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At the beginning of this workshop I felt very nervous and unsure of what was going to happen. This was my first on campus class so i had never seen any of the other students before. I looked up at the whiteboard which had our lesson plan on it and I had no idea what any of the activities were so I was understandably nervous. As the workshop went on I realised there was nothing to be scared of and I was in a safe environment.
My most uncomfortable moment was when I walked into the classroom and i was waiting for the class to start, I was quite anxious about what the lesson would bring as I don't find myself to be all that competent in the arts area.
I really enjoyed the class once we did our name game and all introduced ourselves and I realised that everyone was in this class to become a teacher and we didn't have to be good at the arts just had to understand how to incorporate it into our teaching. I enjoyed the rest of the class and how interactive it was.
I discovered how easy it is to break the ice with a simple name game and how putting everyone a little bit out of their comfort zone can bring the class together. Even though we had never met before we all were comfortable to perform our tableaux in front of eachother. The other thing i learnt related to the arts is tableaux; a motionless picture created by models to tell a story.
Primary students may learn in drama through active learning and the interactions. Instead of sitting and writing notes, we read notes, took notes and then put it all together and performed what we had learnt which is a great way to remember and to learn. Students will learn and most importantly remember a lot through creating and performing.

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Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED

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Tableaux's were the main focus for this weeks class and we learnt what creates an effective tableaux. Levels, facial expressions, body language and holding the freeze are all important parts of creating a tableaux.

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Tableau (freeze frame) - Drama Definitions

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This simple tableaux creates a story. They have used levels, facial expressions and body language. A tableaux doesn't have to look perfect but it must tell a story.

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As a learner I feel as though I am becoming more and more confident in performing in the class. I still find it difficult sometimes and it always feels like everyone's eyes are on me but when I talk to the other people in this class they all say the same, so I think we are all only focussed on ourselves.
This workshop was very different to the first workshop and personally, I found the first workshop more interesting. Mime doesn't interest me very much and I preferred tableaux were we created a still image. I enjoyed the amount we got to engage with different students in this workshop, as we are all starting to learn names and make new friends.
Primary students especially are better with verbal description and story telling than writing an essay on a concept or event. I think it is very important to keep up the way that students share ideas and I think the creative side leaves a much bigger impact and memory.
Drama fosters collaboration and cooperation because you are constantly working in groups. You need to be working with your peers for anything to be created, you can't try to be an individual.

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I found this video very interesting as it shows many different ways to mime. The biggest part of mime is knowing the space and being over the top in your movements.

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Mr Bean is a crowd favourite and even though he does not use voice, the mime is enough for the audience to know what is happening. He uses facial expressions very well.

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Police Station | Funny Scene | Mr Bean Official

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In this workshop we learnt how to mime in a box.

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Dance is a very broad concept and every individual can interpret in many different ways. This makes dance a great activity for many things as an individual can interpret dance and perform it how they like. Dance is used to facilitate creativity in primary students.
In the last few weeks in this unit, I have realised how open ended both drama and dance are. They are both easily interpretted and able to be used by all ages. In teaching, it would be very useful to incorporate drama and dance into the classroom. This will stimulate the. brain.
I have realised how much creativity is taken from us when we go to high school. In high school the students who don't take up dance and drama just sit in a classroom all day listening to teachers talk. There is not much creativity in high school unless you go out of your way to take up one of the Arts.
I think it is very important to continue with atleast one form of the arts throughout your life.

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Although educators claim to value creativity, they don't always prioritize it.

Teachers often have biases against creative students, fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

Why the disconnect between educators' official stance toward creativity, and what actually happens in school?

How can teachers nurture creativity in the classroom in an era of rapid technological change, when human innovation is needed more than ever and children are more distracted and hyper-stimulated?

These are some of the questions we ask in my research lab at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia. We study the creative process, as well as how ideas evolve over time and across societies. I've written almost 200 scholarly papers and book chapters on creativity, and lectured on it worldwide. My research involves both computational models and studies with human participants. I also write fiction, compose music for the piano and do freestyle dance.

What is creativity?

Although creativity is often defined in terms of new and useful products, I believe it makes more sense to define it in terms of processes. Specifically, creativity involves cognitive processes that transform one's understanding of, or relationship to, the world.

There may be adaptive value to the seemingly mixed messages that teachers send about creativity. Creativity is the novelty-generating component of cultural evolution. As in any kind of evolutionary process, novelty must be balanced by preservation.

In biological evolution, the novelty-generating components are genetic mutation and recombination, and the novelty-preserving components include the survival and reproduction of "fit" individuals. In cultural evolution, the novelty-generating component is creativity, and the novelty-preserving components include imitation and other forms of social learning.

It isn't actually necessary for everyone to be creative for the benefits of creativity to be felt by all. We can reap the rewards of the creative person's ideas by copying them, buying from them or simply admiring them. Few of us can build a computer or write a symphony, but they are ours to use and enjoy nevertheless.

Inventor or imitator?

There are also drawbacks to creativity. Sure, creative people solve problems, crack jokes, invent stuff; they make the world pretty and interesting and fun. But generating creative ideas is time-consuming. A creative solution to one problem often generates other problems, or has unexpected negative side effects.

Creativity is correlated with rule bending, law breaking, social unrest, aggression, group conflict and dishonesty. Creative people often direct their nurturing energy towards ideas rather than relationships, and may be viewed as aloof, arrogant, competitive, hostile, independent or unfriendly.

Also, if I'm wrapped up in my own creative reverie, I may fail to notice that someone else has already solved the problem I'm working on. In an agent-based computational model of cultural evolution, in which artificial neural network-based agents invent and imitate ideas, the society's ideas evolve most quickly when there is a good mix of creative "inventors" and conforming "imitators." Too many creative agents and the collective suffers. They are like holes in the fabric of society, fixated on their own (potentially inferior) ideas, rather than propagating proven effective ideas.

Of course, a computational model of this sort is highly artificial. The results of such simulations must be taken with a grain of salt. However, they suggest an adaptive value to the mixed signals teachers send about creativity. A society thrives when some individuals create and others preserve their best ideas.

This also makes sense given how creative people encode and process information. Creative people tend to encode episodes of experience in much more detail than is actually needed. This has drawbacks: Each episode takes up more memory space and has a richer network of associations. Some of these associations will be spurious. On the bright side, some may lead to new ideas that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.

So, there's a trade-off to peppering the world with creative minds. They may fail to see the forest for the trees but they may produce the next Mona Lisa.

Innovation might keep us afloat

So will society naturally self-organize into creators and conformers? Should we avoid trying to enhance creativity in the classroom?

The answer is: No! The pace of cultural change is accelerating more quickly than ever before. In some biological systems, when the environment is changing quickly, the mutation rate goes up. Similarly, in times of change we need to bump up creativity levels - to generate the innovative ideas that will keep us afloat.

This is particularly important now. In our high-stimulation environment, children spend so much time processing new stimuli that there is less time to "go deep" with the stimuli they've already encountered. There is less time for thinking about ideas and situations from different perspectives, such that their ideas become more interconnected and their mental models of understanding become more integrated.

This "going deep" process has been modeled computationally using a program called Deep Dream, a variation on the machine learning technique "Deep Learning" and used to generate images such as the ones in the figure below.

The images show how an input is subjected to different kinds of processing at different levels, in the same way that our minds gain a deeper understanding of something by looking at it from different perspectives. It is this kind of deep processing and the resulting integrated webs of understanding that make the crucial connections that lead to important advances and innovations.

Cultivating creativity in the classroom

So the obvious next question is: How can creativity be cultivated in the classroom? It turns out there are lots of ways! Here are three key ways in which teachers can begin:

1. Focus less on the reproduction of information and more on critical thinking and problem solving.

2. Curate activities that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as by painting murals that depict biological food chains, or acting out plays about historical events, or writing poems about the cosmos. After all, the world doesn't come carved up into different subject areas. Our culture tells us these disciplinary boundaries are real and our thinking becomes trapped in them.

3. Pose questions and challenges, and follow up with opportunities for solitude and reflection. This provides time and space to foster the forging of new connections that is so vital to creativity.

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What creativity really is - and why schools need it

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Although educators claim to value creativity, they don't always prioritize it. Teachers often have biases against creative students, fearing that creativity in the classroom will be disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking, impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.

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Primary dance can be a simple range of motions. We learn in this video the different dance elements.

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Students love to get up and perform at a young age, they enjoy showing their parents what they have learnt. This dance is not a well oiled machine but you can see the effort they put in and the reward they get from performing it.

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Authentic art is work created. and planned by the student to express ideas that are personal and meaningful. In the classroom, students do a lot of creative work without realising but most of it falls under exercise. When i was in primary school we had a workshop come to the school once a week, where we would learn a dance and at the end of the term we would perform it to the school and to our parents. I never thought of this as being creative, but instead exercise in the form of dance.
I think the arts should be incorporated into the classroom more. Students learn well through songs, performing and story telling. These are all easy lessons which can be altered to the content which is being learnt.
If i were a teacher, I would start my mornings with a short song and dance with my class to get them all stimulated and ready for the day. I would encourage students to think of different ways to present their findings about new topics. This could include a song, a dance, a storyboard, storytelling or a short performance.

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Recently, I've been hearing the term "authentic art" used in the art ed world more and more. People talk of "authentic art experiences" and about how specific pedagogies are designed for authenticity. The concept of authentic art signifies an important idea in art education that has broad implications for how we teach and what we want students to learn. So, what does it mean and how can it shape our teaching?

Authentic art is work created and planned by the student to express ideas that are personal and meaningful. It's what all the historically important artists we admire did and what visionary contemporary artists continue to do today. It's also a teachable behavior and an appropriate and necessary part of visual arts curriculum for all age levels.

In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Dennis Dutton writes, "Whenever the term "authentic" is used in aesthetics, a good first question to ask is, Authentic as opposed to what?" One might think that everything students do in art class is authentic art. It is called art class, after all.

In fact, a good portion of the work done by art students falls into a different category - exercises.

Understanding the differences between authentic art and exercises and how they each can be used to support contrasting types of classroom learning is critical for teachers.

So, what's the difference?

Authentic art is about meaning and creative thinking; exercises are about replication or building skills. One isn't better than the other, they are just different aspects of learning and understanding visual arts content. Exercises are important for developing aptitude with media and technique while authentic art experiences are essential for teaching creative thinking. Creating authentic art also provides opportunities to apply skills learned in exercises. We can draw a comparison to the act of learning vocabulary versus writing an essay. Students need both types of activities to fully learn about making art.

A good example of an exercise is an assignment that asks students to create a color wheel. The goal is to learn color mixing and color theory. Students are asked to replicate specific colors to build skill with paint. Most of the content is teacher-directed and the results are expected to be uniform. Students are asked to replicate a pre-determined outcome-specific colors.

On the other hand, an authentic art project that builds color theory knowledge could be the task of creating a painting based on a theme. Students are asked to think creatively to interpret the theme and produce a work that has personal meaning by applying knowledge of painting, including color theory. In this assignment, the student is asked to mix all colors from the primaries, but the results are expected to be varied based on the specific needs of each artist. To accomplish this task, information about color theory must be recalled and then applied to mix the colors needed for the artwork. The knowledge from the exercise supports the success of the authentic art experience. In the same way, just as making authentic art gives the student an opportunity to apply new skills and the teacher the opportunity to assess learning.

The colors of the painting above were mixed from primaries and the theme of the assignment was "Identity." About her work she writes, "This artwork represents my ethnicity as an Egyptian and reveals the emotion of the people and of me (the artist) towards the revolution."

4 Tips for Fostering Authentic Art Experiences in the Classroom

Including a combination of exercises and authentic art experiences is important to teach both creative thinking and to build skills.

1. Teach skills separately.

So often we try to make projects out of skill exercises in an effort to fit everything in. This makes for projects that lean heavily on teacher direction, are low on creative application, and create un-clear learning goals for students. Is a monochromatic painting essentially different from a value scale? Why spend weeks on information that can be taught quickly?

2. Let students apply skills with open-ended tasks.

First teach the exercise, then let them apply it to artwork that is personally meaningful.

3. Consider theme-based authentic art experiences.

Giving students themes to work with is a great way to give parameters to an open-ended task and the perfect place for students to apply what they've learned in exercises.

4. Use master examples.

Talk with your kids about how great artists (past and present) used skills they developed to create authentic art. Try to use a limited selection of examples to encourage creative thinking instead of replication.

The Takeaway

Both authentic art and exercises are important parts of a well-rounded curriculum. Students at all levels must be challenged to make real, authentic art. We learn by doing. To learn about art, students must do the work of artists-plan, develop ideas, and apply concepts to communicate personally meaningful ideas, as well as to develop skills. When exercises become the main focus of instruction, students lose out on valuable learning.

Do you think authentic art is appropriate at every level? How do you incorporate authentic art experiences in your lessons?
Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.

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4 Tips for Fostering Authentic Art Experiences in the Classroom

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4 Tips for Fostering Authentic Art Experiences in the Classroom % %

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I to this day still remember word for word this 'water cycle song'. My year 5 teacher made us listen and sing along to this song when we learnt the water cycle and after about 3 times we were all able to remember the song and therefore the water cycle process.

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This is another example of a catchy song which helped me to recall the periodic table in order. I can still remember the order 7 years later.

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The Periodic Table Song (2018 Update!) | SCIENCE SONGS

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My favourite activity in this unit would be our dance map. We were given a dance map with different actions in each space and we had to partner up to create a dance path. We each took turns to perform these and it was very interesting to watch the different way that everyone interpretted the actions provide to us. It was a good activity for any capabilities. The actions included, jump, slide, roll, wriggle, and many more simple actions.
I have been very surprised about how little of the arts is incorporated into schools. Slowly it is becoming more common but i hope to be able to teach and incorporate the arts in many of my lessons.
I keen to try out a stop motion animation with a group of primary students. I would encourage them to create something based off the content they are learning at the time.
Creating a performance with a. group of 5 seemed difficult at the beginning. We all have our own lives outside of uni so though it may be hard to catch up. We were lucky enough to all work really well together. We had many ideas on what to create but went with a story about native Australian animals. We has to create a performance which had dance, drama and media arts. It was hard to come up with a way to create all of this, but once we got started we were easily able to create a performance incorporating an aspect of everything we had learnt in this unit.

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This was our last workshop for this unit and we all had our performances. My group went first which was good because we got to sit and enjoy everyone elses performance without worrying about our own.
It was very interesting to see everyone's take on the task and how each group created a performance that involved drama, dance and media arts.
I will miss the creative side and practical side of this unit.