Nurturing Creativity in Music Education: A Conceptual Framework and Practical Applications for Secondary Music Classrooms

Abstract

Creativity has recently been increasing in importance with many organizations around the world recognizing the need for creative individuals. Indeed, many believe that creativity should be taught in educational systems to prepare students to be flexible and adaptable in our rapidly changing world. Despite this, pedagogies, and educational strategies, for nurturing creativity in classrooms remain limited. The goal for my project, then, is to respond to this need by contributing to current efforts into developing a framework for creativity in education. This is done through this project in two parts. The first section of this project is a synthesis of literature where I distill creativity research in a way that is meaningful for workers in education by emphasizing essential concepts in teaching and learning. The relevant ideas and theories from the literature are categorized into four pillars: establishing a creativity conducive environment, designing tasks for nurturing creativity, developing success criteria for creativity, and assessing creativity in the classroom. The sections are presented sequentially beginning with the most foundational ideas that can be implemented into classroom teaching. The second section is composed of my conceptualizations of classroom activities for secondary music classrooms that target creativity by making use of the ideas described in the synthesis of literature. Each activity targets a different area of music that would typically be learning goals in school curricula: reflecting, analyzing & responding, improvisation, composing/arranging, and performing. My hope is that this work may guide music teachers, pre-service and in-service, to enhance their ability to foster creativity in their own classroom teaching. While this project is targeted towards secondary music education, I believe that this work will also be a step towards developing pedagogies for creativity in all subject areas and grade levels.