Enhancing creativity in L1 Education: An empirical study
Submitted by:
Angeliki Markoglou
Abstract:
Under the pressure of economic development, education is increasingly called upon to cultivate in students creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Active learning pedagogies play an important role in the development of these 4C Skills not least by promoting higher order thinking skills (HOTS), and for this reason, teachers ought to embrace critical and creative pedagogy, which amongst other things, strives for the cultivation of HOTS. In Greek secondary education, however, pedagogic practices lack such a focus, notably the promotion of creativity. On the contrary, secondary school students who exhibit increased levels of creativity are often censored and discouraged, with the emphasis of teaching still being on students’ compliance with learning behaviors that are identified with the norm and the proper attitude (Paraskevopoulos & Paraskevopoulou, 2009).
Recognizing the value and lack of promoting creativity in the secondary schools of Greece, an empirical study was designed to explore if and how creativity can be encouraged through the story completion technique (Gravett, 2019). Specifically, more than 500 students of Grade B from twenty different classrooms across the country were selected and asked in collaboration with their teachers and during language teaching lessons, notably the teaching of vocabulary, to complete a story in a unique way using four specific words. Their completed stories were evaluated through a specific set of criteria that reflect creative thinking and creative writing and that were drawn upon the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, the rubrics of Mozaffari (2013) and the work of Vaezi & Rezaei (2019) and Joseph et al. (2020). The analysis of the stories show that the use of the story completion technique encourages and facilitates students to develop their creativity, especially in criteria-domains such as originality, flexibility, characterization, plot, mood and atmosphere. This implies that teachers ought to embrace such and similar techniques in their teaching in order to ensure the development of students’ creative thinking and writing.
Keywords: creative writing, story completion technique, L1 Education
References
Gravett, K. (2019). Story completion: storying as a method of meaning-making and discursive discovery. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1–8.
Joseph, S., Rickett, C., Northcote, M. & Christian, B. (2020). ‘Who are you to judge my writing?’: Student collaboration in the co-construction of assessment rubrics. New Writing, 17 (1), 31-49.
Mozaffari, H. (2013). An Analytical Rubric for Assessing Creativity in Creative Writing. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3 (12), 2214-2219.
Paraskevopoulos, Ι. & Paraskevopoulou, P. (2009). Δημιουργική σκέψη: το αποπαίδι της ελληνικής εκπαίδευσης (Creative thinking: the neglected child of Greek educational system). Athens: Korali.
Vaezi, Μ. & Rezaei, S. (2019). Development of a rubric for evaluating creative writing: a multi-phase research. New Writing, 16 (3), 303-317.