Diverstorm: Teaching Creativity and Innovation in African Schools -By Leo Igwe

As in the case of critical thinking, I have grappled with the idea of fostering creative and innovative reasoning in schools, particularly in primary and secondary education. I believe that if Africa is to grow and develop, Africans must take creative and innovative thinking seriously. The objective of realizing a more creative society starts in the schools, and with African students and teachers.

During my doctoral programs at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, this realization hit me very hard. While interacting with students and lecturers, I noticed a missing link in the school system in Nigeria, and by extension, Africa. Many students had an educational background that lacked emphasis on creative and innovative thinking skills. Students were expected to think creatively. When they graduated, students were enjoined to create jobs or to be innovative in carrying out their professional duties and responsibilities. Meanwhile, creative and innovative thinking skills were not taught in schools.

At the University of Bayreuth, professors and mentors repeatedly asked African students to be creative in interpreting their data, in writing, and in articulating ideas. And I always wondered: “What does it mean to be creative?” “How does one innovate?” They never taught creative reasoning in schools. So how could I exercise skills and competencies that I never had? How do I display habits that I never learnt or cultivated?

As is often the case with most university students or doctoral candidates, these questions come too little too late. These queries dawn on learners at a time when they seldom have time, when students are under immense pressure to finish their course and graduate. People want to complete their university education, then get a job, and face other life issues. Students are least concerned or bothered about addressing foundational problems. So the problem persists and lingers because no effort is made to fix it.

Students become creative or innovative by default, by some accidental development, or existential happenstance, not as a result of some intentional, well-thought-out, modular process. In fact, schools kill creativity as Ken Robinson noted in his famous TED Talk.

And this school situation has to change. To this end, it is important to ask: can schools be transformed into bubbling centers of creativity, into communities of innovation and invention? Yes, of course. Classrooms can turn into places where students collaborate, invent, and innovate. To foster creativity in schools, creative thinking should be taught as a subject, like verbal and quantitative reasoning, and other subjects in primary schools. Creative reasoning should be infused with other subjects.

To be taught as a subject, creative thinking should be operationalised, that is, framed and conceptualized in ways that it can be measured and assessed. So, how does one operationalize creativity in schools, particularly for elementary schoolers?

I researched and tried to understand what has been taught on and about creativity in schools. Primary schools in Nigeria offer a subject, Cultural and Creative Arts. This subject mainly focuses on drawing, painting, printmaking, weaving, modelling, dyeing, carving, sculpting, singing, acting, and dancing. Meanwhile, creativity is not a habit that is exclusively exercised in the domain of arts and culture. Innovation is a facility that applies to all disciplines, including science and engineering. While primary school books on Cultural and Creative Arts contain creative expressions and forms, nothing in the modules teaches how to be creative and innovative. Students are taught to memorize and reproduce, emulate and imitate various cultural forms year in and year out. Creative and innovative techniques are missing. It is not clear how creative ingenuity can be exerted, expressed, or cultivated.

To operationalize innovative reasoning, I propose the term, diverstorm. Diverstorm entails the ability to think out of the box, to generate new and possible ideas in all areas of life. I settled for this term after considering other related concepts, such as brainstorm or imaginationstorm. I needed a term that primary schoolers, who speak English as a second language, can relate to and easily understand. No doubt, brainstorming and imagination are concepts that feature in discourses on creativity. But these terminologies aren’t very helpful in this case, especially in stepping down the concept of creativity to the level of primary schoolers. Brainstorm and imaginationstorm do not codify the central element in creativity and innovation as I know it. To foster creative thinking in schools, students should be taught how to generate new ideas and solutions. Students are taught to generate ideas for generation’s sake, create for creation’s sake, innovate for innovation’s sake, and, as in the case of imaginationstorm, imagine for imagination’s sake.

Diverstorm fulfills this role. It is most suitable for delivering creative and innovative skills because diverstorm enables students to think in ways that depart from the norm, in ways that are different and diverse, unshackling ingenuities and infinite possibilities. Diverstorm enables students to think, invent, reinvent, and recreate. Diverstorm implies thinking in terms of the new, thinking in terms of possibilities. Creative thinking is a form of relational thinking. The new idea, insight, or possibility relates to the old; it differs or departs from what is the case or what used to be the case. Students are encouraged to think in other ways, to think other than or otherwise, in a fashion and manner that diverts from what is thought at a time, or what is taught in schools, thinking in ways different from what is presented and what applies in any area of human endeavour, foregrounding modes of thought that depart from what is given or presented to us, and by us.

Diverstorm is a technique that opens new vistas and broadens the spectrum of intellection. It is a mental habit that unlocks new and different horizons. It teaches students to imagine and explore other ways of reasoning. Students are made to understand that nothing is perfect. Everything is unfinished. Whatever one sees, observes, notices, hears, touches, smells, feels, tastes, or experiences has some limitation. Every product has some faults, and can be made better. Every text has some gaps that can be filled. There are boundless ways of thinking anew, of reinventing, renewing, and reimagining, of thinking differently and envisioning new potentials and opportunities. Diverstorm is an outlier form of thinking. It encourages students to exercise their thoughts in other ways, other terms, other sizes, other colours, other textures, other volumes, other tastes, and other forms. It teaches basic schoolers to be inquisitive and disruptive, explorative and adventurous in reasoning. It is pertinent to note that diverstorm is not only a technique to think in diverse, different, and other ways, but a facility that makes thinking in terms of the new and the possible a way of teaching and learning. Diverstorm has some pedagogical value and significance.

Memorization and rote learning constitute the mainstay of education in schools. Reproduction of information received, as received, is the test of intelligence and knowledge. But diverstorm points to a new and different direction that could yield an educational renaissance predicated on other ways of knowing, conceiving and understanding. It makes imagining new possibilities a way of testing or demonstrating intelligence. As an active learning technique, diverstorm will improve creative reasoning and hopefully facilitate participatory and collaborative education in African schools.

Leo Igwe works and campaigns to foster philosophy for children, including critical and creative thinking skills in schools.