Instilling creativity in children is about more than doing arts and crafts, as Madeley Nursery School educator Victoria Waring (pictured)recently discovered during a year-long course on Creativity and the Arts in Early Childhood. Telford-based Ms Waring began the distance-learning course, one module of a three-year MA in Education (Early Years) at the Centre for Research in Early Childhood (CREC), in September 2018.
The Birmingham City University-accredited course involved five face-to-face days at CREC, while students completed the rest through self-study. Ms Waring had to produce two pieces of written work: a 3,000-word essay on creativity and arts theory, and a 6,000-word case study – hers on storytelling.
Contact days were held between October 2018 and March 2019. Tutors gave the group of eight focused tasks to complete in between to help shape their assignments, such as reading. ‘Tutors always asked us to reflect on the impact of what we were learning in our practice,’ says Ms Waring.
She says she has become more open and responsive to the children in her setting. ‘I was very challenged by how packed the curriculum was becoming,’ she explains. ‘The course helped me to pause and listen to the youngest of children and realise how important it is to provide broad and rich possibilities and opportunities.’
She now tries to follow children’s interests more thoroughly. She gives an example of a boy who found a twig and believed it was a bone. ‘He brought it inside to our model of a skeleton,’ she says. ‘There’s something there – he has some knowledge that we have bones. I have to think about how we don’t lose that for him.’
Ms Waring says this slower, more attentive approach has ignited children’s curiosity.
