied, it is observed that the strategies most suggested by preschool teacher candidates for promoting creativity and creative thinking in the preschool stage are taking children on trips, conducting art activities, carrying out drama activities, making Turkish language activities, conducting maths and science activities, and focusing on activities children have at home with their families. The least mentioned suggestions are not interfering when children are conducting activities, carrying out comprehensive activities with divergent questions, and motivating students to different areas of interest.

Evaluation of the subthemes of the third theme

Giving prominence to activities children conduct with their families attracts a lot of attention among the strategies teacher candidates have suggested for developing creativity. Another major suggestion of teacher candidates is that supporting children with different activities may enable them to think in different ways. Teacher candidates have suggested that motivating children to ask questions, and using techniques that promote creativity such as completing stories may enable children to ask different questions and enhance their creativity. Examples for the statements of teacher candidates are presented below:

• Games to develop the creative sides of children may be designed by using kitchen tools in the home, or parents may make cookies of different shapes with the children (TC5).
• Activities that are mostly based on the choices of children should be conducted. Families should read story books at home with the children, and later ask child to narrate the rest of the story, or ask them to change the ending of the story. Parents may make drawings with the children or may build towers with toys (TC13).
• Drama activities enable children to use creative thinking. These activities develop their way of thinking by causing children to use improvisation (TC3).
• Drama activities may be conducted by planning improvised activities on a certain topic (TC7).

Theme 4. Creativity in the program

• The Opinions of Preschool Teachers on the Fourth Theme

When teachers were asked their opinion on the elements in the preschool educational program that supported the creativity of children, they stated that on the whole, the program enabled children to reflect their individual traits. They have also reported that the flexibility of the program enables them to restructure the program according to the individual differences of children, and that this offers them a chance to support their creativity. It may be said that teachers consider the preschool educational program as one that supports the children’s feeling of discovery and self-awareness. The teachers’ opinions on the fourth theme are presented below:

• It is child-centred. Children experience meaningful hands-on learning instead of rote learning. In this way, creativity is always active. The flexible program enables necessary changes in the educational process depending on daily and momentary changes that may arise. As individualism is the most prominent element, the program is created by taking individual differences into consideration as appropriate to the needs of the children. In this way, the differences, creativity, interests and needs of each child make each children unique (T2).
• The program basically has a structure that supports creativity and aims to strengthen it. However, the shortcomings in practice (physical shortcomings, the attitudes of teachers, the attitudes of school administration and families etc.) makes it difficult to reach goals or hinders it (T6).
• The program enabled the child to participate actively in the learning process, and encouraged the child to learn by asking questions, doing research, making discoveries, and playing games. It offered the children the necessary opportunities to express themselves authentically, and in different ways in environments which are appropriate for the learning needs and learning styles of each child (T16).
• The effect of the 2013 Preschool Program on the development of children’s creativity and creative thinking is great. As it is a flexible program, it enables teachers to plan according to the interests and talents of children, the cultural traits of the environment and the self-awareness of the children (T23).
• It develops the imagination, creative and critical thinking skills of children as well as their communication skills and their potential to express their feelings (T25).
• The Opinions of Preschool Teacher Candidates on the Fourth Theme

When preschool teachers candidate were talking on the advantages of the preschool educational program that supported the creativity of children, they focused on the fact that the program supported the development of children in all aspects. They stated that as the program is student- centred, it is a prominent factor in supporting the children’s creativity. The opinions of teacher candidates on the fourth theme are as follows:

• The 2023 preschool program is a program that considers children with all of their aspects and supports children’s development in all ways. Since this program is student-centred, it gives children the chance to express themselves, and to state their opinions freely. Consequently, this situation contributes positively to children’s creativity (TC5).
• In this program, activities are prepared as student- centred activities as appropriate to the program, and then put into practice. Chatting to the children about the activities prior to practice and asking open-ended questions to children following activities may give us clues on how their creativity is developing (TC7).
• This program contributes to the progress of children’s creativity by enabling the children to receive better education as it leads teachers and candidate to the right path (TC1).
• The 2013 preschool program was prepared by studying different programs that would contribute to different types of development. It includes various activities to facilitate children’s creative thinking, and different types of advice to teachers. Teachers who study the program may become more conscious (TC12).
• Following a certain program, acting within limits is a situation that affects creativity negatively. For this reason, the 2013 preschool program makes limitations to children’s creativity (TC8).

Conclusions and discussions

The themes derived from the findings of the study and the subthemes related to these themes were discussed by taking into consideration the opinions of teachers and teacher candidates within the light of the related literature. In the first theme, which focused on creativity and the prominence of creative thinking, teachers and teacher candidates mentioned aspects of creativity which emphasized the individual traits of children. The fact that creativity is an important factor in bringing up unique individuals draws attention as an important finding, which was also proved by the research that was conducted by Özkan [ 8 ] and which sought answers to the question ‘What is creativity?’. In his study, Özkan [ 8 ] reached the conclusion that a majority of teachers defined creativity as the child expressing himself individually, being able to grasp what is authentic, and producing authentic products. Opinions which state that creativity and creative thinking develops the problem-solving skills of children are the items most mentioned by both teachers and teacher candidates regarding the first theme. Opinions which support that children may develop different points of view towards events and situations are supported by thoughts which state that children are able to express their feelings and thoughts authentically. In teachers’ and teacher candidates’ opinions on the prominence of creativity and creative thinking, it is stated that this skill may also positively affect the social development of children. The opinions of the participants which state that training aimed at promoting creativity will lead to positive results both in terms of cognitive development and other areas of development, distinctly overlap with the study conducted by Karadayı [ 27 ], in which the researcher states that we should focus on creativity and creative thinking during the preschool stage. In his study, Karadayı [ 27 ], studied the effects of creavity education on cognitive processes and the skill to organise emotions, which was given to children aged 5 to 6. It is also stated that creativity education promoted creativity, and the skills to organise cognitive and emotional personality, and reached the conclusion that creativity in the preschool stage was related to both controlled and flexible cognitive skills [ 28 , 29 ]. Opinions within the first theme which stated that creativity enables children to express themselves individually also draw attention to the social aspect of creativity and creative thinking. In fact, there are other studies which present opinions that children in classes of extremely traditional teachers may experience problems expressing themselves, and that this situation may hinder creativity [ 10 ]. If teachers are flexible in their attitudes towards children, and if they pay attention to the individual traits of children, children will be able express themselves easily, and this will strengthen the social function of creativity in children.

Within the second theme, which includes opinions on supporting creativity and creative thinking in children, teachers and teacher candidates mentioned the prominence of techniques that would attract the attention and interest of children during activities conducted with them. Leaving children in the middle of a problematic situation, motivating them to use an object for different purposes or asking them to complete a story are among the practices that may be carried out to support creativity. The participants stated that there are technology-based techniques that can be used to promote creativity in addition to techniques based on communication. Akbaba and Kaya [ 30 ], who pointed out that such techniques may be used to enhance the creativity of children by maintaining their interest and curiosity, conducted research with teachers to promote the thinking skills of children. In this research, preschool teachers stated that they mainly used methods and techniques such as hands- on learning, demonstrations, projects, games, and the question and answer to enable students to achieve thinking skills.

There are the opinions of teachers and teacher candidates which state that using different methods (i.e. arts) to promote creativity and creative thinking in the preschool stage will provide positive contributions [ 31 ]. In their suggestions regarding in class activities and out of class activities to be conducted with children, teachers have concentrated on conducting activities that offer different options to children rather than standard and monotonous activities. Creativity and creative thinking may yield more development when people break the mold. Teachers developing attitudes that enable their students to express themselves comfortably is one of the most important factors that would eliminate the obstacles hindering creativity [ 32 ]. In the findings of the study conducted by Yenilmez and Yolcu [ 10 ] regarding the attitudes of teachers in classes on the promotion of creative thinking skills in children, it was stated that children should be given the opportunity to express their thoughts, and that their thoughts should be respected.

It has been emphasized that families should contribute as much as possible during in class and out of class activities. Supporting the child strongly both in the home and at school is a very important factor that accelerates the development of creativity. Chatting to the children about activities during out of class activities, and asking them open-ended questions about the process may enrich their thinking and their mind. Making suggestions to the family to have this point of view while communicating with the child may give the children an opportunity to enhance their creativity throughout the day. The teachers stated opinions which show that if families participate actively during this process, they may provide positive contributions to the child.

Mutlu and Aktan [ 33 ] stated that educational programs which are directed towards thinking, and with which the teacher, family and children support and complement each other during preschool education should be prepared. The preschool teachers participating in the study also stated that creativity and creative thinking play an important role in activities which the families do with their children.

It is important to include activities that address different senses for activities conducted in the class, and getting the attention of children. In a study conducted earlier [ 8 ] it was found out that a teacher needs to discover the different traits of children by observing them carefully, act as a role model for the child with her / his character, and include music, art, language and game activities in the daily plan that will develop and promote the child’s creativity.

It was stated by teachers and teacher candidates that the preschool educational has a structure that gives the chance to promote creative thinking. The preschool educational program is defined as a child-centred and flexible program which places prominence on research and discovery, and which offers children different activities for learning. The program is a developmental program which places emphasis on creativity as well as family education and family participation [ 7 ].

Teachers and teacher candidates expressed that the flexible structure of the preschool educational program enables them to plan according to the individual traits of children and offers the child more freedom. The fact that the program is student- centred may enable the child to display more creative outcomes.

In a research which was conducted to find out the achievements and the indicators in the program in relation to the skills of the 21 st century, it was emphasized that 5 achievements within a total of 21 in the cognitive delopment part were found to be in relation with the skills of the 21 st century. Similarly, 18 indicators among a total of 113 indicators were found to be in relation with skills of the 21 st century. It was stated that 7 of the achievements in the social- emotional development, 5 items in the cognitive development, and 4 of the items in the achievements in linguistic development were parallel to the skills of the 21 st century. It is stated that the highest achievements in relation with the skills of the 21 st century are the achievements in social- emotional development [ 34 ].

It is also aimed to find out the opinions of teachers and teacher candidates for developing creativity and creative thinking in children, tries to evaluate the opinions of participants using a holistic perspective within the context of the preschool educational program. The following suggestions are made based on the findings of the study:

• Problem solving situations that may enable students to display their creativity should be provided.
• Families should participate more in children’s educational process.
• Teachers should include more activities that strengthen the individual traits of children.
• Resources should be provided to teacher candidates to enhance awareness for promoting creativity in the preschool stage.
• Teachers should develop attitudes that are not traditional in the activities conducted with children, and when communicating with the children, as well as taking individual differences into consideration.

As the study was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was less interaction between the researchers and the participants. Thus, this situation is considered to be the greatest limitation of the study.

Acknowledgments

This article was written based on the master’s thesis titled ‘The Study of the Opinions of Preschool Teachers and Teacher candidates on the Promince and Promotion of Creativity in the Preschool Stage‘ which was prepared by Yeşim Yılmaz under the supervision of Assistant Professor Yakup Yıldırım in 2021, at Akdeniz University, Institute of Educational Sciences.

Funding Statement

The author(s) received no funding for this work.

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Free lunches, brain breaks and happy teachers: why Estonia has the best schools in Europe

How did a small, relatively poor country become an educational powerhouse? Creativity, autonomy and a deep embrace of the digital age

T oday’s subject in the sci-fi class at Pelgulinna State Gymnasium is Blade Runner. Thursdays are “voluntary” lesson days, where students at this upper secondary school in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, can choose from a range of subjects; others taking place today include a rights and democracy course, programming and creative writing in English. The seven 17-year-old students in the sci-fi lesson have just finished watching 30 minutes of the film and are preparing to discuss it when I sneak in at the back, switching to perfect English for my benefit. “We’ve talked about Jungian archetypes, persona and the superego,” says Triin, one of the students. “It has been really helpful for me to understand the different aspects of being human and how to create deeper characters.” They’ve also studied Brave New World and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the few minutes I am there, the students touch on US history, child labour, empathy and more. “I have so many questions,” says Triin.

Me too. How did Estonia, a small country that is relatively poor compared with most of the EU, become an educational powerhouse? In the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings, which measures 15-year-olds’ abilities in maths, reading and science, the top spots are held by a handful of Asian countries, but Estonia ranks next – the best in Europe. Its teachers are highly educated, the focus is on social and personal skills as much as academic learning and the typical curriculum is packed with a wide range of subjects, from robotics to music and arts. British politicians are taking note. In 2022 Labour’s shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, visited to see what Estonia is doing right.

Gunda Tire, who leads international assessments for Estonia’s education and youth board, says the country’s success is partly thanks to its mix of history and geography. “We have had the Swedes, Danes, Russians, Germans, a lot of people coming and going. Estonians, if they wanted to survive, had to be smart, and they understood that education would take them forward. It was the same when we were under Soviet occupation.”

One of the abiding principles, she says, is equality – universal free school lunches are as much ideological as they are practical. And almost all children attend kindergarten, which is heavily subsidised, so that by the time they start school at the comparatively late age of seven, disadvantages are not as entrenched. Autonomy is also fundamental. “We have given schools the ability to decide for themselves.”

When Estonia embraced the digital age, schools were part of that. As far back as 1997, the country launched an initiative called Tiigrihüpe (Tiger Leap), to upgrade computer resources and provide internet access to schools. “We trained a lot of teachers, connected all the schools and gave them computers,” says Tire. “The idea is not to have an IT class, but to have digital skills incorporated everywhere.” Many children learn coding and robotics, and everything from textbooks to communication with parents is digital. Instead of disruptive students facing harsh discipline, says Tire, Estonian schools tend to have a more nurturing approach – it is common to take children out and teach them in a small group with a separate teacher, and most schools have a psychologist and counsellor.

Creative subjects are just as valued, Tire explains: “They all have to take arts and music, and [what we call] ‘technology’ – in other words, they learn how to cook, knit, things like that. If we allow kids that, their wellbeing and sense of accomplishment increases. We don’t think that that’s irrelevant. Some countries say: ‘We took out the music lesson to teach more maths.’ But look at a sheet of music and you will not think it is less complicated.” Creative subjects, Tire points out, can foster all kinds of skills such as teamwork and problem-solving. She smiles when she remembers watching teenage boys at a large festival last year enthusiastically taking part in folk dances they’d learned at school. “It’s a physical activity, gives you joy, and you are in a group and have to use communication skills.”

To progress into upper secondary, the equivalent of sixth form, students take just three exams – maths, Estonian and a subject of their choice – rather than the pressurised workload when taking many GCSEs in the UK. Could you imagine having to take eight or more exams, I ask Cordelia Violet Paap, a 17-year-old student at Pelgulinna State. She looks shocked and says: “That’s a lot. I’d be a lot more stressed.”

Paap says her school’s ethos of creativity “is a lot more enjoyable than the very orthodox way, where you just sit in a classroom and listen.” To counter any notions that this is too liberal, Targo Tammela, 17, who has just come from a Nordic history class, says there “is still discipline, you still have to pass every test.” Neither has particularly embraced Estonia’s much-admired digital education, but it is still a big part of their learning, they say. Tech is readily available, and most learning resources and tests are online. “There are a few cons, because you can get lazy with it or get lost in the internet,” says Tammela. “But the pros outweigh it.”

It’s early afternoon and at the Gustav Adolf Grammar school in the old part of Tallinn, the school day is already over for many students. I wait at the front gate for the headteacher and watch young children walking off home by themselves, or with friends. “They tend to be very independent,” says Henrik Salum, the (young, jeans-wearing) head.

Behind the historical facade, the school – it educates children aged seven to 15 and this site is for the younger students – has been redeveloped, with plenty of space and light. There are punchbags in one area, which is also used for dance lessons; table tennis in another. The huge central atrium, where children have their lunch, has a piano and a stage for performances. Students sit on the tiered step seating, doing schoolwork or chatting. The atmosphere is friendly and relaxed.

Are there behavioural problems? “Of course,” says Salum. “Every day there is some sort of incident where you have to talk to students about how to respect others and how to behave. We have certain students we need to keep a closer eye on and we work with parents a lot, but overall I think the students tend to appreciate their environment.” It looks pretty harmonious to me. Two children are playing chess in one of the wide corridors and there are neat piles of cushions everywhere to be used for socialising, or for whenever one of the teachers fancies a change of scene and wants to hold their lesson outside the classroom.

In an Estonian class, there is quiet as a group of eight and nine-year-olds work on their own summaries of a book they’ve just read, which is up on the big screen. In another classroom, 12 and 13-year-olds are focusing on English vocabulary. There are just 16 children in this class. Class sizes are usually up to 28 students, but foreign languages are taught in smaller groups, so everyone has the chance to speak and participate.

In Maria Toom’s class of 10 and 11-year-olds, some of the children have stayed back to speak to me – all in excellent English. What do they remember of kindergarten? It was fun, they say. “We had sleep breaks,” says one girl, Laura. Here they get “brain breaks” instead, she says – several times in a lesson, their teacher, known by her first name, will give them a break for a bit of movement, or to play a game.

“One of the key elements of the Estonian educational system is that schools and teachers have a lot of freedom,” says Salum. There are standards they need to meet, but how they achieve that is up to them. Toom has access to tablets and laptops for the children, but she is just as likely to take a lesson outside, or on the roof terrace, with paper and pencil – not to study nature (although they do that, too), but because it’s nice to learn maths outdoors. “I think it gives freedom and it means that students have the flexibility to learn everywhere,” she says.

As we walk around the school, every student says “tere” (hello) to Salum, and one girl comes up to him and throws her arms around his middle. “Some want a high five,” he says. “As long as students are smiling and saying hello then everything is fine. If they stop doing that, I know I’m in trouble.” When Salum was at school, it was more traditional but he says the students appreciate a less hierarchical atmosphere. “We tend to view our students as colleagues so we work together, we involve them.” Many of the school’s teachers are former pupils, which he likes.

The main problem for Salum, and many other heads, is the lack of teachers. Despite the positives of the system, there are still workload and recruitment issues. Why, when teachers are required to have a master’s degree (kindergarten teachers must have a bachelor’s degree), would they earn a comparatively low salary when they could go into a higher-paying job, such as in Estonia’s healthy digital industry? Earlier this year, Estonia’s teachers held their first strike for many years.

Teachers’ pay “is a problem all over the world,” says Kristina Kallas, Estonia’s education minister, when I meet her in her office. “The education system is always under resources pressure.” There are two main issues at the moment, she says. “One is the economic recession, and the other is that any budget surplus goes to defence, because we are in a very precarious situation.” All eyes are on Estonia’s neighbour, Russia, and the situation in Ukraine.

Kallas thinks the strength in Estonia’s education system is because “it’s built from the bottom-up, not run by [central government], and it never was. The education system is older than the state.” Are there politicians who would like to have more control over it? “Surprisingly not,” says Kallas. “Everybody leaves [education] to the experts. Teachers and universities debate it, sometimes publicly and there are arguments about whether it should be done this way or the other way, but it’s not the politicians.”

There are issues that Kallas has her eye on. During the pandemic, Estonian children didn’t fare too badly because they were already well set up for digital learning, but since then, there has been a worrying number of teenage boys dropping out. And although there isn’t an elite private school system, higher-earning families often move to be near the best schools, pushing others out. “This is a trend I don’t like because it works against the reasons why our education system is strong – equity is important,” says Kallas.

Pelgulinna State Gymnasium is clearly one of the better schools. It only opened last autumn – one of 13 new secondary schools built by the state in the last five years, and it’s beautiful, with the focus on space, light and natural materials, especially wood. One room has rows of large screens where students can work in small groups and share presentations, and there are comfortable nooks built into the wall, complete with power points, where students can cocoon themselves. There are also 300 bicycle parking spaces, cool pink bathrooms, trees growing indoors and a comfortable library. A small reminder that all is not entirely perfect in this idyll is this morning’s class in the lecture theatre, where several army officers are offering “defence education”, including preparation, communications and looking after neighbours; these courses were introduced to Estonian upper secondary schools last year.

The teachers use a mix of practises, says Agne Kosk, head of languages, who was leading the sci-fi course. “This generation want to express their opinion, they want to be included in the conversation, to know all sides of the issues. Teaching by regurgitating a textbook doesn’t work any more.” She says a good relationship with her students “is number one. If you don’t click with the students, it doesn’t matter what you do”. Estonia’s education system seems particularly geared up to nurturing that, from the informal and creative approach to the mostly happy teachers.

In her sci-fi class, there is clearly a great relationship – the students have created their own hashtag, written on the whiteboard, which translates as “Agne is cool”. Kosk asks them what notes they made when they watched the first part of Blade Runner, and this sparks a discussion about whether or not they’d fail an empathy test (which would mark them out as one of the film’s non-human replicants), what it means to be human and a bit about film history (is this, one of the students asks, one of the first films to have flying cars in it?). It’s time to watch some more. Lights down – the students fix their attention on the screen.

• Euro visions

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