Presenter: Leonor María Martínez Serrano
Affiliation: University of Córdoba, Spain
Chosen format: Presentation
Abstract:
Schools kill creativity, argues Ken Robinson in his landmark TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” (2006), drawing educators’ attention to a skill that should be central to current school curricula. However, the reality is that , instead of growing into imagination, students get progressively “educated out of it,” which would be the desirable outcome of formal schooling. Nobody would question the decisive role played by creativity, not just in the field of education, where a growing body of research suggests it can improve students’ academic performance (Fisher, 2004), but also in our everyday lives more generally. As Fehér (2015) has pointed out, creativity is “a life skill we use on a daily basis” ( p. 64). In the Know ledge Age, where new knowledge is being massively produced and rehearsed on an unprecedented scale, creativity sh ould be on a par with such fundamental skills as literacy (or pluriliteracies), critical thinking and lifelong learning. Upon closer scrutiny, language itself is a creative phenomenon in itself, always mediating the process of disciplinary knowledge construction that occurs in classrooms all over the world. Every single word or sentence we say or write is created on the spur of the moment, in a unique moment of communication. But because it is almost the very air we breathe, because “[l]inguistic creativity in particular is so much part of learning and using language […] we tend to take it for granted” ( Maley 2015, p. 9). This paper explores the role of creativity in quality language learning and bilingual education, with a focus on CLIL settings, where languages(L1, L2 and L3) are both vehicles of communication and tools for co-constructing subject-specific curricular knowledge. Creativity can be cultivated in CLIL teaching throu gh the medium of a wide range of strateg ies that will be the main focus of this paper. In learning content subjects, students need to be exposed to learner-centred experiences that encourage dialogic learning, critical thinking, decision-making and problem-solving, while they are also given opportuni ties to articulate their understanding of content in a variety of formats, in accordance with the spirit of Universal Design for Learning.