Everyday creativity : boosting creative resources with Finnish models of education : teachers' handbook

Abstract

This Handbook is the result of several conversations and activities that took place during a blended in-service teacher education course “Everyday Creativity – Boosting the internal creative resources of European schools with Finnish models of education for creativity”. This course offered opportunities for teachers from Romania, Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands to map creative practices in their own school communities, come to Finland to reflect on their work in dialogue with Finnish teachers and education experts, and finally implement follow-up projects to further develop their creative pedagogical ideas . Instead of writing textbook-like material, we decided to emphasize teacher participants’ experiences to inspire their colleagues in and beyond their school communities.

The core material of this Handbook follows the modular structure of the online resource and task bank which is available on our project website.

The online resources and tasks can be used for individual or group study. We encourage our readers to team up with other teachers whom they know from their local community, their teacher organization, through social media or whom they find in any other ways. Writing notes and organizing pair and/or small group discussions may open up space for reflective dialogue. Involving students and/or their parents can also be stimulating and can make learning even more interesting and useful! We recommend working on the tasks and using the Handbook simultaneously, so that individual or group study can build and reflect on participants’ experiences from the first iteration of this course.

To put the study modules into a wider context, we begin our Handbook with testimonials from our project partners and the participating teachers to illuminate the relevance of the topics, activities and potential impact of this venture. Further, we explain how we assessed teachers’ needs to create an optimal course for them, and we share the main considerations that lie behind the course . Doing so, we emphasize the importance of co-designing courses with prospective participants. The section “Practice creativity and innovation in your school” includes a reflective pre-task and materials from the course modules . The modules include sources, and participating teachers’ reflections on the sources, as well as a collection of their observations gained from their visit to three local schools in Jyväskylä during their intensive training week in November 2018 . This section also includes teachers’ reflections on the creative practices of their own school community. The module materials are extended with descriptions of workshops that took place during the intensive week . Finally, presentations of participating teachers’ follow-up projects show how they adapted some inspiring elements of their course experience to their own pedagogical practice . We believe that these follow-up projects are all very inspiring and will lead to pedagogical innovation beyond the teachers’ local school communities as well. We would like to express our gratitude to the course participants and their national coordinators, teachers at local schools in Jyväskylä as well as to our colleagues who led workshops, for this intensive and fruitful collaboration. We have learnt a lot from all stages of this journey: organizing, teaching and supervising the course as well as editing this Handbook. We hope that this Handbook, which is also a document of the learning pathway of our learning community, will inspire practitioners who want to grow in the teaching profession.