The radio alarm woke me up this morning, as it does every day, to the KOIT trivia question for the day.
Question: What was inventor Thomas Edison afraid of?
Answer: The dark.
This tidbit is on the Edison entry on the Wikipedia site...
Over his desk, Edison displayed a placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quote: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the facility.
Teaching Artist Eric Booth said this about UNESCO's first worldwide arts education conference...
...one of the shocks was that amid all that wide variety of 1200 delegates from 97 countries, a clear ringing unified call for and from arts education emerged. Heads of state, culture ministers, and arts leaders made speech after speech (often excruciatingly boring because in the UN tradition, they all presented formal papers, read from pages at a podium for hours on end) imploring basically the same thing. They laid out all the worst problems in their nations—environmental degradation, youth mental health crisis, AIDS, economic deadends, wealth gap, and more—and implored arts education to become an active contributor to their solutions. They said the #1 thing their countries’ needed was creativity, and arts education had to provide it. There was worldwide consensus that all arts educators around the world should march behind the same banner, upon which is written: Literacy, Numeracy, Creativity. All three should be prioritized across all curricula of all nations, and arts education had to be the leader of creativity. It was incredible to witness this clear unanimity around a concept this focused and worldwide role so clear for our field; and not an instrumental benefit of the arts like improving behavior, boosting teamwork or raising academic scores, BUT…
I was struck by the fact that creativity is not a particular focus of arts learning in the U.S. No, we aren’t against it! But we don’t focus on it; we don’t prioritize it in our programs, our teacher/teaching artist/artist training. Indeed, if we empirically analyzed what we teach students in American arts education, we’d have to say creativity is a pretty low priority. The one thing the world really begs from us, and we deal with it incidentally.
I think we have to change this. What would arts education in America look like if we emphasized creativity skills in our programs and projects? Sad but true—the #1 gig I am hired by American businesses to deliver is workshops and speeches on Creativity, and they immediately say, “but no arts, please.” The general American mainstream view is that creativity is hugely valuable, but the arts are fluffy and light and not tied to useful-creativity. We have to consistently put forward the uniquely effective ways the arts have to develop creative capacities. And it has to start in arts education.
I was struck by the fact that creativity is not a particular focus of arts learning in the U.S. No, we aren’t against it! But we don’t focus on it; we don’t prioritize it in our programs, our teacher/teaching artist/artist training. Indeed, if we empirically analyzed what we teach students in American arts education, we’d have to say creativity is a pretty low priority. The one thing the world really begs from us, and we deal with it incidentally.
I think we have to change this. What would arts education in America look like if we emphasized creativity skills in our programs and projects? Sad but true—the #1 gig I am hired by American businesses to deliver is workshops and speeches on Creativity, and they immediately say, “but no arts, please.” The general American mainstream view is that creativity is hugely valuable, but the arts are fluffy and light and not tied to useful-creativity. We have to consistently put forward the uniquely effective ways the arts have to develop creative capacities. And it has to start in arts education.
Most would agree that creativity and innovation are a good thing in education... right?
In order to motivate any team to turn ideas into action, it's important to build consensus.
What is the value of innovation in education?
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