A Creator's Guide

The Power of the "Imagination Playground"

Well, high fives - and fist bumps - to architect David Rockwell, whose is applying his genius for creating spaces to a new venture called "Imagination Playground" - an collaborative initiative with urban playground king Kaboom to offer children (especially those in low-income neighborhoods) innovative, colorful playspaces to let their imaginations run wild.

These playspaces are unique, in that, rather than just staging the usual slides, swings and other less-than-imaginative standard equipment, Imagination Playgrounds give the children real, movable foam pieces and parts they can combine into endless new forms, configurations - and original creations (photo from Robert Stolarik of theNYTimes).

Think Legos on steriods - or Zolo or Toobers & Zotz at life-size.

As The New York Times reports:

"In Brownsville, Brooklyn, a portable version of Imagination Playground features oversize but lightweight building blocks. ...

Instead of plummeting down slides or dangling from the monkey bars, children on Saturday built polyethylene palaces from blocks shaped like triangles, clovers, rectangles and cylinders.

They became instant abstractionists, using sturdy brushes to mix heaps of wet sand with colored chalk on the cement. And the urban planners-in-training among them took turns toying with hoses and blocks to create water irrigation systems. ..."

Clearly, with creativity and imagination being forced out of the classroom - and in large part out of our education system, in general - in favor of basic memorization and fact-based testing ... initiatives like Imagination Playground are ever more important and essential, to engage our children in using their imaginations to envision new possibilities and see beyond "what already is" and on to "What Can Be."

What are your thoughts on how creative activities (and, unfortunately, increasingly recess itself) are being squeezed out of our education system?

Share your experiences - and innovative ideas - here ....

In creative spirit,
Julie Ann

Stripping Creativity out of the Classroom

There's a great, global debate raging about "The Creative Economy" - and about where the world's innovative knowledge workers will come from, to fuel future economic success - in a new realm where brains trump brawn, services trump manufacturing, and imagination trumps knowledge.

Unfortunately, the United States education system continues to strip creativity - in every form - out of the classroom, and out of education altogether.

In the all-encompassing drive for educational "accountability" (driven by NCLB - No Child Left Behind legislation), the creative arts have been driven out of education almost entirely - and these are the activities that enable students to practice creative and innovative thinking ... to learn to think beyond "What Is" and to create "What Can Be."

Nothing could be more important to global competitiveness than the ability of our workforce to think creatively and our business success to be fueled by innovation - yet these are precisely the abilities we undermine by eliminating creative education.

This past week on Meet the Press (7/13/08), Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) noted this serious discrepancy:

"We can do accountability in different ways.  What we have done with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is squeeze the creativity out of the classroom, because teachers have begun just "teaching to the test" (the standardized tests required by NCLB).  We need to measure progress and reward progress, not hit some one number, some "one size fits all."

But as long as we keep accountability in NCLB by forcing people to measure progress and judging them and saying 'If you do better, good for you ... If you do worse, you've got a problem' - but that's not what we've been doing with NCLB.  What we've done is we said 'one size fits all.'  We need to reauthorize NCLB, but we need to change it so that we get accountability through progress, rather than one standard number for everybody. ... in terms of all the globalization talk, really, we're going to be left behind. ..."

Teaching to the test emphasizes knowledge only - not imagination.  And student testing never measures the most important factor - a student's potential.  Not what he or she currently is, but what he or she can be.

For that, we need educators and parents who understand how to share with our children - and how to apply for ourselves - the conscious use of the creative process.

In creative spirit,
Julie Ann Turner