A Teacher's Repertoire: Developing Creative Pedagogies

Promoting creativity in schools involves the development of characteristics such as self-motivation, confidence, curiosity and flexibility. It can be argued that the development of the first three of these probably relies on the last, all of which need to be supported by a ‘flexible learning context’. However, this cannot work without a structure which can be used as a scaffold (Vygotsky, 1978) either to go beyond and enhance learning, or to work within a framework, flexible enough to accommodate individual learning styles. Such pedagogy is intricately related to the curriculum. In the context of the newly introduced Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, this paper discusses the experience of an interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy funded by the Scottish Arts Council. The approach was developed within the initial teacher education (ITE) programmes at the University of Aberdeen and elaborates on the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy and creativity.