Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:00:00]:
There is a moment in time where the child says, I finished, and when they say I finished, whoever is going to evaluate that outcome will look at the end of it, right? And actually, creativity happens a lot in the processes, in the invisible ways, in all the ways that maybe did not result in the final outcome, but they were still part of the process of creating it.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:26]:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:29]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:31]:
This is the fueling creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:35]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:40]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:51]:
Goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:59]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood: [00:01:01]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the fueling creativity in education podcast. And Cindy and I are super excited for this episode because we are welcoming Patricia Alves Oliveiria, who is a postdoctorate researcher at the computer science and engineering department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Patricia received her PhD in human Robot Interaction studies in 2020 from the University Institute of Lisbon and spent time at Cornell University as a visiting graduate scholar. Her research focuses on designing human robot interaction. She is especially interested in leveraging the qualities of social robots to empower human health and education. During her PhD, she studied the application of robots in fostering creativity in children. And now I know everyone listening understands why Cindy and I are so excited for this upcoming episode. Patricia, thank you so much for joining us.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:01:59]:
Thank you for having me.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:00]:
Patricia, we would love to start with a paper that you recently co authored that was a systematic review of creativity interventions for children over the last 70 years. When I came across this article, I was in awe. I thought, oh my gosh, what a great journal article. I immediately started sending it out to all of my colleagues and friends who are interested in creativity and education, who have asked, what is the impact of creativity interventions and what has been done? And what I would love for you to do is give us a highlight of what you learned in doing this review of the literature and tell us a bit about what you discovered.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:02:39]:
So this article, the main intention behind it was really to understand the landscape of creativity interventions or trainings for children. I wanted to understand where we are and how it evolved over time. So I started a systematic review on the very early types of trainings that were established and validated for children and how that evolved over time and what are the current limitations of them. So I started with this very well defined goal in mind, and then it just opened the door for so many new things on creativity. From concept definition. What is creativity? Because there is just so many ways to define it. I even came across articles that say, what is not creativity? In order to be able to define what creativity is, or concepts related to creativity that people use, like problem solving, originality and all of that is such a rich field that I tried to disentangle along the way, because researchers were just referring to these terms in very different ways. And then I was trying to understand how they use those terms and those ideas to establish trainings for children.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:04:01]:
And so I also discovered a lot of different approaches to them, but there are some aspects that were very common among them. So one of the most immediate things that I found, and that for me as a critical researcher on this, was that a lot of the trainings for children were like tests. They looked like a test, an exam. So they were mostly like children would sit at a table, they would be given this piece of paper with some exercises, and usually that paper was given by a teacher, and then they would evaluate the outcome of whatever children had done in those exercises. Even if the exercises were interesting, such as drawings, they still had this mindset of someone will evaluate it, someone is giving it to me, and someone is expecting something from me. That was the first thing that I’ve noticed. This goes kind of against what a child is, which is like trial and error and just being around on the floor or in the dirt and playing around with things. So that was one of the first things I noticed.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:05:16]:
Another thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of the expectation is for teachers to do those types of trainings when teachers are already overflowing with work. Sometimes the curriculum that they have to deliver is even beyond what they can do in the classroom. So how can teachers open space for creativity training when that’s not even being rewarded in an educational system? And so I was trying to see what other ways, what other people have been delivering trainings in children. And actually, some of the trainings are meant for children to do on their own. So they have independence on the training, because the training looks like a playful activity that they can do on their own or with their peers, with their friends. And then there is also some trainings that include families, which I think is so important and not so discussed. The role of families in training children for creativity, because whatever happens inside school needs to be continued outside school. There is also amazing work studying the impact of outside trainings in children creativity inside the school.

Cyndi Burnett [00:06:28]:
So what would you recommend that teachers do? So you’re giving them a test, which typically is a torrance test of creative thinking. That’s how people typically test children, right. In creativity. But I often get this question around assessment. So how can you assess children to see if those interventions are working? So what would you recommend that teachers and administrators do to assess a child to see if there is any impact on that intervention?

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:06:57]:
One of the aspects that I found was that a lot of the evaluations or the measurements of creativity come with the end product. So with the final resolution of the exercise or the final drawing, there is a moment in time where the child says, I finished. And when they say, I finished, whoever is going to evaluate that outcome will look at the end of it. Right. And actually, creativity happens a lot in the processes, in the invisible ways, in all the ways that maybe did not result in the final outcome, but they were still part of the process of creating it. And that is not being looked at so much for many reasons, very valid reasons, such as it’s chaotic, it’s so hard to measure. How can we quantify this? How can we interpret what we have, and how can we make meaning out of it in such a way that we understand if it’s creative or not? So I would say one way to do it is really to look more at the process, and I’m not sure if I can give a straight way to do that, but I definitely think there is so much around the process that can impact other ways of education. For example, even during the teaching of history or math or biology, could there be a space in the formal curriculum where teachers open a creativity thought process? So how could we use that math problem for something else? How could we think about the history that happened in this way? What if something changed along the way? Can you reinvent a little part of the history? So these open ended questions that look for processes, and I’m not just saying, throw all of your ideas and all of that is fine, because creativity is not just about divergent thinking, but also how to make cohesive convergence on the real world.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:09:03]:
So how can we bring that back? And maybe this is just a little 10% of that lecture, but it is part of the process of creating things, and I’m not even sure if we need to measure everything. Sometimes it’s just more the process of opening space for it.

Matthew Worwood: [00:09:21]:
I really appreciate some of the stuff that you’ve said, and we’ve discussed it in past episodes. This idea of a lot of the creative thinking typically occurs during the process. And, yes, it’s very difficult to measure it. One of the strategies that I’ve introduced in one of my classes is kind of weekly progress reports. So when you’re kind of engaging students in project based learning environments, I think there’s an opportunity for you to have them deliver presentations of their learning each week. And it’s not always a tangible product or outcome that you can kind of point to and say, oh, that’s an a, that’s a b, that’s a c. But nevertheless, they’re still presenting knowledge, they’re presenting discoveries, and most importantly, they’re able to articulate the new knowledge that they’ve grasped. And so that might be from research, but then they’re able to showcase the connections they’ve made between what they’ve discovered and how that’s going to move their project forward.

Matthew Worwood: [00:10:23]:
And I think that if there’s opportunities for us to kind of build more of those presentation type styles or other methods to which you can have students articulating what they’ve learned along the way, then I think we’re beginning to celebrate and promote the process as much as the product.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:10:42]:
I absolutely agree. Even critical discussions in the classroom. And by critical or a critique, I don’t mean to criticize, but to think about it with the lenses of critical thinking, discussions between children about what they bring in. So if a child brings in a project and the class could discuss around it, could question it, right? I think this is absolutely a great process of creativity being brought in the classroom in a very natural way. And I do believe that it also has the potential to expand outside the classroom to their normal interactions, which is ultimately what we want. We don’t want children locked in the classroom being creative, and then they come out and they’re like standardizers.

Matthew Worwood: [00:11:32]:
Well, actually, that was another piece that I got from your first answer is this idea that the semester or the class comes to an end. But quite often when we think about change and change theories, we’re quite often thinking about how an experience leads to a change of behavior in the future. And that’s another piece that when we kind of, like, end a lesson or end a semester, we don’t always have an opportunity to make a connection of, well, what was learned and discovered in semester a has led to behavioral changes in semester b. And so I’m just thinking along the way, within the system, perhaps there is an opportunity to be better at making connections and evaluating the progress on grades as well. So it’s not just a case of, like, saying, oh, you as an a here and an a here and an a here and an a here. It was actually, well, this is what you knew, and this is how you was applying your knowledge in semester a. And then look how that’s led to a change in behavior in semester B and C, or a change in approach to how you tackle problems in semester b and C. Absolutely.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:12:41]:
I absolutely agree with that. And we might be able to even see this just in indirect ways, too. Thinking about, again, outside of the classroom, what types of programs do children like to see on tv? Does that change with creativity in the classroom? What do they like to play with? Does that change? How do they talk about things? Does that change? And also promoting activities where children, and maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but where they can get bored because they will have to invent something to do. And there is also a lot of research on boredom and creativity and how that opens space for relaxation and for thinking about things in a different way. I don’t believe that children always need to be doing something to be creative. Sometimes it happens in the closet of their minds, and then it comes out unexpectedly.

Cyndi Burnett [00:13:38]:
So, Patricia, can you tell us how we could improve our interventions to promote creativity in young children?

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:13:45]:
So I would say the first thing would be to bring way more playfulness in the interventions. And I think that’s actually big. It’s a big change because interventions are designed, created by adults generally. And so we have this adult mindset on how can we measure whatever the child would do. So we are very concerned with the outcome and with the process and to be methodologically sound, and that’s great. But then sometimes we go too far beyond, and it feels like the child and the natural way to communicate with the world and they interact with the world is a little bit secondary to it. So I think that actually should be at the heart of designing any activity for interventions with children to go back to kind of our inner child, actually, to reactivate that which everyone has. We are all very serious adults, but I think there is always a playful part inside us being that when we cook, when we are relaxed generally, and kind of reactivating, how could I bring this feeling to an intervention that a child would do? I think that should be very important.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:15:01]:
So that could mean just the activity is done on the playground, the activity is done with sticks and stones, which was when everything started on storytelling. So going back to the basics, keeping it simple, that might open more space for the complexity of the creativity of the child to come out, there is maybe less expectations because expectations over the child might also hinder and put some lenses and layers over what they express. So we want to remove all of that and make it sound like we are in the playground playing. So I think to really improve creativity trainings, we need to be very creative ourselves on how can we make maybe a space for this comfort in the child to arise and to be able to measure it, to be able to say at the end, this is better than that. Definitely keeping it simple, making it child centric, and designing with that in mind throughout the process.

Matthew Worwood: [00:16:07]:
I’m going a little bit off topic, but you are making me think about how serious learning is, how we’ve made learning such an incredibly serious and pressured experience. And I look at my undergraduate students and the pressure that they put themselves under, and of course, I think a lot of it is connected to a job. If you don’t work hard, if you don’t get good grades, then that is going to significantly impact your life moving forward. But what you’re doing in your response there is reminding us that actually we know that we learn very effectively through play. Play is fun. Play is a comfortable experience. We learn through trial and error, but the errors aren’t serious. There’s not dramatic consequences when we make mistakes.

Matthew Worwood: [00:17:00]:
It’s just part of the fun experience. So out of curiosity, if I’m a teacher in a traditional class environment, what might you say to help me think more about introducing fun, playful activities in my classroom environment?

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:17:19]:
I love that question. I think mindset change could be a big thing. So taking the mindset out of this will count for your grade. Or we will assess this as good, bad, or medium to something more exploratory and curiosity driven, such as the child might have done something unexpected given a given prompt. Why would that be? So the questions of why and how, instead of an immediate judgment of what that means in the real world, could make a huge change just in the long run to bring that critical thinking in also. This happened, but why did it happen and how did you make that connection, and why did your colleague did it differently? So involving more of these discussions could make a huge change in the mindset and make it less like a judgment and more accepting the differences of each child on how they think, how they develop. Everyone develops at their own pace, at their own time. I think something that is very important too, is just like how the environment is.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:18:35]:
As soon as we enter a room, any room, we feel something about it. Is this a very serious room where I need to sit down at a chair, right? So I think the physical world, we tend to forget this, but the physical world wasn’t born. We created it. And so change it. Change it to whatever you need to make the activity you want to bring in reflected in the environment, too. So maybe take the chairs or put them upside down, who knows? But I think that’s a very important thing, because a painter can be creative because it has the brushes and the canvas, a dancer, the music, the musician, the instrument. So all of the instruments and tools that are around us, the physical things that we actually grab and do stuff with, they were created by us. It’s not like someone came from the skies and give it to us.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira [00:19:29]:
And so I think we are responsible to make that happen with whatever resources we have to just shift things around.

Cyndi Burnett [00:19:37]:
I love the idea of the classroom being sort of the medium of. You can create things in your physical environment to help facilitate that creativity in your classroom. And I’ve been in some classrooms, and you feel that it’s sterile and it’s dull, and you sort of feel like you just want to take a nap, and there’s nothing that inspires you. And then even if you think about playfulness in the classroom, like, you can make things playful inside of your classroom just by making them unusual. I have a teacher that I work with, and she has a little Yoda, baby Yoda in her classroom, and she gives it dress up clothes based on the theme of the week in her elementary class. And just doing simple things that spark laughter and curiosity and open mindedness can help change the perspective of being inside that classroom and making it a more warm and friendly environment. So this concludes part one of our double espresso with Patricia Alvis Aliveria.

Matthew Worwood: [00:20:37]:
In our second episode, we will be getting a little bit deeper into the concept of robotics and also future technologies that might support promoting creativity and developing creativity skills in younger children.

Cyndi Burnett [00:20:50]:
Stay tuned. This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dadsforCreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.