Creative dance: Singapore children's creative thinking and problem‐solving responses

Abstract

An important outcome of Singapore's education system is the development of creative thinking skills. This project investigates the impact of a creative dance unit on a class of Primary One (seven‐year‐old) children's usage of bodily kinaesthetic intelligence to solve problems. One key objective was for the researchers to observe something new, something that stimulated the children to deviate from their normal range of motion. Students were observed across five sessions in order to document any progressive learning, particularly in their kinaesthetic responses to the problem‐solving tasks. These kinaesthetic responses serve as the primary data source for this paper. Our belief was that creative thinking and problem solving are learnable and teachable skills. We hypothesized that in spite of children's lack of dance education, there would be an observable increase in creative thinking as expressed in varied solutions to movement problems over the course of five sessions. A programme of instruction and curricular materials has been designed to support the acquisition of cognitive skills and subject‐matter knowledge and increase students' proficiency in problem solving and experimentation using the tools of dance.