Teachers and Creativity: The Role of Internal Motives

Nikolaos Theodoropoulos,Pandelis Kiprianos

doi:10.5296/ije.v12i3.17746

Abstract

In this paper we investigate whether and to what extent teachers’ values function as internal motives that shape their involvement with innovation and Innovative Programs. Linking Amabile’s theoretical schema with Super’s concept of work values, our aim is to detect the features of this shaping. The research has a dual aim: on the one hand to examine the extent to which teachers are receptive to innovation and Innovative Programs and on the other, to analyze the role played in this by work and educational values. From our research it emerged that the more the teachers are governed by the values of offering something, autonomy and sociocentric relationships with colleagues, the more likely is their involvement with educational innovation.

Highlights

Teacher-centered teaching, mechanical rote-learning of school books, the difficulty of linking school knowledge to the pupils’ everyday experience and the predominance of the ‘tutorial schools’ as the solution that ensures school success, are just some of the commonly accepted illnesses of Greek education
The more the teachers believe that ‘sociocentric’ relationships with their colleagues are important in their life, the more likely they are to believe that innovation is necessary in education
From the data analysis it emerged that teachers are receptive to innovation much more as something linked to the sociocentric dimension of learning and much less as a practice linked to pupil performance or the learning of a cognitive object, whether we see that traditionally

Summary

Introduction

Teacher-centered teaching, mechanical rote-learning of school books, the difficulty of linking school knowledge to the pupils’ everyday experience and the predominance of the ‘tutorial schools’ as the solution that ensures school success, are just some of the commonly accepted illnesses of Greek education. Leaving to one side its conceptualizations as a product of some ‘charismatic personality’, researchers believe that creativity is related to problem solving processes, to the way one locates problems, poses research questions and suggests means of solving them that were initially considered unusual but which in time are adopted as self-evident (Brewer and Gardner 1996) Within this context, Glaveanu (2010) believes that there are three dimensions to creativity: a) the socio-cultural nature of the creative acts and the interdependence between the individual and the environment, b) the role played by dialogue and interpersonal relationships in the process of the production of creative ways of thinking and c) the way in which the team processes challenges and problems that arise in the environment. The main idea that runs through the theoretical approach and the methodological design of the research is the shift of interest from the ‘obstacles’ in the analysis of subjective logics that contextualize the attitude adopted by the teacher in the implementation of IP

Methods

Results

Conclusion