Abstract:

The presentation aims at focusing on the impact of a curriculum built around design and creativity. The project is the joint effort of a designer and creativity coach, Federico Ramponi, and an experienced international Educator, Diego Zaffaroni.

Our initial achievement has been the development of a new independent international school in Milan with Design and Creativity as essential elements of the school’s vision, mission, and curriculum. The school’s system was developed through design, meant as project, and its focus was on the process of Design rather than the collection of specific outcomes for each grade level. This showed us, for example, that potentially a “Design School”, as we called it, can be aligned to a variety of standards taken from curricula or frameworks such as the IB Primary Years Programme, the US Common Core and the Cambridge International Curriculum.

A major area of investigation has been the involvement of teachers in the design of the school’s framework. We highly value the active role of teachers as researchers, experts, and learning designers. As their interactions and connections grew, together with the level of interdependence between members of staff, we observed interesting results in the way teachers approached the matter.

We assume that creativity is a natural tool that the brain uses to grow knowledge dynamically and help us evolve. As we worked to support the implementation and the success of the programme, a working definition of creativity was essential. We would rely on current research on creativity that challenges conceptions of creativity as limited to individual psychological traits; it is also learnable and can be achieved in dynamic groups.

Another area of investigation is assessment. We know that assessment permeates and guides the whole process of teaching and learning. Assessment for Learning and more recent research of formative assessment seem promising as they can support our vision. But the evidence base for formative assessment is not as strong as often claimed and it needs deconstruction and more research.

We believe that teaching for creativity in schools must be prioritised to equip children with the skills for their future needs and encourage children’s agency.
Working with teachers with a variety of backgrounds, pre-service training, and qualifications exposed certain weak aspects of the typical organization of a school including teachers’ motivation and effectiveness, levels of effectiveness of classroom learning, students’ achievement and progress, and the tendency to promote rote learning.

Another area of work is the development of a vision of the role of creativity shared by all stakeholders involved. Promoting a deeper, more sophisticated definition of creativity across members of staff, and parents too, has a relevant impact on the quality of the teaching and learning experiences happening in the school environment.

Now our goal is to find contexts where the idea of Design and Creativity across the curriculum can be embraced by new learning communities and all stakeholders involved. As part of the activities of our organization “de4ed Design for Education”, we constantly work to promote this vision and share the body of knowledge with a growing group of educators, schools leaders, pedagogists, and institutions.

Keywords:

Design, creativity, curriculum, framework, innovation, transformative, CPD, workshop, culture.