Fostering Creative Pedagogy among Secondary Art Teacher Training Students in Taiwan: Investigating the Introduction of Possibility Thinking as a Core of Creative Pedagogy in a Workshop Intervention

Abstract

This study explored how a teacher-training course helped secondary art student teachers in Taiwan to develop their perceptions and practice of creativity and creative pedagogy [CPed]. A series of CPed workshop sessions, based on the Western theoretical framework of possibility thinking [PT] and its pedagogy [PTCPed], were designed to introduce to the twelve secondary art teacher training students in an arts university in Taiwan.

Through adopting an action-based case study approach, qualitative data were collected from the participants’ interviews together with the reflective documents of the participants and the researcher, and any possible visual materials. Observations were also video-recorded. The analytical methods focused on both inductive and deductive approaches to explore how student teachers developed their perceptions of creativity and CPed and the possible influences in practice.

Adopting the idea of “contextualising” one set of cultural values in another, a new landmark of PTCPed emerged. This study confirmed most features of PT, but found question-posing and question-responding to be intriguingly absent in the participants’ definitions of creativity (PT) and their practice of CPed; and it also, significantly, identified several emerging PT characteristics and attitudes: originality, confidence, no limitations, and problem-solving. These features were fostered by teacher’s creative teaching [CT] and learners’ creative learning [CL] in an enabling and effective context in which teachers offered the learners’ opportunities (including time, space and challenges) to develop ideas and confidence to play with the materials, prioritised learners’ agency (including individual and group activities), and stood back to offer freedom, and at the same time moved step forward to observe the learners’ engagement and check when to offer help. Finally, this study also highlighted the implications for the practice in the Taiwanese initial art teacher education [IATE], in which teacher educators are suggested to appreciate this complexity, and to understand and allow student teachers to interact with different perspectives or approaches when interpreting their pedagogy through reflective practice.