This week our lecture looked at creativity. There was a quote from Csikszentmihalyi (1996) that I found really interesting that said “constant busyness is not a good prescription for creativity” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p.353). I really liked it because it shows that you need to allow time to be creative and that actually, boredom is okay. Being bored means that you have time to think and come up with something that you actually want to do which is really important for an arts lesson. Another interesting point we discussed came from Ken Robinsons TED talk. His talk focuses on wether schools kill creativity and one of the things he said, “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything” (Ken Robinson, 2006), really stuck with me. It backed up a point made in our very first lecture that we need to develop an ambiguity for messiness. We also need to know how to learn from our mistakes and move on. Not only is this vital for creativity and arts lessons but also for our own mental health and wellbeing. We also looked at WALT (We Are Learning To) and WILF (What I’m Looking For) and how these don’t always apply to art lessons. The lesson should be a problem that the children have to solve using art which is why don’t always know what we’re looking for in an art lesson.
Our visual arts workshop looked at critiquing art and being critical. Children can struggle to talk about their art learning, such as the different elements of art. Art is always assumed to be a practical lesson but it should also be critical, This could be by looking at different pieces fo work and critically examining them. We then done this ourselves by using Taylors model of assessment to critique a work of art and create a video about it. I had done higher art at school so I had a little knowledge in this area with different terms, etc but I could understand if others struggled, especially children. Theres also opportunities to link the critical lesson to a literacy lesson because one of the first level experiences and outcomes is “As I listen or watch, I am learning to make notes under given headings and use these to understand what I have listened to or watched and create new texts” (Education Scotland, 2017).
In our music workshop, we used the online resource called Charanga. The website had lots of different lesson ideas and resources that could be used by non-specialist music teachers. I think this would be really helpful in my future practice because I don’t personally feel that music is a strong point of mine and I wouldn’t feel 100% confident teaching it so this website would be a really big help.
References
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity – Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Collins
- https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/up-next?language=en
- Education Scotland (2017) Curriculum For Excellence: Experiences and Outcomes [Online] Available:https://education.gov.scot/Documents/All-experiencesoutcomes18.pdf [Accessed: 31st of October 2019]
