On Saturday many of the Flinders Educators attended a Creativity Workshop with Maria Bootle from Tafe SA. Creativity forms a significant part of our teaching and learning at Flinders and children’s creative work is a constant source of inspiration for many of us. It is not often that we are able to meet and collaborate with our colleagues in different buildings, so this in itself was a wonderful opportunity for us to share ideas and generate reflective dialogue with professionals who share our philosophy.
As many of you know, Flinders is a unique space and we work hard to create beautiful, inspiring environments for children, educators and families. Inviting people into our space always gives us an opportunity to look with new eyes, to be proud of what we have achieved, and to share our work with joy.
Our presenter shared her ideas with grace and passion, and many of the things she shared with us resonated. We, too, value creativity, flexibility, beauty and freedom. We, too, value the role of wonder and awe. We, too, question the true meaning of words and resist the temptation to use terms without interrogating them first.
She helped us generate questions and conversations together, to discuss our understandings of creativity and to be courageous in sharing.
She emphasised the importance of our role as advocates for children, early childhood education, and children’s creativity, and helped us to understand that this work is never done. We, as early childhood educators, have access to an ever widening pool of knowledge and research regarding children’s learning. With this privilege comes the responsibility of respectfully sharing what we know. Interestingly, it was this that many of us keep thinking about. Not nurturing creativity so much as advocating for it, which is perhaps the same thing…
We are beginning to explore this role of advocacy in deeper ways. Why do we do what we do here? How do we make these decisions? And how do these decisions change over time? We are wondering…how can we share these ideas with our community in order to generate a new conversation, a new understanding of children’s creativity?
Again we come back to the importance of a good question. This is the heart of all inquiry. We in the spirit of this, we ask…
What is creativity to you?