Why Creativity?

 

Children should be active participants in their cultural life,
not just consumers of commercialised culture.
Children are bombarded with famous faces and pop music every day; celebrity, film, TV and pop music is big- business.
At ABC Creative Music, we believe Early Years and Primary school music should counter-balance, not consolidate this.
We believe children should be active participants in culture- not just consumers. 
In schools using ABC resources, while children learn traditional songs, music from other cultures, and explore rock, jazz, folk and classical music, creating and performing their own music is a bigger part of what they do.
Creativity empowers children.
It is our job to make sure no-one feels ‘creativity is something other people do, people who are talented or special.’ 
Creativity connects children.
Ask a roomful of people to make a creative decision one by one- you find out something about each person.
Creativity is fun!
Creativity is surprising and affirming, and at times can be exhilarating and deeply satisfying.
Creativity gives children a voice!
It allows children to have their own perspective, which is listened to and acted upon by others,
and helps them to express it in increasingly confident and articulate ways.
This takes months and years, with safe authentic creative processes that grow in complexity as children’s skills, confidence and conceptual world grows. It is not something that should be bolted on at the end- or be done half-heartedly every now and again.
Creativity is flexible-  it adapts to any topic.
Music and creativity can be hugely cross-curricular
Creativity creates engagement and ownership.
Children really respond to the chance to make decisions, to take control, to express themselves.

But creativity can be scary- for both children and teachers. 
It involves the new and unknown. What are we about to create? What is about to happen?
Children don’t want to have ownership of something that doesn’t sound good, or doesn’t make sense. Performing in front of others feels scary, you don’t want to mess up or look bad.
And it’s scary for teachers; outcomes are unclear, control given to children, and quite often we don’t know how to help children create stuff that makes them feel good.
ABC Music is very very very interested in Creativity.
At ABC Music we are very very very very interested in creativity- in making it genuinely work for children and non-specialist teachers in the classroom, every day every week every where for every child. so much so we have developed a bunch of theories in it, and are now writing academic papers about it to encourage a debate.
We think there is a wide acceptance that creativity is good, but widespread confusion about what creativity is and how to bring it safely into education.
How do you make genuine creativity safe and available to your learners, for much of the time, to develop long- term creative emotional and cognitive skills- and instrumental pitch rhythmic performance skills, and confidence available to non-specialists. 
We are not saying it is falling-off-a-log easy- there will be scary moments, because there are meant to be scary moments- but it will transform your classroom, your understanding of what primary and early years music can and should be, and it will transform your children.

 

To read ABC Founders Phil and Tom Bancroft's Paper on Creativity-
entitled 'Creativity in Music Education and Beyond'- go here.