An Investigation into the Effects of Teacher Involvement and Influence on the Creativity of Children in the Classroom (Saudi Arabia)
The creative ability of a child to realise their imagination is something that is a pleasure to see in drawings created by children. There is the idea that whatever is produced by children is something pure and valuable in its own right. Unfortunately, when children are being creative, they are subject to adult influence, especially by art teachers at school, which is reflected in their work that show signs of this influence and that such influence is an impediment to natural creativity. This study set out to investigate the effect that the teacher and the different aspects of the teacher’s role have on the creativity in children, where it was found that such involvement which includes instruction, engagement and evaluation can negatively impact creativity. The study intensively considered the teacher in the classroom and the curriculum in order to determine the different aspects of teacher involvement to be investigated. The investigation was achieved through experimentation where children were allowed to draw under various experimental conditions. The variables of the experiment included the inclusion and exclusion of the potentially influencing factors in various combinations in order to determine their impact on the children’s creativity. The drawing outcomes produced in the experiments were evaluated for creativity through creativity assessment tools, namely; the Creative Product Semantic Scale (CPSS) to investigate creativity under the various experimental conditions. CPSS was adapted to the study by the inclusion of an ‘Uninfluenced Dimension’ to look for signs of influence in the work. The results showed that the presence of all three variables, namely: instruction, engagement and evaluation had an impact on creativity and a high level of evidence of influence in the drawings. Furthermore, this study showed that curricula influences pedagogy which in turn influences creativity. Moreover, the exclusion of teacher influences reveals a new design paradigm where there is increased creativity, this not only has implications for those interested in art, pedagogy and curricula, but also those concerned with the psychological implications of creativity in children.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations