Engage, Excite, Educate: Creativity in Classrooms
Most educational experiences are not engaging for pupils and students
I was taking my granddaughter to a dance competition recently that involved a few hours travelling in the car together.
As I am exploring how we can develop innovative approaches to education, particularly ones that encourage pupils and students to be more engaged in their educational experience, I asked her about her current time in school. She is thirteen and attending a Welsh-speaking comprehensive school in Wales, UK.
Talking about her experience was frankly depressingly familiar, in the sense that it reminded me so much of my own memories of secondary school at her age over forty years ago.
First, she talked about the morning assembly with prayers and singing, which was not of interest to her at all. That this was still compulsory in state schools surprised me. This was identical to my own experience of being taught religious ideas in which I personally had no interest at the time.
Following on from this, she described her experiences of classes, where she sat with friends at desks, looking to the front of the class, with the teacher talking to the pupils and instructing them as has been the approach of education for many decades.
She described her experience as not being engaging or interesting for her. She talked about her subject classes, such as Maths, which she is good at. She found these classes to be uninteresting and uninspiring because she could not see any relevance between what was being taught and her life. Although she could complete the set exercises, she didn't take any interest in the subject despite being good at it. Again, memories of my own experience of Maths came back to me.
And then we talked about subjects she felt engaged in, which were very few. She enjoyed aspects of English, Drama and History and I was reminded of how the first two subjects had transformed my own school experience.
But when I asked her what she wanted to do more of at school, she asked a question which surprised me:
Why isn't a dance in the curriculum? Why can't I do dance at any point? In my teaching week? It's not something I can study or even take as an activity after school.
And I was reminded of Sir Ken Robinson very famous TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, which I've talked about before, where he asks exactly the same question in speech from 2006 viewed by over 75 million people:
Why isn't dance taught on the curriculum in the same way as Maths and English? We all have bodies don't we? Did I miss a meeting? I think this is very important.
Robinson had been a Senior Education Adviser and a Professor of Education and his talk still resonates with people.
To hear my granddaughter asking that same question nearly twenty years later struck me.
Why isn't dance on the curriculum?
What my granddaughter meant was not a dance for all. She did not expect everybody to be studying dance to the same level as her, but she was suggesting it for those who want to dance and those who loved dance like her.
When we went to the competition that she was performing in as a member of her dance group, which was running for a whole week, I was staggered by how many competitors were there. Thousands of young people dancing in all sorts of different skill categories, disciplines of dance, in individual competitions and collaborative group performances.
Nearly every type of dance you can imagine, was on display. And what was also evident was the enthusiasm, the energy, the commitment and the passion for dance. It was also intergenerational, mixing older and younger participants together in collaborative group performances.
These young people were desperate to do this activity and loved it. They had spent hours committing themselves to training, preparing for competitions and this gave them a great deal of joy, happiness and fulfillment. It was also evident that the younger children learnt from the older ones and were being mentored and inspired by them.
It was clear from talking to my granddaughter, that she got none of those things from the vast majority of her school experience. And I think that was Ken Robinson's point. We don't allow children and young people to do the things they are passionate about, they care for and they love to do as a fundamental part of their educational experience. That might even include those for whom Maths or STEM subjects are their passion.
We leave those things to the uncertainties of their own lives and if they are lucky enough, like my granddaughter, to be able to participate in these things and to have a family who could afford to pay for the classes, then the child gets to follow that passion.
Some children find this in sports, some, like me, in drama, which was taught as a subject in school including up to A level which was unusual at the time. It became an inspiration for a career teaching these subjects.
But many families and children don't have that opportunity, because the costs can be prohibitive or the family isn’t supportive of a young person’s aspirations or passions.
But I don’t think this was Robinson’s point. The Arts should not really be an adjunct or merely an extra-curricular activity. Instead, he was talking about the value of creativity at the centre of education.
How can we imbue all education with the same love, joy and passion that these students feel when they engage with such activities; how can we put passion at the heart of the education system?
The current curriculum in schools, colleges and universities, covering predetermined, subject-specific content, has the opposite effect for many young people, making it dull, uninspiring and irrelevant to their lives or what matters to them.
We can also see this reflected in the 2024 report on UK student experience in higher education published last week. University students express the view that their curriculum lacks relevance, as Jim Dickinson has observed:
They want academic activity that is “relevant, practical, and connected to the real world” – more practical, context-specific learning through real-world examples, authentic teaching methods, and assessments to enhance engagement and employability.
I think all pupils and students want this, and I think our education systems fail to deliver these more often than they succeed.
What we do even less often as a defined purpose within our education systems is nurture passion, love, joy and self fulfilment in our pupils and students.
We don't give their day-to-day life meaning in the way that following a passion in something you love does.
I'm not advocating we don't ever teach Maths or English. We know that that numeracy and literacy are important skills to have. But how do we teach them in a way that is inspiring, relevant and connected to the person we are teaching them to?
How do we position all students as the creative individual engaged at the heart of the experience. Something they do for themselves, from choice and desire rather than something that is done to them?
Ask the Educated
So on the way back from the dance competition I ask my granddaughter this question:
Okay, how could you incorporate your passion for dance into your school curriculum to make it more relevant and enjoyable?
She came up with numerous ways in which subjects including English, Maths, History, even Science could utilise her passion and love of dance to teach her things that she wasn't interested in studying because they were taught in isolation from anything that mattered to her.
My granddaughter understood exactly how she could be engaged with the subjects she needed to understand but in a way that connected with her. This was the most detailed, extensive conversation we have ever had about her schooling - which was usually summed up by her response: ‘school is boring, and I wish I didn’t have to go.’ As Robinson himself says ‘talk to someone about their own education and they pin you to the wall’.
Once she was given an opportunity to imagine her own curriculum, my granddaughter was very insightful about how it could be changed to engage her more effectively. But of course, she had never been asked these questions before and didn’t see herself as someone who could be the creator of her learning rather than the consumer of someone else’s education.
Passion is Everything
And that is the problem with our education systems. They fail to deliver that passion to our young people. And that is why so many of them and so many of us end up with dissatisfied with our jobs, with our lives and is also one of the reasons why more pupils, students and people in general suffer from mental health and wellbeing challenges than ever before.
Too often we are not experiencing joy in these environments. We are not encouraged to believe that we can explore our world creatively through those things we care about and love.
As Ken Robinson said, we are being trained not just out of creativity, but we are also being trained out of the idea of having passion in our lives. And school is important in this respect, because for so many children it is the only chance they get to explore their creative passions because of the lack of opportunity elsewhere.
Some of them do find it of course, through self-sacrifice, struggle and commitment. Or some have the means to follow a life of artistic and creative pursuit without concern - but this is rare.
But even children who have these opportunities, like my granddaughter, are made to feel that it is an ‘extra’. That your passions are separate from your education. It is like having a secret self that exists outside of school life.
How much are we missing out on by taking this approach to education at all levels? How much are our students and pupils missing out on?
And how much are we missing out on the potential to develop human beings to achieve the most creative lives available to them?
How can we inspire people, and as a result realise the potential of human achievement to create positive human change for a world that desperately needs it?
We are not delivering education systems that inspire, transform and energise the next generation and we need to change that.
Eighteen years ago, Ken Robinson saw this and many people recognised it then and still see it now. And yet, there is so little real change in our educational systems for those who experience them.
This is what has inspired us to create Future Horizons Education.
We have some ideas about how education can be delivered differently in a way that engages young people in their passions. We have a tool that is focused on designing a curriculum that is more central to the person and reflects their interests.
We also have a vision of the campus of the future that will offer the opportunity to promote relevant, personalised learning. This campus uses innovative approaches to engage students at schools, colleges and universities in ways that interests them through a creative and collaborative curriculum.
