A Child’s Right to Creative Expression.PPT

A Child’s Right to Creative ExpressionA Position Statement from the Association of Childhood Education International(ACEI) ECED 5320 Tuesday, April 27, 2004 ACEI’s position… that creative expression depends not on talent alone, but also on motivation, interest, effort, and opportunity. The creative process is: socially supported, culturally influenced collaboratively achieved ? ? Challenges we need to redefine creative teaching and confront misconceptions about creative thinking we need to provide students with role models of motivation and persistence in creative thought arrive at more appropriate ways of assessing creative processes and products Finally, educational institutions and the larger societies in which they exist need to reflect deeply on what they hope children will become. What do we want for our children? The international community needs resourceful, imaginative, inventive, and ethical problem solvers who will make a significant contribution, not only to the Information Age in which we currently live, but beyond to ages that we can barely envision. What is imagination? To be imaginative means that a person formulates rich and varied mental images, sees beyond the obvious, and draws upon experience in inventive and effective ways. Studies of the brain activity of preadolescent children offer empirical evidence that children do indeed have active imaginations (Diamond Hopson, 1999). Theta wave brain activity is more relaxed, freewheeling, and receptive to fleeting mental images. Eminent creative individuals in various fields report trying a host of techniques to capture theta wave activity, including meditation, keeping a lighted ink pen at bedside, and so forth (Runco Pritzker, 1999). Thomas Edison used to go to sleep with ball bearings clutched in his hands and metal pie plates positioned below so that, as his hands relaxed, he would be freshly awakened by the clatter and could jot down the ideas that came to him in that half-awa