Velislava Hillman looks into how technology can act as a bridge between school and real life, where what is learned can immediately be applied

Creativity is essential for human advancement. As the starting point of every discovery and invention, creativity is necessary to examine, not only where it originates or what it produces, but also how it can be triggered and how a highly creative mind can be maintained.

Increased emphasis has been put on the importance of creativity on learning outcomes and literacy.

From Vygotsky’s and Russ’s views of creativity to Amabile’s proposition of having domain-relevant and heuristic skills, to Mednick’s ‘wide horizon’ notion and, more recently, McCarrick’s, Clement’s and Sarama’s creativity and learning through the use of media technologies, exploring ways of fostering creativity in the presence of technology becomes all the more valuable to the fields of education.

With the tablet-per-child policy roll-out from 2016 in Maltese primary schools, one is pressed to ask in what way will smart tablets be incorporated into the curriculum so they can foster creativity and learning. Ultimately, will schools change for the better with these tablets?

After a recent visit to the northern Swedish city of Umeå (pronounced ‘umeo’), known for its strong academic muscle, Volvo – always – and, of course, Stieg Larsson, one cannot help but wonder what is it that makes the Swedes so advanced as a society.

Generalising as I do on one visit may not be quite correct but, funnily enough, last week’s London Times confirmed my subjective observations, so I dare say: Swedes are, indeed, very advanced.

So much so that, while the Western world is now acquainting itself to the idea of breakfasting quinoa and drinking kale topped with spirulina, walk into any Swedish canteen or average café and people will ask if you are vegan to ensure they bring you the right menu.

In a creativity experiment, children struggled to come up with anything out of their own imagination when they were given Lego.

Besides advanced palatable tastes and out-of-this-world self-serve hotels and waffle vending machines around town, the social media, communications and informatics faculties at the city’s eponymous university can be summed up as inspirational.

For example, HUMlab and FUNlab, of Umeå University, are two state-of-the-art laboratories where professors, scientists, artists and students create films, outstanding presentations, quirky creations and innovative research methodologies. One example is Utopia, an ongoing project that aims to develop an interactive game to be used in schools to teach children about democracy and collaboration.

Scientists, IT specialists and researchers involve children – nine- to 11-year-olds – by letting them create the game’s rules. The first thing to underline here is the fact that research about children is done with the children at its centre.

Secondly, teaching children the concepts of democracy and collaboration goes beyond delivering information in a dry, decontextualised manner as conventional schools would do. Technologies act as the bridge between decontextualised school and real life where what is learned can immediately be applied and, therefore, begins to make sense.

As Seymour Papert would put it, the Swedes create a web of connections in which school and real life hang out hand in hand.

Can we, like the Swedes, engage children by letting them speak up and propose their own ideas?

Reflecting on Sir Ken Robinson’s bold statement that school kills creativity, the example above prompt the question: how do we engage Maltese children in our pursuit of the effective means to foster learning and creativity?

Moreover, in the presence of smart tablets and software applications, what methods can be developed to bridge school with real life to ensure that children learn better and, ultimately, learn to love learning?

The media have rambled on about the empowerment of children in the family’s decision-making processes. Teachers admit to having relinquished some of their power and are limited to how much they can impose on children in class. But how truly empowered are children today?

They argue about what computer their family should buy for the home; they bemoan when doing homework, but nothing more than that.

After spending some time in a few classes of seven- to nine-year-olds in Malta this year and conducting an experiment on creativity, the notion that children seem to be subjugated by the dictates of the compulsory curriculum prevailed.

The sort of compliancy among children, especially manifesting among girls, began to concern me deeply. Why are children so compliant? Why don’t they ask questions? Why don’t they argue whether what they hear is right, boring, irrelevant, stupid even?

The creativity experiment deployed comprised several tasks. One of them was to create something – anything – by either using the children’s own smart tablets (those who took part in the tablet-per-child pilot project that ran this year), plain old plasticine, colouring pens and colourful paper, and Lego blocks. None of the children wanted to use their tablets for the experiment – something I initially learned was otherwise their favourite tool to tinker with.

All of the children shrieked at the site of colourful things – the Lego blocks and the plasticine in particular. All of the children grabbed plasticine and Lego blocks.

Then silence ensued.

What happened next was a shocker. Children, even those marked “with learning difficulties”, sunk into a completely new world of their own.

More silence; then subtle babble rose above desks: children struggled to come up with anything out of their own imagination. They wanted to be told what to build (they kept asking me) and they would build it, not the other way round.

In parallel to this, one should ask what sort of learning is our current Maltese curriculum nurturing?

Does our school environment foster creativity or complicity? Can we, like the Swedes, engage children by letting them speak up and propose their own ideas?

Parents’ growing protectiveness over their children, overseeing every task (be that homework or holding their child down the slide in the park) creates overdependence, but school, supposedly a safe environment, should allow for the risky behaviour, the critic to stand up and argue, for the bored to protest and unravel, for the disinterested to propose engaging solutions.

It will be interesting to see how a rotational presidency similar to that of the Council of EU would impact a child by giving him or her responsibility over peers’ discipline for a week; or, perhaps, a lesson for eight-year-olds in asking questions and positing theories.

These are the issues that researchers, academics and educators should focus on with policymakers’ and the education ministry’s support; with input from children themselves and also from our IT industry, artists and media specialists – just like in Umeå.

Adding smart tablets to our current curriculum, left intact, is like putting band-aid to gangrene. The necrosis needs revascularisation, antibiotics, even amputation of some areas.

School, most of all, must become connected to real life; media technologies are the perfect tool to bridge the gap between the two, something Swedes are already on the roll of doing.