Background: Creativity across all disciplines is increasingly viewed as a fundamental educational capability. Science can play a potentially important role in the nurturing of creativity. Research also suggests that creative pedagogy, including interdisciplinary teaching with Science and the Arts, can engage students with science. Previous studies into teachers' attitudes to the relationship between science and creativity have been largely situated within national educational contexts.Purpose: This study, part of the large EU funded CREATIONs project, explores educators' perspectives on the relationship between Science and Creativity across national contexts drawn from Europe and beyond.Sample and Methods: 270 educators, broadly defined to include primary (age 4-11) and secondary (age 11-18) teachers and trainee teachers, informal educators and teacher educators, responded to a survey designed to explore perceptions of the relationship between science and creativity. Respondents were a convenience sample recruited by project partners and through online media. The elements of the survey reported here included Likert-scale questions, open response questions, and ranking questions in the form of an electronic self-administered questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was used to develop a combined attitude scale labelled 'science is creative', with results compared across nationalities and phases of education. Open question responses were analysed thematically to allow more nuanced interpretation of the descriptive statistical findings.
Results:The findings show broad agreement internationally and across phases that science is a creative endeavour, with a small number of educators disagreeing about the 3 relationship between science and creativity in the context of school science. Those who disagreed were usually secondary science teachers, from England, Malta or outside Europe (primarily from the United States). The role of scientific knowledge within creativity in science education was found to be contentious.
Conclusions:That educators broadly see science as creative is unsurprising, but initial exploration of educators' perspectives internationally shows some areas of difference.These were especially apparent for educators working in formal education, particularly relating to the role of knowledge with respect to creativity in science. With current interest in STEAM education, further investigation to understand potential mediating factors of national educational contexts on teachers' perspectives with respect to the role of disciplinary knowledge(s) in creativity and their interaction in interdisciplinary teaching and learning, is recommended.
material approaches to science education and teacher education. She uses a range of methods as relevant to these questions, from survey studies to new materialist diffractive analysis. Lindsay co-leads Initial Teacher Education at the University of Exeter and is a member of the Centre for Research in STEM Education.
Complexity theories have in common perspectives that challenge linear methodologies and views of causality. In educational research, relatively little has been written explicitly exploring their implications for educational research methodology in general and case study in particular. In this paper, I offer a rationale for case study as a research approach that embodies complexity, and I explore the implications of a ‘complexity thinking’ stance for the conduct of case study research that distinguishes it from other approaches. A complexity theoretical framework rooted in the key concepts of emergence and complexity reduction, blended using a both/and logic, is used to develop the argument that case study enables the researcher to balance the open-ended, non-linear sensitivities of complexity thinking with the reduction in complexity, inherent in making methodological choices. The potential of this approach is illustrated using examples drawn from a complexity theoretical research study into curriculum change.
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