The Creative World of Learning: A Comprehensive Definition

Creative learning is an identifiable form of learning that involves creative expression within the framework of academic learning. It’s more than just memorizing information; it’s about building knowledge and developing skills using creative techniques. Rather than prescribing how information should be absorbed, creative education guides the learner through the instruction process using creative methods. It challenges the discernible, the conformist, and the expected, and to some degree, it’s about breaking out of limitations.

The Essence of Creative Learning

At its core, creative learning pertains to the development of new and meaningful contributions to one’s own and others’ learning and lives. This conception adheres to standard definitions of creativity, which includes two basic criteria: originality and usefulness. Originality implies that the idea or solution is new, different, or unique within a particular context or situation. Usefulness means that it is meaningful, effectively meets task constraints, or adequately solves the problem at hand.

Why Creative Learning Matters

Creative learning is important because creativity is freedom of expression. It teaches learners to view the world through different lenses, instead of the one single way that an academic education provides. It can also foster productivity and efficiency. When a student comes up with an idea, they are more likely to be able to find ways to work around impending barriers and achieve this idea because of learning to think ‘out of the box’.

The skill of creativity is the ability to think about a task or a problem in a new or different way, or the ability to use the imagination to generate new ideas. Creativity enables one to solve complex problems or find interesting ways to approach tasks. Learners engage acutely with creative learning experiences, shifting from convergent thinking skills (locating tangible and familiar solutions) to divergent thinking (producing unique ideas and neoteric prospects). The more that learners engage with the process, the longer they retain knowledge and develop their understanding.

Benefits of Creative Learning

Stimulates Problem-Solving: Creative learning experiences change the way learners approach problems, making them more ingenious and innovative. They visualize alternatives or possibilities from different viewpoints.
Develops Critical Thinking: Learners recommend innovative ideas and resolutions, review the progress of executing them, and adapt the process for improvement.
Promotes Risk-Taking: Creative learning exposes learners to failure, providing a safe space for making decisions and seeing various outcomes. Getting comfortable with “failure” allows learners to take more risks with less fear.
Builds a Curious Mindset: Creative learning solutions are unconventional, fostering curiosity about the process and the topic, leading to thought-provoking insights.
Increases Confidence Levels: Creative learning techniques build confidence, making learners more likely to apply the lessons they learned.

Creative Learning in Practice

Within school settings and classrooms, the process of creative learning can span from smaller scale contributions to an individuals and others’ learning (e.g., a student sharing a distinctive way of thinking about a science problem) to larger scale and long-term influences that promote the learning and lives of people in and beyond the walls of the classroom, school and community (e.g., a group of students develop and implement a creative solution for addressing social exclusion in the lunchroom).

Legacy Projects: A Generative Approach

Efforts aimed at supporting creative learning represent a generative form of positive education because it serves as a conduit for students to contribute to their own and others learning, life, and wellbeing. Legacy projects, for instance, provide creative students with opportunities to engage with uncertainty and attempt to develop sustainable solutions to complex and ill-defined problems.

An example of a legacy project involves a group of fourth graders who learned about an endangered freshwater shrimp and then worked to restore the habitat by launching a project that spanned across multiple years and multiple networks of teachers, students, and external partners. This type of learning undoubtedly has relevance to education as it allows for student engagement and contributes to their social-emotional learning of the students. For the duration of the legacy project students would need to communicate, collaborate, engage in critical thinking, review the changes that can be made, their roles as citizens and character. All these skills encompass 21st century learning and are skills that are required post schooling where students have to identify their niche in the world to become global citizens.

Intra-psychological and Inter-psychological Aspects

The process of creative learning includes both intra-psychological (individual) and inter-psychological (social) aspects. At the inter-psychological (or social) level, students have an opportunity to share and refine their conceptions with teachers and peers, making a creative contribution to the learning and lives of others; student inventors, authors, content creators, and members of community-based problem-solving teams are further examples of the inter-psychological level of creative contribution.

Consider a biology exam where students are asked to draw a plant cell and label its most important parts. If a student draws a picture of a flower behind the bars of a jail cell and labels the iron bars, lack of windows, and incarcerated plant, then it could be said that the student has offered an original or even humorous response, but not a creative one. For a response to be considered creative, it needs to be both original and meaningfully meet the task constraints.

However, if a biology teacher invites students to identify their own scientific question or problem, which is unique and interesting to them, and asks them to design an inquiry-based project aimed at addressing the question or problem, this type of task provides the openings necessary for creative learning to occur in the classroom. This is because students have an opportunity to identify their own questions to address, develop their own understanding of new and diverse ways of addressing those questions, and share and receive feedback on their unique ideas and insights.

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Providing students with semi-structured learning experiences that requires them to meet learning goals in new and distinctive ways helps to ensure that students are developing personally and academically meaningful understandings and provides them with an opportunity to potentially contribute to the understanding of their peers and teachers.

Creative Learning Techniques

Here are some creative learning techniques:

Hypothetical scenarios
Improvisation (with exercises or games)
Analogies
Brainstorming sessions and debates
Storytelling

Instructional Storytelling: An Example

Storytelling is a creative learning technique that makes information interesting. It takes the pressure out of the learning experience and improves learners’ attention. A question can be posed, ‘What defines a story as being extraordinary? For instance, ruminate about an item that is of sentimental value to you. Perhaps a treasured object that was given to you by a family member. Do you remember the moment you received it and how you felt, with all the sensory details? Do you know why? The reason is because emotions are associated with information that power long-term memory. Long-term memory maximises learners’ attention! Emotions drive attention, and attention drives learning.

Creative Learning vs. Creative Teaching

In contrast to the teacher-focus of creative teaching, the idea of creative learning is learner-centred. It is interactive and encourages learners to experiment and explore possible learning approaches with an attitude of playfulness. The ultimate goal is to unleash an individual’s potential during the creative learning process.

Creative Teaching Defined

Creative teaching is the act of teaching in a novel and useful way that promotes student growth related to the development of original thought and action. Creative teaching focuses both on the methods a teacher uses to deliver learning and the overall effect those methods have on students and the outcomes produced which is a condition of developing creative learning.

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In the process of creative teaching, the teacher inspires learners’ interests in learning material, and then leads students to find the problem by themselves creatively, or present specific problems and ask learners to apply all categories of available resources to find the best satisfying solution creatively. Teaching in a creative way refers to the teachers’ use of imaginative approaches to make learning more interesting, engaging, exciting and effective. Creative teaching is customisable depending on the teacher’s skills, experiences, and perspectives.

Creative teaching can be viewed from two perspectives: teaching creatively, which means teachers employ “imaginative approaches to make learning more interesting, exciting, and effective” and teaching for creativity, which is for the purpose of developing learners’ creative thinking. Creative teaching has been defined as “a unique, customized, and meaningful exchange of knowledge among all individuals in a learning context”.

Creative vs. Academic Education

Academic education involves the studying of certain subjects which are more analytical. Creative education is a way of teaching children to think independently and to use their imaginations. Subjects that are creative include drama, music, and art.

Locating Creative Learning in Schools and Classrooms

There are at least four interrelated components posited as being necessary for creative learning to occur in schools, classrooms, and beyond:

Students
Teachers
Academic subject matter
Uncertainty

Creative learning in schools and classrooms occurs at the intersection of these four factors. Additionally, the classroom, school, and broader sociocultural contexts play a vital role in determining whether and how creative learning will be supported and expressed.

The Role of Students

Students, unquestionably, play a central role in creative learning. Creative learning in schools even at the individual level involves providing creative students with opportunities to test out and receive feedback on their personal understandings and insights to ensure that what they have learned fits within the broader academic subject area. When this occurs, creative learning at the individual level represents a blend of individualistic and generally agreed upon academic knowledge.

In the context of creative learning, students need to be confident in their own ideas prior to being willing to share those ideas with others and test out their mini-creative ideas. Valuing creativity and the willingness to take creative risks also appear to play key roles. The same can be said for intellectual risk-taking, which refers to adaptive behaviours that puts a person at risk of making mistakes or failing.

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