“I dont have a creative bone in my body.”

I hear this a lot. It usually comes from people who aren’t ‘arty’ types. These people believe that if they don’t make their own craft Christmas cards or attend local art classes then they aren’t creative. We commonly define creativity as anything artistic, musical, dramatic or performance based. But this is a myth.

The dictionary defines creativity as the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships or the like.

It doesn’t say anywhere that it has to be artistic. However, this definition does suggest that nothing is creative unless it is original; not only original to the self but to the domain it is operating in. In creative terms we describe this as Creativity (capital C) and these major influential acts mould the subject knowledge we teach. Subject knowledge is always in a constant state of flux and Creativity is one of the main drivers of that change.

But this hard definition of Creativity omits the everyday, low-level creative acts that most of us understand as creativity; painting a picture, making a model or writing a poem. This creativity (with a lower case c), can be defined as ‘acts resulting from originality of thought and expression’, but where that originality might only mean original to ourselves. Creativity therefore, is a general trait that occurs in every discipline; every subject.

Working out a new route to work that avoids traffic is creative, so is decorating, planning a new outfit or creating a new garden. Builders are creative when they build a new and interesting feature (but not when they are repeating the same process over and over), shop workers when they arrange a new shelf display. Office workers are creative when they produce a novel office document, cooking a new and exciting meal is creative or even planning a new trip or excursion. So many daily acts we take for granted involve the creation of a new and novel outcome and they don’t have to involve the arts.

So what does this mean for educators who teach children everyday?

I think we have to make it clear that creativity is a very broad term to describe any innovative act in any subject area- and teach students that it is NOT the sole property of the arts.

We have to make children aware that to devise something novel, even if that’s only novel to you, is creative. If your novel act is valued enough by the wider society or if it’s effective enough to alter the structure of domain knowledge then it will become Creative, for as long as it continues to affect the domain.

Creativity is our personal application of the extrinsic knowledge we have processed and understood to devise novel outcomes.

Drawing for Science Invention & Discovery by Paul Carney

Creativity operates in the areas of your subject where you want students to apply what they have learned for their own purpose. It’s where knowledge stops being a passive incoming process and becomes an extrinsic application of that knowledge. Look at the Programme of Study for the National Curriculum and read the first part, the bit that says Purpose of Study, and you’ll find creativity lurking. Factual and Procedural knowledge are like the training part of an athletes preparation, they are the tactics, the discipline and the physical and mental toughening. Creativity is the performance, the game, the thrill of victory or the bitter taste of defeat.

So what does creativity look like in Geography, History, English or PE?

Well I’m not an expert in these subjects but I’m going to give it a go and maybe if you are an expert you can correct me.

Geography (I think) is the study of people, places and environments. From my own Geography O Level I remember a lot of the hard facts from the subject such as map reading and geological features as well the study of the people of Russia and their cooperative farming methods. This domain knowledge is vital to understanding Geography and I appreciate the importance of learning it rigorously.

However, if learning is the transfer of extrinsic knowledge to the individual, then we have to also teach; how does Geography affect you? How can you as an individual interact with your own environment, to mould and shape it? This is where creativity comes in; it is the application of what you have leaned; it is Geography in action, not just a static fact from a text book. Creativity is how you apply what you know about Geography to real situations. Creativity isn’t just reading existing maps, but using that knowledge to devise your own map. It is using your knowledge of farming in the Russian Steppe’s to inform the organisation of your own culture, to create cooperatives of your own or to organise your managerial team using similar methods.

Now I don’t know the first thing about the aims of a Geography education but this seems like a worthwhile thing to do.

History is the study of the past. Again, like Geography you can simply read accounts of historical events and remember them. This is an important thing for a Historian to be able to do. But ask; what is the purpose of knowing history? What do we want to do with it? How can it affect your future choices? When you answer these questions then you begin to involve creative processes; making decisions, informing actions, affecting our future planning. To apply our knowledge of the past to the future we need creativity. For history to become meaningful it needs the relevance that creativity brings; how can we use and apply what we know about the past? It seems to me that we need to do more of this!

Physical Education may not seem to be a creative subject. I know many PE teachers and unless they also teach art, they wouldn’t see themselves as creative. But when you think of physical exercise in terms of how the individual applies their subject knowledge to themselves and their environment and it becomes very creative. My own physical performance is a personal record of my physical ability and fitness. This isn’t a static force, it’s always evolving, so when I improve my performance I’m creating new novel outcomes. If I learn a new sporting technique then apply that in a game I’m being creative. If I produce a significantly new (for me) sporting action, such as running a sub four minute mile, then I’ve been creative. When I break a world record I’m Creative but only for as long as that record stands. Compare these creative actions to others in groups and we see that competitive sport is creative because it is constantly producing new and variable outcomes.

English Language is of course full of creativity by its very nature. You only have to construct a sentence to begin your creative journey, but if we study how writers have shaped and changed literature then we begin to learn how creativity affects that domain. What was it about Virginia Woolf that makes her writing so great, even today? Why do the works of Shakespeare continue to enthral and influence us, 500 years after he wrote them? To ask these questions is to try to understand the act of Creativity itself. If students can apply this advanced knowledge of cultural change within literature to their own writing, then their chances of making influential change increases.

Mathematics is a tricky one since its domain depends on rules and axioms, strict systems that we need to learn before we can Creatively apply them. The chances of any student going on to redefine the laws of mathematics are very slim indeed despite them happening all the time at advanced levels. But notice the capitalisation of the word Creativity there? That’s because whilst we are unlikely to ever change the domain rules of maths we can all be low-level creative with maths very easily. Playing with numbers, finding new routes to get to the same answer, inventing and problem solving are integral to the way many people teach and learn maths. Despite the certainty of its outcomes, mathematics is surprisingly flexible. It is open to numerous methods and techniques, it is cultural, even ambiguous. But there seems to be two kinds of mathematician; the rule follower and the rule breaker; the creative and the non-creative. All I can say with certainty is that whenever you want a student to apply the mathematics to their own environment, when you want them to use what they know to create a new outcome; even if that’s just a household expenditure projection, then they are being creative.

Languages are another case in point. The body of knowledge we need to learn to speak a language is static and it must be learned, but it is the way we absorb this knowledge intrinsically where creativity is important. It is the way we employ that language, construct our own meanings from it that creativity is vital because this is how we keep wanting to learn more.

Creativity gives us a reason to study, it motivates us and it helps us make intrinsic connections to the knowledge we have learned. In short; it’s what we do with the stuff we know. We do it all the time; on trains, in our offices, sat on our tablets, in the gym, walking on the moors, in the car, our brains can’t help making new stuff; applying what we know to the world around us. We need greater knowledge to do that more effectively, but we also need creativity too.