Abstract
The perspective of creativity as rooted in difference opens up new questions for researchers and educators concerning the sharing of perspectives and, most importantly, the role of contradiction between perspectives within the educational act. While differences of perspective between students, teachers, or students and teachers, can be considered a precondition for the emergence of new and valuable ideas or practices, this condition is necessary but not sufficient. The process of engaging with difference in a productive or creative manner includes,being aware or, recognising, and valuing different perspectives, but this process itself doesn’t explain how exactly novelty emerges in classroom settings. Furthermore, not any kind of difference fosters creativity under any circumstances. What type of difference is favorable for creative action in educational settings? The present chapter addresses this question based on a series of theoretically-informed empirical examples.
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Notes
- 1.
It is important to point out that Sawyer is not an apologist for standardization. Rather, he was simply explaining one reason why standardized practices took hold in U.S. schools. In fact, he also asserts that the standardized model of schooling is “particularly ill-suited to the education of creative professionals who can develop new knowledge and continually further their own understanding” (p. 176).
- 2.
Marzano is one of the United States most popular educational consultants and writer of professional development books aimed at classroom teachers and school administrators.
- 3.
Backwards planning is an instructional strategy that is also called “backward design” and is often attributed to the work of Wiggins and McTighe (2005). Wiggins and McTighe outlined a three stage process for designing lessons (i.e., identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, and plan learning experiences).
- 4.
The classroom examples that we drawn on are based on footage from actual classroom discussions (Hannah & Abate, 1995; Kamii, 2000). These examples have been used elsewhere to illustrate features of classroom interactions between teachers and students that are more or less supportive of creative expression (see Beghetto, 2013a, 2013b). In the context of the present chapter, we elaborate on the previous use of these examples to illustrate monocular and polyocular features of classroom encounters.
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Glăveanu, V.P., Beghetto, R.A. (2017). The Difference That Makes a ‘Creative’ Difference in Education. In: Beghetto, R., Sriraman, B. (eds) Creative Contradictions in Education. Creativity Theory and Action in Education, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21924-0_3
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