School Environments: Friend or Foe for Creativity Education and Research?

Abstract

Creativity is considered a 21st century competency. Creativity is integrated in national curricula and in international texts. However, despite its recognition by educational authorities, such as Ministries of Education, creativity is not well implemented in classrooms. Indeed, even when educational practitioners admit that creativity is important for education, it does not mean they seek systematically to implement it in schools. This difficulty is one of the significant issues that creativity research encounters. In response, this chapter aims to provide a reflection, based on the current literature, about the place of creativity in school environments. Considering the past 50 years of research and reflection on creativity, several factors hindering or fostering creativity implementation in education and research are evoked regularly. Hence, we propose an overview of these factors, with the goal that practitioners and researchers take into account observed situations, relieve the current duress under which creativity finds itself, and in the future contribute to field research on creativity and ultimately the development of creativity in schools.