Creative Curriculum Research Articles

Implications of the Creative Curriculum from the Perspectives of Educators in Qatar University Early Childhood Center

To better understand the effectiveness of any implemented early childhood curriculum, it is vital to pay attention to the experiences of early childhood educators who practiced that curriculum. The purpose of this research is to investigate early childhood educators' experiences with the Creative Curriculum that has been implemented at the Early Childhood Center of Qatar University since 2015. In this phenomenological research, the methodology includes: (a) in-depth phenomenologically based interviews, (b) follow-up online interviews, and (c) a focus group meeting with the teachers. Eight early childhood educators with a wide range of experiences presented their own experiences with the Creative Curriculum. The findings revealed that by implementing the Creative Curriculum, teachers were encouraged to integrate all aspects of the Curriculum. Teachers were inspired to pay close attention to their children’s physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development and to respond appropriately. This research provides insights and future implications about this specific curriculum in the early childhood field.

Can the Curriculum of Creativity Affect Motivation to Dance?

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the curriculum of creativity affects motivation to dance. The experiment was conducted. Forty dancers were divided into experimental and control groups. The experiment was carried out for sixteen weeks. Dancers in the control group were educated according to a regular programme designed by the teacher, while dancers in the experimental group were given the creativity curriculum. To assess the effect of different curricula on dancers' motivation, a questionnaire survey was conducted at the beginning and at the end of the experiment.

MUSIC CREATIVITY INTERVENTION FOR OLDER ADULTS WITH AND WITHOUT MCI: COGNITIVE BENEFITS AND NEURAL MECHANISMS

Abstract Alzheimer’s and related dementias are debilitating conditions, and at this time, no cure has been identified. Older age is associated with cognitive decline and dementia. Developing and testing innovative non-pharmacological interventions to delay the loss of functional ability and understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the intervention’s efficacy is imperative. We conducted a semi-randomized clinical trial evaluating the effects of a novel music creativity curriculum on cognitive and neurological outcomes. Eighty older adults with and without a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) diagnosis were randomized to a 6-week music creativity intervention or a 6-week no-treatment control condition. Before and after the six weeks, both groups participated in a series of self-report and cognitive assessments; they also participated in resting-state fMRI scans to quantify whole-brain network patterns of modularity and flexibility. Those randomized to the music group exhibited improved overall cognitive function and working memory relative to the control group (assessed using standard clinical neuropsychological assessments). The association between being randomized to the music group and increased cognitive function was more robust among those who exhibited greater neural flexibility at baseline. The study shows that music creativity interventions may positively affect cognition, especially among those whose neural network structure is more dynamic or flexible. This study is innovative as it is among the first to identify possible neural mechanisms underlying why music creativity interventions confer a more significant cognitive benefit for some older adults than others.

The Impact of Early Childhood Teacher’s Perception on the Development of Creative Curriculum: A Mixed Approach

The current study focuses on investigating the impact of early childhood teacher’s perception on the development of creative curriculum. Mixed approach was taken to analyse the findings of the study. For the qualitative study, past papers and scholarly researches have been taken to touch the deeper roots of the topic. Moreover, for the quantitative approach, regression analysis was conducted to statistically test the significance of the variables on the study variable. The main objective of the study was to examine the views of the early childhood teachers in creating the curriculum for the students. To collect the responses, semi-structured interviews were undertaken to know the responses of the teacher that were later encoded to perform the regression analysis. The findings showed that, teacher’s role and perception has a significant impact on creative curriculum development as teachers are the main actors engaged in student teacher learning and experiment multiple methods in enhancing the learning experience of the students. Finally, it is recommended to conduct the longitudinal study in the future research to have the more detailed analysis of the study.

Feasibility and Acceptability of a Group Music Creativity Intervention for Adults with Varying Cognitive Function

ABSTRACT Maintaining healthy cognitive functioning and delaying cognitive decline in cognitively intact and cognitively impaired adults are major research initiatives for addressing dementia disease burden. Music interventions are promising, non-pharmaceutical treatment options for preserving cognitive function and psychological health in older adults with varying levels of cognitive function. While passive, music interventions have attracted considerable attention in the abnormal cognitive aging literature, active, music interventions such as music creativity are less well-studied. Among 58 older adults with different levels of cognitive function (cognitively healthy to mild cognitive impairment), we examined the feasibility and acceptability of Project CHROMA, a Stage 1 clinical trial developed to assess the effects of a novel, music creativity curriculum on various health outcomes. Music intervention participation (93%), overall study retention (78%), and intervention satisfaction (100%) rates were comparable to other similarly designed clinical trials. Exploratory analyses using mixed-level modeling tested the efficacy of the intervention on cognitive and psychological outcomes. Compared to those in the control condition, participants in the music condition showed some improvements in cognitive functioning and socioemotional well-being. Findings suggest that a 6-week music creativity clinical trial with several multi-modal health assessments can be feasibly implemented within a sample of varying cognitive ability.

Design Thinking in Education: Adding Collaboration, Uncertainty, Phronesis and Fairydust to Curriculum Design

We exist in an age of supercomplexity with policy and strategies both impacting and restricting creative curriculum development and participatory classroom practices particularly in Higher Education (HE). As academic developers who have also taught undergraduate programmes we inhabit liminal space - both enacting and subject to policy - both professing and subverting practice. In this paper we outline how we have engaged in human centred curriculum design ourselves. Typically curriculum evaluation and development processes are presented to our staff-as-students as something far removed from design thinking (DT). Curriculum design emphasises thorough thinking, it is slow-paced, and continuously evaluated. DT requires trust and collaboration, open sharing of diverse and often contradicting ideas, rapid prototyping - a non-judgemental space that will help ideas develop and grow, playing with initiatives that might not work. DT encourages experimentation. We used a collaborative Practice-Based Research (PBR) approach to explore our processes to reveal how DT can be a valuable part of a more fast-paced, urgent, creative and human centred curriculum design.

Exploring Children’s Developmental Stages and Preparation of a Framework for Comprehensive and Creative Curriculum

This paper examines the overall child development and approaches to child development and suggested a framework for constructing a curriculum that enhance the whole child learning process relevance to learning theories. In addition to assess the child activities in and out of the classroom and school. It has been examined from the developmental approaches of child that it is essential to concern the theories and approaches to child development for making a framework of creative and comprehensive curriculum. The theories and approaches of Jean Piaget, Bruner, Erikson and Hoffnung have discussed in the paper. Generally three major domains of development (Physical, cognitive, and psychosocial) are discussed in relevance to above mentioned psychologists. Concerning upon the stages and development of child a framework for comprehensive curriculum has made. Furthermore, the paper suggested the construction of Child-centered curriculum. In construction of the curriculum, the content and material required for comprehensive curriculum has been added in the paper. The very first thing is to make it research and theories based, a good curriculum must have specific goals and objectives, the interest level of children should be observed first and include materials afterword, the role of the teacher, family engagement and concerning the disable children are the main considerations of comprehensive and creative curriculum.

COGNITION AND HEALTH: PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF A MUSIC CREATIVITY INTERVENTION FOR ADULTS AT RISK OF MCI

Abstract As the number of people with dementia is projected to rise to 13.8 million by 2050, there is a growing need to develop interventions that prevent or slow down disease progression in at-risk individuals. Older adults are particularly vulnerable, given that increasing age is the strongest predictor of dementia. Music interventions are promising, non-pharmaceutical treatment options for slowing down cognitive decline and enhancing psychological health. However, more music-related clinical trials are needed to evaluate treatment efficacy and to identify biobehavioral mechanisms of change. Project Chroma is a Stage 1 semi-randomized clinical trial, developed to assess the effects of a novel, music creativity curriculum on cognitive, socio-emotional, neurobiological, and immunological outcomes. In this study of 58 older adults with or without MCI, we demonstrate that Project Chroma has good feasibility and acceptability: participation, retention and satisfaction rates were comparable to other similarly designed clinical trials. Preliminary analyses revealed that participants in the music condition, relative to those in the control condition, showed marked improvements in cognitive functioning. Slight changes in socioemotional well-being were observed, which may be attributed to a minimally distressed sample. This study contributes to a growing literature substantiating music interventions as effective options for curtailing cognitive decline. Forthcoming work will examine the effects of music creativity on neural and immune outcomes.

Classroom participation: Teachers’ work as listeners

ABSTRACT This article examines teachers’ work as part of the everyday life of classrooms, schools and communities—as curriculum design, dynamic pedagogies and as an oeuvre which is assembled over time. One of the hardest aspects of the everyday work of teachers, and perhaps one of the most under-rated and under-studied, is listening, really listening. This article firstly explores the dangers of teachers not listening. Secondly, it highlights the contributions of teacher researchers who take students and their worlds seriously. We argue that teachers listening to students in the context of their communities can underpin responsive pedagogies and creative curriculum design, which in turn can allow students to assemble repertoires of complex communication practices for representation, participation and taking action. Finally, we speculate about how, over time, teachers, as artists, assemble an oeuvre—an assemblage of curriculum design and responsive pedagogies which could inform teacher education and research.

역량 중심의 창의적 체험활동을 위한 국가 수준 교육과정 설계 방안 탐색

Objectives This study explores the components of the national-level curriculum and proposes a new national-level curriculum design plan for competency-based creative experiential activities. Methods The 2015 revised creative experiential activities were analyzed by investigating contents and through the extraction of competency-based activities goals and academic standards. In addition, Delphi surveys were conducted on experts in creative experiential activities and competency education to understand the feasibility of designing a distinct competency-based curriculum. Results The plan for designing a new and innovative competency-based format is as follows; The presentation of three competencies: personal growth, social relations, and creative innovations. Detailed competencies of individual growth presented self-management, self-directedness, willingness to grow; detailed competencies of social relationships presented communication, collaboration, empathy, citizenship, and creative innovation. In addition, a total of 23 achievement standards were given in conjunction with competency-based creative experiential activities, presenting general goals and clear competence goals. Conclusions This study is significant in that it first conferred a competency-based creative experiential activities curriculum and clarified the nature of creative experiential activities by shifting the creative experiential activities curriculum from area-based to competency-based.

An exploratory foreign language curriculum: The creative application of RICH in senior high school English instruction

With the rapid development of globalization, foreign language learners are supposed to have the ability to use the language in intercultural communication accurately and appropriately. However, guided by the traditional teacher-centered language teaching and learning model, learners cannot meet the requirements of social development because the knowledge that students acquire is rather limited, let alone learning and applying abilities. Meanwhile, their interest in learning a foreign language cannot be fully stimulated. RICH, a creative curriculum concept, combines Research-based Learning, Integrated Curriculum, Cooperative Learning, and Humanistic Outcomes. The new curriculum concept aims to lead students to enter the language classroom as thinkers and researchers, developing their humanistic qualities and their abilities to use the English language in practice through interdisciplinary studies so as to promote their intercultural communicative ability eventually. To test the applicability of RICH in senior high English school instruction, qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed, including one academic year’s teaching experiment lasting from 2020 through 2021, video recordings of instructing cases, and semi-open interviews with some subjects. Research data has demonstrated that RICH can be of great help in creatively designing and implementing key competence cultivation-oriented English instructions in the context of the New Curriculum Standards for senior high school English instruction.

“Girmit Root and Pacific Shoot”: An Indo-Fijian Autobiographical Poetic Narrative for Constructing, Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Girmit Story

This article draws from the narratives through oral story telling of my great grandmother’s experience during Girmit. It aims to preserve the past and present for future generations in a creative manner. Narrative and poetic inquiry has been used to bond the Girmit root and the Pacific shoot. Inspiration from Teresia Teaiwa’s (1968–2017) efforts which emphasized creative practice as a path to drawing out and deepening one’s knowledge guided this article. Data, presented as poems, express and communicate the stories pertaining to Girmit and its descendants. Present curriculum should seize opportunities to cultivate the usage of narratives and poetry to create a creative curriculum. This article, hopes that the poems could be used in the curriculum to construct, deconstruct and reconstruct the colonial mind-sets. It is written from my heart to the many hearts who, like me, are still in search for answers and insights of being and belonging to the diasporic/Hybrid identity.

Design and Practice of Aerobics Teaching Design Based on Data Fusion Algorithm

Aerobic exercise is a very popular form of exercise. It combines various forms of sports and music. Aerobic exercise improves muscle tone and relaxes the mind and body while burning calories. It is designed to individualize instruction for different audiences. It is an important factor in the applicability of the operation. The purpose of this paper is to build different human models based on sensor network numbers to quantify different movements through the Internet of Things (IoT) to design personalized curriculum design and practice to improve the popularity of creative aerobics curriculum. In this paper, we first give an overview of the algorithm and data fusion algorithm and then simulate the aerobics creative curriculum design. First, the variance is used as the error measure to establish the data fusion algorithm and aerobics new concept innovation curriculum design and practice. The established model is compared with the aerobics curriculum design under the traditional model to highlight the advantages of the curriculum design under the data fusion algorithm. A comparison is also made with examples. The experimental results show that the data of the audience’s movement changes during different creative processes solve the aerobics creative editing problem. Compared with the traditional curriculum design, the efficiency of the curriculum design and practice is improved by 20.23%.

Attitudes of Undergraduate Public Health and Health Science Students towards Interprofessional Education (IPE) at a California University

Introduction: The study revealed that many healthcare professional students begin their academic studies with positive and high expectations towards interprofessional collaborative studies. Unfortunately, students lose interest if their initial expectations are not met with consistent opportunities to enhance their communication skills and better understand the different healthcare professions. The study aimed to explore health science and public health students’ attitudes toward IPE. The participants’ backgrounds and demographics were used as the variations for the study. Methods: A pre-post semi-quantitative anonymous survey was designed to assess health science and public health undergraduate students’ attitudes toward IPE. The reason for this design was to capture the participants’ attitudes toward IPE at the start of a semester when they had no academic exposure to IPE. Qualtrics was used to collect the research data. A valid and reliable scale was used to measure attitudes toward IPE. A post-survey was included to measure the participants’ change in attitude toward IPE during the semester. The goal was to measure the IPE curriculum effectiveness. There were 21 survey questions. The questions were divided into four validated subscales. The first seven questions (Questions 1 - 7) pertained to the participants’ demographics s, such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, major field of study, and prior education. Questions 8, 9, 16, & 20 were designed to determine how the participants perceived their roles and responsibilities in their future healthcare careers. Each IPE attitude question’s central tendency and demographic variations were measured. The correlation between demographics and IPE attitudes was measured. Results: The pre-survey had 192 participants, and the post-survey had 97 participants. The pre-survey had 87% of participants in the age group 17 - 25 years, while the post-survey had 82.5% in the same age group. Only 5.7% of the participants were 36 years or older in the pre-survey and 9.3% in the post-survey. The participants were 80.70% female in the pre-survey and 85.6% in the post-survey. The largest healthcare career field concentration was nursing, with 42.7% and 45.4% in the pre- and post-surveys. The other three larger career fields were healthcare administration, community health education, and physician assistant. The participants’ attitudes toward learning with different healthcare career students and becoming more effective members of a healthcare team increased from 4.36 (SD = 0.13) to 4.40 (SD = 0.17). Two negative IPE attitude questions showed an increased value: 1) The function of nursing therapists is mainly to provide support for doctors (3.51, SD = 0.19 to 3.12, SD = 0.24, p-value ≤ 0.004) and 2) Clinical and healthcare problem-solving skills could only be learned with students from the same career field (3.73, SD = 0.13 to 3.31, SD = 0.24, p-value ≤ 0.001). Conclusion: Interprofessional Education in an academic setting is essential to help healthcare students prepare and succeed in their future healthcare careers. The study results show that health science and public health students understand IPE and value academic exposure to the IPE process during their studies. Academic healthcare programs should continue integrating the IPE learning model and content throughout the student’s academic journey. The variations in IPE attitude do not significantly vary based on demographics and healthcare career fields. This study only represents a sample size of the many healthcare careers. Interprofessional communication and collaboration are essential to the future healthcare delivery challenges we face. For this reason, IPE should be integrated into healthcare education for all health science and public health students. It is recommended that more research should be done on creative curriculum design to get students more engaged in various healthcare IPE learning activities.

Gifting a Healing Education Through Writing Life and Art: A Paris Studio Residency

We are two Canadian arts-based educational researchers who collaborated during a studio residency in Paris, France, during May 2015, for ten days. Our residency curriculum included study of feminist poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, taking walks in Paris locales, viewing women’s art, and engaging arts-based inquiry methods such as journaling, life writing and creative embodied practices, as a way to pay attention to and document our daily experiences. We practiced what we call companion pedagogy, with a feminist focus on mothering and gifting relations. We find that arts-based, restorative practices strengthen our wellbeing and resiliency as educators, and also support our desire for a more nurturing, mothering humanity to come forward for gifting a healing education. Healing education begs the question of how to address the resiliency of educators over time through what are increasingly challenging and depleting conditions of institutional cultures and economies. We thus offer creative practices such as studio residencies for collective care and gifting that can nurture a restorative pacing of life, while supporting the resiliency of educators to gift their energies towards creative curriculum visioning and enacting of social change.

The Creative Curriculum from the West to the East: A Critical Perspective

The Creative Curriculum from the West to the East: A Critical Perspective

Lesson Learned from the Development and Implementation of an Interprofessional Case Learning Project (ICLP)

Abstract Interprofessional collaboration is essential for our students’ success in their selected program/s and postgraduate life. These types of experiences have been shown to improve students’ interprofessional competencies - communication skills, teamwork abilities, ethical practices and understanding other team members’ roles and responsibilities; they also can increase their theoretical knowledge acquisition within their discipline. We developed and tested a pedagogical idea, the interprofessional case learning project (ICLP,) that encompassed a multi-disciplinary approach involving biology, chemistry and public health. The goal was to provide students and faculty with the opportunity to experience interprofessional collaborative practices that would encourage questioning, discredit misconception, connect concepts and make inferences, generate new ideas and encourage shared decision making. Feedback indicated that the goals established aligned well with the development of interprofessional competencies. Student engagement with this project lead to in-depth questions beyond the scope of an individual discipline, with resulting impact affecting decisions about coursework, and professional and career development. This project also fostered collaboration between faculty, which promoted creative curriculum development and facilitated the development of scholarship that lead to publications. Our major challenge to this project was time – to pause, reflect and participate individually or as a group. Another challenge was overcoming logistical barriers such as incorporating the ICLP in our courses and scheduling the multi-disciplinary discussion that required a common time and large enough space for everyone.

Classroom and music teachers perceptions about the development of imagination and creativity in primary music education

Despite the importance of musical creativity in combining existing musical knowledge in novel ways, research suggests that primary school teachers' practices do not adequately stimulate and develop children's musical creativity. In this regard, the purpose of this paper was to investigate teachers' perspectives on the development of imagination and creativity in primary music education. A phenomenological study approach was adopted to better understand how classroom and music teachers experience and ascribe meaning to imagination and creativity, as well as to assess the status of the two phenomena in primary music education. The results demonstrated that classroom and music teachers thought imagination and creativity were important for improving students' learning skills, underlining the importance of these phenomena in music education. Teachers linked product learning to student performances in playing their own instruments, creating rhythms with various materials, and writing poetry and lyrics. While a few music teachers emphasized the creation of melodies and rhythms, no emphasis on structural and intentional composing, and no product descriptions were provided. Teachers' thoughts on what adjustments need to be made within the primary music curriculum to equip students as imaginative and creative thinkers are also covered in this article following the introduction of a creative curriculum in primary music education.

African American Head Start Teachers’ Approaches to Police Play in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Background:Scholars in the fields of early childhood education (ECE) and multicultural education have argued that preschools are key sites in which children learn about race and racism. However, there is little research on how teachers negotiate conflicting tensions and enact antiracist approaches within Head Start (HS) classrooms that use comprehensive and commercialized curriculums.Study Purpose:This article is about the challenges early childhood educators face when young children (ages 3–5) bring painful and uncomfortable issues of race, racism, and incarceration to preschool. This study is part of the research project Negotiating Head Start Curriculum (NHSC), a comparative study of policy implementation in four cultural communities in the United States. Here we focus on educators’ response to the “Jail Scene,” a pivotal scene taped in an HS classroom serving African American children.Research Design:The method used in the NHSC project is a multivocal ethnographic research method combined with a comparative case study design. We selected classrooms in each community that implemented both Creative Curriculum® and Teaching Strategies Gold®, led by experienced teachers in Chicanx and Latinx, Samoan, and white Appalachian communities. We made videotapes of similar activities across all sites. We then used these videos as cues for focus group interviews with educators (teachers, directors, and instructional personnel). We applied constant comparative, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Voloshinovian literary analysis to 41 interview transcripts of 132 educators’ talks.Findings:Analysis of transcripts indicates Black teachers are more likely to recognize racism, including the effects of incarceration and arrest on children’s talk and play, in ways unavailable to teachers from outside their community. Despite extant research suggesting early childhood teachers of color are no more likely to engage with young children about racism than white teachers, our study found that Black teachers offer nuanced, careful, and responsive approaches to antiracist pedagogy. They respond in sensitive, child-led, playful ways, inserting counternarratives within the confines of scripted curricula.Conclusions:ECE teachers’ disparity of interpretation has particular importance as ECE moves to professionalize the field. If elementary school patterns are any indication, the field should expect a sharp increase in the percentage of white, middle-class teachers instructing children of color. Unintentionally, these teachers may fail to recognize the play and talk to contain challenges born out of racism and inequality. We suggest policymakers, curriculum designers, and the broader field of ECE must carefully consider the approaches of teachers of color and take these approaches seriously.

Creative industries curriculum design for living and leading amid uncertainty

ABSTRACT Government policies are forcing universities to narrowly emphasise employability, which does not bode well for the Creative Industries (CI). Despite being one of the fastest-growing and diverse employment sectors, CI degrees have been criticised for failing to deliver adequate employment prospects. The employability focus, which serves ‘the [economic] system’ [Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2 Lifeworld and Ssystem: The Ccritique of Functionalist reason, Translated by T McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press], ignores both the employment precarity in the sector and diminishes universities’ capacity to serve the lifeworld (Harbernas) to facilitate graduate citizenship. Dichotomising employability and citizenship fail to consider the supercomplexity of the twenty-first Century [Barnett, Ronald. 2000a. Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Buckingham: Open University Press], constituted by the co-existence of a multiplicity of epistemological frameworks. In this paper, we draw on supercomplexity and the concept of the system and lifeworld to investigate how to develop CI curricula that foster employability and citizenship. Using an illustrative case, we demonstrate how CI curricula can be designed to support students to navigate multiple ideological geographies, facilitate employability, and contribute to civic society.