A review is offered of Hong Kong's current education reform that sites a key role for creativity. This key role leads us to ask “Creativity in the Hong Kong Classroom: what is the contextual practice?” To address this question 27 Primary classroom teachers across three subject areas were observed and rated using the Classroom Observation Form [Furman, A. (1998). Teacher and pupil characteristics in the perception of the creativity of classroom climate. Journal of Creative Behavior, 32(4), 258–277]. The creativity potential of these teachers was then measured against the Creativity Fostering Teacher Index [Soh, K. C. (2000). Indexing creativity fostering teacher behavior: A preliminary validation study. Journal of Creative Behavior, 34(2), 118–134] and the Creative Personality Scale [Gough, H. G. (1978). A creative personality scale for the adjective check list. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(8), 1398–1405]. Their class students then completed the Chinese Creativity Tests [Wu, J. J., & Chen, F. X. (1998). A study on the new creativity test. Taiwan: Education Bureau and Foundation for Scholarly Exchange]. Findings support and extend current understandings of both system and componential theory [Csikzentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Collins; Amabile, T. M. (1996). The social psychology of creativity. New York: Springer–Verlag; Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context. Boulder: Westview Press]. Instrument limitations and a need for interpretative cautions are discussed and their significance for further research indicated.
It is perhaps readily forgotten that our understanding of ‘creativity’ is still evolving—common usage of the term ‘creativity’ is only a recent feature of the 20th century (Weiner, 2000) while current understandings of ‘creativity’ are diverse and multi-faceted (e.g. Sternberg, 1988 and Sternberg, 1999). In Hong Kong education, the use and understanding of ‘creativity’ has recently been defined by the Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council (CDC) as “the ability to generate original ideas and solve problems appropriate to the contexts” (CDC, 2001)—a definition that echoes both Guilford's (1950) idea of originality as a factor of creativity and Amabile's (1983) idea of appropriateness. Together, this definition and pedigree highlight the thrust of substantial systemic and curriculum reforms to Hong Kong's education system (http://www.e-c.edu.hk/).
One example serves to illustrate how ‘creativity’ in Hong Kong's education reform is defined as a combination of originality and appropriateness. In 2001, the Curriculum Development Council (CDC) introduced Learning to Learn: The Way Forward in Curriculum Development followed by teachers’ curriculum guides ( CDC, 2002a, CDC, 2002b, CDC, 2002c, CDC, 2002d and CDC, 2002e) for the five key-learning areas of Chinese and English Language, Arts, Mathematics and Science. These guides provide both extensive and detailed suggestions of how teachers’ can reform class-time to develop both students’ specific creative abilities, attitudes, attributes and to apply the Creative Problem Solving model and creative thinking strategies. Elsewhere, such reforms have been shown to empower teachers both as decision makers ( Sternberg, 2000) and to modify their classroom behavior—providing more instructions to pupils, less frequent use of disciplining, raising more questions and providing more convergent and divergent tasks as reported both by Fryer (1996) in English speaking classrooms, Furman (1998) in Slovak speaking classrooms, and Zhang (1993) in Chinese speaking classrooms. By seeking to empower decision making (originality) and to modify classroom behavior (appropriateness) the CDC's teachers’ curriculum guides may be seen as grooming teachers to become defining role models for Hong Kong's current definition of ‘creativity’.
A review of current Hong Kong curriculum reform served to illustrate in the Hong Kong classroom, a key role for understanding creativity. Reforms such as Learning to Learn: The Way Forward in Curriculum Development seek to replace traditional boundaries of ‘subject-knowledge’ with generic skills that enhance students’ ‘life-long’ abilities, attitudes, attributes and observable behavior. Integral to the successful implementation of these reforms both within the classroom and the education system is the key role of creativity. This backdrop prompted us to ask “Creativity in the Hong Kong classroom: what is the contextual practice?’ A discussion of our statistical findings raised more questions than answers. Indications that teachers may be significant gatekeepers of student creativity were cautioned by noting the correlations were based on dissimilarly situated data. Where the findings displayed an apparent abundance of creativity – in the learning area of Chinese language – this highlighted a possible flaw in the current research instrumentation leading to detection of some, but not all, forms of classroom ‘creativity’ – particularly the failure to value teachers’ divergent questions. These contradictory possibilities highlighted that dependable interpretations need to be grounded in the classroom context—informed by in-depth case study possibly together with a large-scale, random sampled survey.
Given the instrument limitations and need for interpretative cautions, our question “Creativity in the Hong Kong Classroom: what is the contextual practice?’ remains unanswered—although a possible pathway to its eventual answer is perhaps now becoming clearer.
