Training pre-service teachers to be creative: A case study from an Australian university

Creativity in education is extremely important but can be problematic in its teaching and assessment. In order for school students to become comfortable and confident being creative, the teachers firstly require training in how to take risks in their own learning and assessment ideally during their university training. For many students, this is a leap of faith (Robinson, 2009). Here, they need to develop their own creative skills supported by a theoretical framework in their respective disciplines. These creative ideas and outputs according to Boden (2004) can be categorised as integrative, exploratory or transformative. In this context, the pre-service teacher may experience creativity in any of these ways depending on their skill level and confidence. A lecturer at an Australian university transformed an arts education unit in order to more effectively teach creativity to pre-service arts educators who are studying to work in the early and primary years of schooling. In the Australian curriculum, the arts studied are visual art, media art, dance, drama and music (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2011). This online unit underwent a transformation in order to teach arts pedagogy more effectively, and to provide opportunities for pre-service teachers to more actively engage in the creative process. The methodology used was Participatory Action Research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005) where the steps are: planning a change; acting and observing the processes and consequences of change; reflecting on the processes and consequences; and replanning to start the cycle again (p. 595). The chapter will describe what aspects of the unit were changed and the outcomes of the transformation in order to provide pre-service students with opportunities for creativity in the educational experience.