- Title
- Creativity in early childhood: how educators from Australia and Italy are documenting the creative thought processes of young children
- Creator
- Leggett, Nicole
- Relation
- SN Social Sciences Vol. 4, Issue 2024, no. 74
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s43545-024-00873-1
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Creative and critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making have attracted increasing interest over the last decade as key twenty-first century skills for education. While the Australian Curriculum implies that creativity should be applied to all learning domains, the Early Years Learning Framework for birth to 5 years (EYLF) largely relegates creativity to children’s expression through the creative arts. The world-renowned Reggio Emilia approach places creativity at the centre of its curriculum not as a creative product, but as a cognitive process. This paper draws upon recent research with early childhood teachers from NSW, Australia and Northern Italy who formed sister-centre relationships to share their perspectives on children’s creative thinking. Through email exchange, educators from each country sent three examples of centre documentation they believed demonstrated children’s creative thinking, with an invitation for a response from the sister centre. Vygotsky’s creative imagination theory, Malaguzzi and Rodari’s philosophies of creativity, imagination and education, provide theoretical frameworks to explain the creative processes of children. Findings suggest that the Australian educators in this study demonstrated the practice of responsiveness to children in co-constructing factual knowledge, while the Italian educators focused more on the processes of children’s thinking, with a view of the child as an imaginative and creative being. This paper argues that if creative thinking is an essential skill for lifelong learning, then more attention for how educators in early childhood education contexts are incorporating this into practice is needed.
- Subject
- creativity; creative thinking; documentation; curriculum; Reggio Emilia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1517639
- Identifier
- uon:57139
- Identifier
- ISSN:2662-9283
- Rights
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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