RAPPORT
WWW.RECORDINGACHIEVEMENT.AC.UK
Issue 2 (2015)
Figure 3 Nathan Sawaya, Art of The Brick Exhibition. London 2015
an intellectual tradition to emphasise my point that
creativity is not just about producing a physical item,
although this will figure in subsequent examples. My
next one concerns wordplay and its relationship to
written reflection. This is important as whenever I
write about creative approaches I panic that I will be
misconstrued as being anti-writing. This is not the
case, and I don’t need to persuade anyone of the
value of writing as design or as a creative act. In fact,
playing with words as a creative preparation for
reflecting can also be invaluable, not least when it
involves using fewer, rather than more words, to
make a point. This is been most entertainingly
demonstrated in the volume of six-word memoirs
Not Quite What I Was Planning (Smith and
Fershleiser, 2008) or Theakston’s ten-word crime
stories which adorn bottles of Old Peculier (Anon
2010). Most recently mini-stories have been found
in the six word World Cup Rugby spoilers on the
billboards at London’s Waterloo station, summing up
the latest results (“Ireland leave France green with
envy”). In terms of pinpointing critical incidents,
outcomes and the heart of one’s learning these can
help capture a student’s imagination but also force
them to refocus their word count.
Hand knowledge and creative reflection
A cartoon that is widely circulating on the internet
shows a variety of creatures being exhorted to climb
a tree in order to pass a test. Inevitably some (the
monkey) are infinitely better suited to it than others
(the fish or the elephant). The image bears the
quote, attributed variously to Einstein and
Anonymous, that "Everybody is a genius. But if you
judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its
whole life believing that it is stupid".
This is something that shifts towards inclusive
curricula have been addressing, spearheaded by
educational gurus such as Sir Ken Robinson. His
Youtube video Changing Educational Paradigms
(2010) has been seen by more than 13 million
people (although he noted ruefully in 2011 that it had
only reached 5 million views, while a cat video had
managed 30 million). One of his most famous
arguments is that schools are killing creativity in the
young because the kinds of knowledge and
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