Infusing creativity elements into regular classroom was an important movement in recent Asian educational reforms. A large-scale research study was conducted in Hong Kong to explore the possibilities, outcomes and difficulties of this kind of curriculum change from students’ perspectives. Based mainly on Western creativity literature, this study developed a set of methods for infusing creativity learning elements into regular science lessons. After its implementation, students perceived improvements in their attitudes, conceptions, abilities and behaviors in creative science development. Students characterized this creative learning as a kind of active and playful learning which encouraged them to think boarder and wider, to appreciate creative ideas, and to develop their curiosity, confidence and initiation in learning. Though this classroom reform originally aimed at creativity development, students considered better understanding of science knowledge and positive attitudes towards science learning as their major gains. Students’ high-order creative developments, such as novel and innovative thinking, challenging authority and risk-taking attitudes, metacognitive development and transfer of learning, were found to be weak. In further analysis, these outcomes were found to be related to some typical characteristics of Eastern culture and educational system. This study argued that creativity education, which adopted this kind of infusion approach, was likely to be restrained by the subject curriculum, local educational systems and social cultures. It provided additional support to the domain-specific, contextual-based and cultural-embedded characteristic of creative learning. Some suggestions were made for creativity reforms in Asian societies.
1.1. Creativity education reform in the East
Nowadays, it is an international trend to integrate creativity in curriculum frameworks (Le Metais, 2003). Recently, governments of Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Israel and other Asian countries have imposed curriculum reforms, which emphasized creativity development in their primary and secondary schools. One common feature of these countries is that they all recognize the importance of creativity across the curriculum, such as science, language, arts and so on. To cultivate creative citizens, Asian countries are undergoing vigorous education reform in a top-down process, in the strong support of their governments.
In Hong Kong, creativity is now one of the three most significant “generic skills” to be developed across all subject curricula (Curriculum Development Council, 2002a). Like the situation of other Asian areas, the curriculum structures and the subject contents of the new curricula of Hong Kong did not have fundamental changes. In its suggestion, creativity is not taught as a separate subject, but to be infused into the regular curriculum, which is still highly conventional and knowledge-centered. Asian places are now in need of effective methods to infuse creativity elements into their regular classrooms (Cheng, 2004a).
To realize creativity education in school curriculum, finding methods to integrate creativity learning and that of content knowledge is unavoidable. Obviously, it is not an easy task. In the process of integration, adjustments, balancing and compromise between the two learning domains are expected to occur. This study provided one potentially useful method for infusing creative learning into subject content, including the discovery, understanding, presentation, application and transformation of content knowledge. The results of this study highlighted several important directions and factors for Asian educators to consider when infusing creativity learning into their regular lessons. They included the perceptions, needs and preferences of students, their tensions and dilemmas in the learning process, the heavy cultural and contextual influences and also the domain-specificity of the infusion approach of creativity education. In future, education policy makers need to note that the starting points of creativity reforms in Asian places may be quite different from that of some Western countries. Simple direct transplant of Western style of creativity learning and their pedagogical practices would surely meet obstacles. In light of this study, it seems that an active, playful, self-actualizing learning style, which emphasizes deeper understanding and daily-life application of science knowledge, and, at the same time, encourages creative appreciation, alternative thinking, curiosity, confidence and initiation in learning may be more readily implemented in schools and favored by students in the existing Asian contexts. In light of this study, Asian educators should consider scaffolding creativity education into various dimensions and progressive levels, with higher focus on adaptive creativity in its initial stage of reform, and the inclusion of student voice in its process of change.
