Create a 250 word pen
portrait that reflects a dominant philosophy from your own schooling. Reflect on the place of the arts and
creativity in your portrait.
Being educated in the 80’s, creativity was not encouraged as
teachers wanted students to ‘toe the line’.
As Sir Ken Robinson states in his TED talk (2006) “education has stifled
creativity”. Education has taken a step
in the right direction to allow children to use their creativity. This can clearly be seen in pedagogy such as
Universal Design for Learning (Ashman, 2015) which encourages different forms
of expression, allowing students to show their learning in whatever form they
desire. This is very different from my
education which more geared towards a transmissive pedagogy which certainly
stifled creativity.
The increased usage of technology also allows for increased
creativity. This allows all children to
use their creativity, innovation and flexibility. Technology also breaks down barriers for
those students with learning difficulties as they can express themselves
through many different mediums such as iMovie, photos, PowerPoint and animation
apps, allowing all children to show their learning.
I am looking forward to learning many different ways to
engage children in the various art forms whatever their talents or
capabilities. As Rich said, "art is subjective", so what someone sees
as not being very good, the next person will think is wonderful. That is what I
hope to achieve in my classroom - that no person's work is any better than the
next.
References
Ashman, A. (Ed.). (2015). Education for inclusion and
diversity. (5th ed.). Melbourne, VIC: Pearson Australia.
Robinson, K. (2006). Do schools kill creativity? TED talk,
February 2006. Retrieved from:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity?language=en
I found it interesting that in O'Toole's chapeter there was some research that said making Arts central (or at least increased its importance in the curriculum) was said to improve literacy performance by up to 24%.
ReplyDeleteMy main question is, how, with so much pressure from stakeholders, do governments fit in more arts time?
Do you find that during this degree there seems to be a push from each area about what needs to be given more importance? For example, the importance of putting 'Maths' into everything, 'Science' into everything, 'Aboriginal/TSI' into everything, and now arts? I can understand why, because all of these are very important (and of course our lecturers are very passionate about this, and know that the teachers of tomorrow need to make these big changes). But it all seems so overwhelming!
I hope I can bring a lot of the passion and creativity into my classroom that is outlined in the first two readings. I don't know how I'm going to do that yet, but I trust this unit will help us to acheive such a goal.
Good point about UDL. That has given me a few ideas...
I suppose with arts and PE, it is more about trying to incorporate it into the core curriculum subjects such as Maths or English. On PE3, my colleague teacher showed me their acrostic poems about monsters. The children had to perform the poem to the class with emotions (their inquiry unit focused on emotions and being able to read people's body language). This was bringing drama into the English side of the curriculum, and also linked to their inquiry unit. We just have to be creative ourselves to be able to link all the areas together to the best of our ability. As with most of our teaching, I am imagining a steep learning curve for the first few years.
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