Creativity in Chinese Schools

Abstract

Is creativity occurring in China’s primary and secondary schools? The thesis undergirding this article is that creativity is a paradox and possibility within this test-centric culture. Discussion is of the literature on creativity from an international perspective, with support from an original pilot study. The Chinese schools visited arose out of an inquiry into crucial issues in basic education involving high-stakes accountability and effects on the creativity and innovation of children and youth. Pursuing knowledge in action, the u.s. Fulbright Scholar used observation, conversation, and interviews to explore creative processes in five rural and urban preK-12 schools within Southwest China. A teacher training institute confirmed that creative learning transpires within some of the primary schools in the region. Analyses of the data collected suggest the potential for creativity in schooling to co-exist with external accountability. These emergent results offer a lens for understanding intriguing developments of schooling in Chinese education.

* In the capacity of a Fulbright Scholarship, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, u.s. Department of State’s Bureau of Education & Cultural Affairs, & Council for International Exchange of Scholars supported this work (Grant number 6219). The other funder was Virginia Tech’s Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment, Global Issues Initiative Research Support Program.

In this article, I explore literature-informed descriptions of international trends in creativity and accountability that impact trends in basic schooling in China. My other purpose is to present aspects of preK-12 Chinese schools I visited and studied, connecting these with developmental trends in education today. My thesis is that creativity within international assessment regimes can be envisioned, enacted, and researched, but only by allowing for the elusiveness that inevitably comes with studies and assessments of creativity. 1 For this writing, I use a creativity–accountability construct for recognizing complex issues of paradox and possibility, constraint and transformation.

This empirically supported discussion, a work-in-progress, has emerged out of China’s highly complex, changing nation, which is being greatly impacted by global forces. Creativity in Chinese high-stakes schooling is the paradox for which my telling, while limited in scope, taps a modest number of schools in my capacity as a u.s. Fulbright Scholar. Inevitably partial and limited by the American perspective I bring, my text is a literature-based, data-informed academic narrative. 2

I have organized this essay as a series of perspectival frames of paradox and possibility. Together these function as a device for communicating a vision for creative thought and action in schools without negating the hardships that Chinese teachers and students endure. My literature-informed frames, which precede the thematic results, are themselves infused with my thoughts, experiences, and takeaways. These arise out of my first-hand experience of select Chinese schools and the writing of a book, cited herein, that is an outcome.

In this vision-oriented study of creativity, my interest is in Chinese education in global and local contexts. The exploratory questions I framed for the school visits are: Does China—a rising global giant at the forefront of enforced test-driven schooling—display any creativity in teaching and learning? Is it even plausible that creativity in education could be observable in a communist regime? I was seeking to learn whether creativity is being invoked in some preK-12 Chinese schools and whether the creative process can be observed by outsiders.

To a Chinese correspondent in Washington, d.c., China is on the cusp of becoming a new world. 3 The creative Chinese schooling I describe is part of this new world. Creativity, creative expression, and creative innovation are all dynamics within this transforming test-bound educational culture.

An education professor from the United States, I travelled to China for the first time in 2015. My workdays were spent in high-poverty rural municipalities and well-resourced urban schools alike, and in documenting the visits for analytic purposes. Financial support enabled me to bring along a translator of Mandarin for the school visits, which proved essential. (I also studied creative innovation and pedagogy in higher education and taught a course on creativity and accountability, which is outside the present focus.)

Before proceeding, I present my multifaceted working definition of creativity. Commonly understood as creative is the making and producing of one’s own works. 4 Less familiar is a view of creativity as thoughtfully appraising knowledge. 5 Asking open-ended questions of stakeholders, such as students, that have no single answer or solution is creative. 6 Turning unrelated things into something new can make the extraordinary happen—this is a distinguishing quality of creative people, in addition to dynamic creative learning environments. 7 Coming up with new things, ideas, and artifacts can be a mysterious process, 8 which defeats the notion that creativity is completely knowable and thus formulaic and replicable.

Perspectival Frames: Ways of Seeing China

The ideas introduced helped orient my perspective as a Westerner looking to the distant educational ranges of China. Education scholars from different countries who are American, 9 British, 10 and Chinese 11 have repeatedly claimed that test-centric policy and curricular mandates compromise creativity and creative education. Understandably, I could not have known if any creativeness would be apparent in the leading exam-taking country in the world—China.

These scholars from different countries are among the growing voices that criticize restrictive mandates for subverting equity, liberty, and socially just gains in the teaching and learning enterprise. Studies of wealth disparity in China have painted a picture of stark inequalities in opportunity for families. 12 Place-bound immobility, poverty-burdened households, poor parental connections, and low-resourced communities affect many. Rural-bound families are stressed by the fewer quality education opportunities, less access to services, and inadequate support for disabilities. 13 In high-poverty rural districts serving poor children and youth, it is difficult to attract quality teachers, 14 let alone those prepared to teach a 21st century curriculum of creativity and entrepreneurship. All of this and more adds up to disadvantaged schools that cannot attract the quality teachers and resources needed to build and sustain creative learning environments.

High-stakes testing cultures, and the proliferating markets that profit from these, have been “outed” for dominating schooling with “a narrow means/ends orientation.” 15 China is no exception. Eisner’s argument is that these schooling trends interfere with creative mindsets, a growth-producing catalyst for human beings and the environments and societies they construct. Like Dewey, 16 the influential scholar before him, Eisner sees as first-rate intellectual and creative dispositions those of “risk-taking, exploration, uncertainty, and speculation” and “curiosity and interest in engaging and challenging ideas.” 17 There is a valuing within China’s policymaking arena of these capabilities with the directions being taken for school improvement and renewal. 18

China is changing. Political scientists describe it as a highly adaptive communist regime. 19 Notably, measurable economic recovery is most evident in the rapid construction of cities, schools, and universities. 20 Probably less well known, China has a capacity for creatively adapting in different domains of life. As examples, the Chinese government’s pursuit to effect change in education has taken the form of democratic components being introduced in mandates for teaching creative curriculum 21 and in society through village elections. 22

Around the globe, just as schools can be invented and reinvented, so too can systems and societies. A critical theorist’s delineation of “thick” (healthy and generative) and “thin” (damaged and atrophied) democracies gives one pause for thought. 23 Test-centric, market-driven education systems—dubbed “testocracies” by an American teacher 24 —do not make good companions of democratic governance and voice. More than this, testocracies impede equitable progress in student access, resource distribution, and creative curricula, according to critical theorists in educational leadership 25 and curriculum studies. 26 More severely, test-centric regimes have violated civil rights and human liberties. The United States is purportedly pointing a finger at China as a violator of human rights, without understanding its own violations. 27 Authoritarian regimes like China’s are more punishing types of testocracies, in part because of the limitations placed on creative and critical thought and the penalties that accompany the restrictions.

Despite having different political structures, histories, and education systems, for the sake of argument might both the United States and China be construed as a testocracy? Zhao proclaims as much. 28 In the knowledge-based global era the brain trust—our human capacity for tapping, expressing, and demonstrating creative and critical dispositions—is essential for tackling the major economic, educational, and other problems of the day with innovations and solutions. These stem from the ability to imagine possibilities beyond norms.

But the brain trust is under threat within testocracies. As one paramount example, consider the threat to the dispositions and skills of Chinese students. A study found that China’s exam-focused education system has the negative effects of “stifl[ing] a student’s imagination, creativity, and sense of self, qualities crucial for a child’s ultimate success in and out of the classroom.” 29

Inside and outside China, perceptions more generally are that the banking model of education and policy is subduing the creativity of Chinese high school students. 30 Articulated as a call to conscious raising by critical theorist Freire, the banking model initiates static curricular knowledge and breeds compliance and conformity with the status quo. 31 In contrast, creativity and innovation of knowledge, used to study the challenges faced by education systems and societies, can transform these entities. Therefore, the transformational type of curriculum and schooling is a problem-posing education in which students and teachers have the experience of being active/creative/socially conscious.

With the banking model, norms are reproduced, just like experiences of being passive/receptive/imitative. In this vein, the transactional model in Chinese schools is attracting some empirical attention. Preliminary research indicates that the earlier grades are also being adversely affected. Of note, a 2013 national survey study of China, carried out by Chinese scholar Cheng, identifies signs of stress and disillusionment, some at the elevated level of suicide, not only for secondary school students but also of primary school students. 32

Consequently, the passive learner in China exhibits attitudes aligned not with creativity and hopefulness but rather with a view of education “as nothing more than merely passing examinations.” 33 As Zhao, who was himself educated in China explains, secondary students take the dreaded exam called gaokao, the outcomes of which decide their university fate and future. 34 The all-consuming preparation for the exam comes at great cost, impeding students’ imaginations and creativities over an extended period, perhaps indefinitely lost to the individual, the school community, and to China itself.

Despite inflexible schooling standards that enforce uniformity across China’s education system, Chinese people are said to strongly favor the American education system. Based on interviews, American journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote about the paradox of China’s people being drawn to education systems they perceive as liberal bastions of creativity: “Many Chinese complain scathingly that their system kills independent thought and creativity, and they envy the American system for nurturing self-reliance—and for trying to make learning exciting and not just a chore.” 35

Another point about the brain drain phenomenon in China concerns the monumental exodus. The level of instability is so great that creative solutions are well behind it. Not only relocating from rural areas to urban sites, many citizens have also left the country. Unprecedented, this societal trend involving Chinese college-aged students and graduates, workers and families is being explained as a search for opportunities for success and a better life. 36

Yet, in the face of such threats to its very foundation and culture, China proves itself resilient, capable of developing (“thickening”) democratic components of governance. Having the capacity for reinventing aspects of its authoritarian structures, China, paradoxically, is governed by a motivation to appease citizens. 37

A Flawed Frame: One-Dimensional Thinking

Next, I extend the discussion of global and educational issues pertinent to China. One such issue involves the acculturation of learning within its rigid system of testing and accountability measures, 38 but from another perspective. The country’s strict regimen of teaching and learning leads to the assumption, worldwide, that Chinese students lack creativity and thus are not able to think flexibly and laterally. Much of the literature actually builds on this generalization, adopting it as a starting point for making international comparisons. 39

Cultural and racial stereotypes—such as Chinese people have a creativity deficit—can impede the ability of leaders, scholars, journalists, and laypersons to see with fresh eyes. Negative typecasts that interfere with goals of being a world innovator respectful of democratic systems and processes can have impact locally, nationally, and globally. Constructive creative thinking becomes an antidote for mental prisons: “Innovation comes from thinking beyond our current confines of reality, in seeing a new, as yet to be created, reality, and striving towards bringing these visions from thoughts inside one’s head into action.” 40

A widespread oversimplification from the West is that China’s large class sizes are “hell-like” robotic environments that enforce rote memorization of content for testing purposes, sabotaging opportunities for creative and critical thought. 41 Such views fail to account for the granular strides that some schools have made to reduce class size in the primary grades that policy analysts in China have reported. 42 This change in numbers, albeit gradual, may be allowing for personalized attention and creative work. At the same time, problems accompany this change, such as the lack of full support outside schools for such reforms and the unevenness of teacher training across schools. Booming populations also exert pressures on schools to accept more students and to teach exclusively to the test.

One-dimensional thinking is associated with the international tests in science, math, and reading, the results of which measure and rank countries, and, more than this, with the test-takers themselves. 43 China, led by Shanghai, has been the world’s top competitor, with the United States well behind. 44 Not being tested are creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship—indicators of vocational competencies of global competitiveness in China and the United States, two of the world’s twenty major economies. 45

Notably, there are consequences to marginalizing creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in school curricula by nations and their governments and marketeers. Many u.s. educators—absorbed with test-centric curricula and penalties for failure—have abandoned project-based learning and collaborative group work, kinetic activity that advances creative thinking and a nation’s brain trust. 46 Historically and in current times in China, innovative methods are not typical in classroom instruction; for, teacher-centered pedagogy and ancestral worship overpower creative engagement and production—constructivist learning and independent thought also suffer. 47

Test-stressed teachers in the West, too, have difficulty imagining how to exercise creative advantage in their prepackaged curriculum. In the United States, teachers have admitted to using testing formats for subject-area assessments in conformity with No Child Left Behind and currently Race to the Top. Two such teachers’ disclosures are “We’re teaching [students] how to follow a format [as though] they’re doing paint-by-numbers” and “My choice of instructional delivery and materials is completely dependent on preparation for this test.” 48

Takeaways are that in high-stakes standardized settings teachers can lack pedagogical control and creative license. Some American teachers, oftentimes in direct response to the pressure they feel, conform by aligning their curriculum with test material or subvert the system by changing scores on tests (i.e., cheating). A further explanation is that it is common these days for curriculum to resemble testing formats. Test-centric curriculum bypasses opportunities for students to think creatively and critically, negatively undermining authentic instruction and global preparedness. 49 A human issue is simultaneously a systems problem. On a macro level, critics are seeing not only communist regimes but also Western democracies as political regimes out of touch with the changing times and demands of a globalized world. 50

Standardized curricula, in effect, casts students as test-takers passively receiving content in mathematics and other subjects. Critics believe that knowledge gets dispensed, not actively constructed: As an aid for memorizing facts for tests, knowledge is presented as a “collection of disconnected facts, operations, procedures, or data.” 51 Not unlike M&Ms candy, the chunks of information are consumed. Deprived of open-ended, complex problem solving and in-depth knowledge development, the student mind is littered with factoids. Possibilities are delayed for creative challenges and global preparedness.

Creativity is but a childhood memory for students and their young teachers whose creative and critical thinking is suppressed. Imagine the toll of such buried treasure on the global classroom and workforce of the future. To make the point, efforts to construct or resume a creative curriculum can be all consuming. As such, this can involve interventionist programming and motivational boosting to spark creative and critical work, as evidenced by a 2017 study of Chinese college students in education. 52

Creativity indeed suffers in standards-oriented learning environments around the world. In these meritocracy-driven testing systems, score-generated metrics are turned into classifications of students, schools, and even countries. 53 But, it is widely known that underserved populations, creative individuals, and the interdisciplinary- and global-minded are being stigmatized in the process. Creative education, perhaps seen as a luxury by drivers of the metrics, is nothing more than a byproduct of technocratic pedagogies of learning. Ironically, creative innovations and societal breakthroughs (such as the printing press and personal computer) propel schools and countries where the developments are used in positive and humane ways, just as has been the case for centuries. 54

A policy argument is that China’s launch of its suite of education reforms was in direct response to the Programme for International Student Assessment (pisa) results, not out of global-mindedness. 55 The pisa accountability benchmark, explains Sjøberg, has severe consequences in exam-centric regimes wherein creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in schooling disappears. As the stakes for measurable success increase, inequality worsens for under-resourced, low-income schools and the populations they struggle to serve.

Low scores on competitive entrance exams and other tests have discouraged some Chinese students and the teachers responsible for preparing them. A deep sense of shame over having failed one’s family and nation contributes to the escalating suicide rates of students in China, exceeding other pisa-benchmarked countries. 56

Global-Ready Frame: Creativity and the Curriculum

According to education philosophers Dewey and Eisner and psychologists Csikszentmihalyi and Kaufman and Beghetto, all cited herein, schools must recapture creativity. Curriculum is called for that welcomes the elusive, ambiguous, unmeasurable, and mysterious aspects of learning and life itself. Linear thinking is conducive to a rote, fact-based style of instruction. A focus on everyday creativity and innovation in the schooling process fosters experiential learning as well as creative meaning making and problem solving.

To elaborate, as illustrated in my thematic results, not knowing what I might find in my study of creativity and accountability in Chinese schools, I nonetheless attended to the tender process of intrapersonal creativity. Within a particular creativity framework that differentiates personal, professional, and cultural types of creativity, 57 I deliberately ascribed value to the first two types—students’ and practitioners’ creative processes as expressed in their worlds.

I attributed peripheral value, then, to cultural creativity; simply put, this is the dominant association with creativity around the globe—it amounts to famous life-transforming creations and feats, such as Apple’s personal computing inventions (e.g., iPhone). However, I did account for this type of creativity where relevant to education stakeholders and suggestively present in the schooling environment. As such, at all of the schools visited, cultural icons (e.g., dragons, fish) were incorporated in curriculum programming and instruction, teacher displays and student projects, and even classroom and building infrastructures.

Creative Learning Environments

Just as educators and students, in all subjects, anywhere, can be creative so too can classrooms and school environments. Despite escalating pressures from external accountability demands, around the world creative classroom educators of science, English, and other subjects find ways to personalize, enliven, and cross-pollinate their curriculum with other subject areas. 58

Accommodating for situational differences, there are some answers in the literature as to what can make creative learning environments tick. Many teachers pair open-ended inquiry with novel approaches and group work for high engagement of students. For example, constructivist science teacher Jeffrey from Kentucky, usa, uses open-ended discovery in his teaching, sparking the curiosity of all students, including with disinterest in school or from disadvantaged circumstances. Excited, students work in groups to build objects like hovercrafts; engaged in the process of discovery, they creatively problem solve and make meaning while learning new content. 59

In Los Angeles, usa, Robinson also describes how low-income immigrant children in an English course perform a different Shakespeare play every year. They act out the parts and play the music themselves. In these and other classrooms, students have benefitted from creative curricula and methods of learning. While many of the global exemplars tend to be drawn from American classrooms, innovative teachers support students’ individual strengths and talents, as well as the ability to create and collaborate within and beyond the classroom.

Because global-ready graduates have had opportunities to develop their creative thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solving, the assumption is that they likely benefitted from innovative teaching pedagogies. These favor inquiry-driven curriculum, cooperative group learning, and project-based learning. 60 Enriching preparatory experiences serve graduates in forging their own paths while maximizing creative expression, ingenuity, and freedom as responsible, ethical citizens helping the world become a better place.

Thinking independently, flexibly, and innovatively, in creative learning environments students handle open-ended, complex problems. These go beyond problems facilitated through direct instruction and testing mandates. Robinson’s school visits reveal that creative teachers have used any variation of project-based learning, cooperative group work, and real-world inquiry. Prepared graduates, in their new work roles, creatively and critically engage and socially contribute by seeing differently, posing questions, framing problems, making things, and resolving issues. Those who grow into leading creative experts in science, the arts, and other fields can anticipate problems and identify these for study—in effect demonstrating Csikszentmihalyi’s disposition of having an unmatched imaginative capacity for seeing the unseen. 61

Curriculum and Culture in China

In China, creativity has become an important component of education since 2001. Its development is a main concern, with varying effects across the country. Hong Kong has been ahead of the curve in the nation’s work towards progressively implementing creativity in schools and colleges. Higher order thinking, a critical and creative skill, is being addressed in education policy and reforms. Acting on the priority for transforming societal institutions through creativity, policies have been changed; new practices are being implemented in preschool, primary, and secondary education. 62

In Southwest China, principals (i.e., directors) and teachers of primary schools explained that there is no unified national curriculum. Their schools receive a guideline from the education department that they turn into a viable program. These early-grade teachers actually create their own curriculum using a team approach, all of which may be new information for many global outsiders.

In contrast, in secondary and college grades, Ministry-set general education curriculum, tethered to the competitive goals of international testing, dominates. Aligned with high-stakes standardized testing, China and the United States are among the countries that credit language arts, math, and, science as core knowledge, but not the arts and humanities. 63 Given this problem, one would not expect to encounter much, if any, work being done in the arts and humanities at the high school level. However, this is not what I discovered in the single case of a secondary site visit. This one school might be a petri dish of sorts for teachers’ creative experimentation with curricula. It goes beyond tested subjects to incorporate the arts and humanities, and creative approaches to stem, in the ongoing interdisciplinary engagement and learning of students.

If the preliminary work being done in cross-cultural research is moving in the right direction, then Asians might be showing themselves to have a collective orientation, and Westerners, an individualistic one. 64 Generally, it believed that China attributes creativity to social influences (e.g., networks), whereas for Westerners creativity is attached to individuals (e.g., inventors). Paradoxically, by preparing public high school students as workhorses for the booming labor markets, China is blocking their higher-order global preparation and its own dream of having citizens that possess stellar creative ingenuity. These are only a few of the economic realities that help explain why test-centrism dominates in China today. However, in the high school I observed there was student-centered learning and absorption in creative activity, as well as cooperative groupings and student–teacher collaboration evidenced throughout the campus. 65

Creative Methodologies

Puzzling over the world issues raised, as a tenured professor I felt that I could afford risking a study focus that fascinated me, even though this would complicate, even strain, my Fulbright project. I wanted to look for myself to see if any of China’s primary and secondary schools have creativity occurring. If so, I wondered whether I would be able to make sense of creativity in the unfamiliar environment and to write about the experience.

Setting and Participants

In 2015 I visited five preK-12 schools and a teacher training institute in China. Three were high-poverty rural locations: a public kindergarten, public elementary school, and public special education school. The well-resourced urban schools were a private primary Montessori school and a public high school. The site selection is in no way a representative sampling of preK-12 schools in China; the schools were decided on by my host institution and myself.

Participating were veteran teachers and one novice (n = 19); principals (n = 4), and officials: a dean, a director, and a teacher trainer–supervisor (n = 3). All were Han Chinese and mostly female (two of the principals were male). The schools, locations, and people’s names are non-identifying, in keeping with the procedures for participant protection administered by the Institutional Research Board (irb) from my home institution.

Bicultural Strategies

The research protocols were produced in Mandarin and English. A political gulf was being traversed—China and North America have different views of human and civil rights. 66 As I more keenly learned, this is also true for research ethics. I used various measures to help bridge the cultural gap. After distributing the irb packet (in hard copy form) to all participants, I went through the key documents (e.g., consent form); gave the big picture of the study while outlining my procedures; elicited questions while trying to build trust in the process, and utilized my Chinese translator during all of these steps. Two-way communication was facilitated and concerns were eased for the penned signatures that the irb requires of research volunteers on consent forms.

Conversational Analysis

At all schools, there were informal conversations and interviews with leaders and teachers, mostly taking place in a group fashion but also on an individual basis, particularly during the campus tours. Time had also been permitted for observation of activities, which fostered more conversational interactions with the practitioners and my translator. At times, I observed creative learning activity with students; at other times, I was actively engaged as a guest, all of which gave me a sense of the environment itself.

The data collected from these conversational exchanges with the practitioners revolved around contextual issues of creativity and accountability. Using qualitative methods, my interpretations were grounded in making sense of naturally occurring and guided conversations, 67 in addition to what I observed, perceived, and experienced within the diverse range of schools.

To elaborate on the context-setting conversations with the practitioner teams, in addition to the irb forms, participants were handed these general creativity topics for guiding our sessions.

• Creativity and learning in your environment and work being done

• Education reforms, policies, and regulations and any impact on creativity

• Ideas and practices of creativity and critique in the 21st century

• Theories or research on learning creatively and thinking critically

At all schools the first topic in this list proved most popular, eliciting school-based discussions of creativity and evidences of creative processes and products.

Data Sources

Field notes were independently generated by myself, the researcher, and translator. In addition, a photographic archive constituted a data source, serving to confirm details of creative work and spark memories. Site visits were high quality, lasting approximately three concentrated hours each and yielding useful information.

Qualitative models, used for coding and analyzing data, were widely known, reputable sources. 68 With two faculty experts, inter-rater reliability was established using sample selections from the data sets. Cross-checking of details from our notes and photographs were carried out with my translator. I manually created key-word-in-context charts, along with frequency distributions of key words and phrases.

Unconventional, critical and creative methods in the qualitative research canon allowed for open interpretation of sociopolitical issues. As such, I adopted a sociologist’s methodology for surfacing messy (controversial and subjective) macro and micro issues implicit in the data. 69 As such, I was able to make national comparisons of fundamental differences in social and political systems, human and civil rights, and research ethics and expectations, as referenced herein. Perspectives from the literature, the global news, and my translator were the main supports I used in navigating this challenging analytic process.

Thematic Results

Generalizations abound of China as creatively impoverished and of classrooms as robotic learning environments. Yet, in the select sites, Chinese teachers and leaders described and showed an array of creativity in teaching and learning within their campuses.

In the vignettes that follow, I have used broad strokes that convey my sense making and impressions for readers. Briefly narrating the results from my onsite experiences, I start with the rural schools, then move to the urban schools. Using vignettes, I animate this main thematic outcome: creative expression was cognitively and vividly apparent in a multitude of ways within the younger grade levels and within the accountability-steeped advanced grade levels.

Rural Schools Vignette

Rural Public Kindergarten

Creative teachers at this school explained the process of coming up with a monthly schoolwide curricular theme (e.g., friendship and sharing). The themes incorporated special days in China and the four parts of this school’s daily activity: learning, games, sports, and life.

Creativity had a strong visual presence—artwork was thematically arranged in many spaces. The basis was primarily a storybook, as well as celebrated occasions (e.g., Mother’s Day) and festivities (e.g., Dragon Boat Festival), accompanied by a lesson. A kids’ gallery featured displays dangling from ceilings, some celebrating Father’s Day. One had cutouts of miniature men’s shirts hanging from tiny pegs on strings across corridors (symbolizing an adult clothesline). On the flipside were children’s personal notes to fathers.

Heads and figures of red dragons dominated another display, as well as hand drawings of fathers decorated with images of nature, animals, and family. The dragon, traditionally associated with masculine energy, hints at how Chinese children are socialized to accept the power and authority of father figures. Obedience is expected, as conveyed by the hierarchical values of Confucianism. 70

Another display of paper cutouts was of mothers—hand-drawn with babies (symbolically, newborns are descendants of dragons) glued onto the stomachs. Included were creators’ baby pictures in the company of their families (see Figure 1).

figure 1

Child creators’ paper cut-outs of mother and child.

Family–self creativity was a subject for this display as it was throughout much of the school. While creativity can be an aesthetic medium that celebrates life, it can inadvertently convey gender stereotypes and set expectations, such as for fathers and mothers, as well as male and female children.

Suddenly placing me at the center of their drama as a traditionally robed bride, nine children enacted a wedding ceremony for which they had designed all of the props (e.g., presents) and rehearsed the parts (e.g., bride, groom, carrier). In another space, young children—cross-legged on the polished floor of an area that opened up onto a garden—painted freestyle on rocks following a teacher-led meditation encouraging thoughtfulness. Heads bent, stroke after stroke soon revealed Chinese symbols of nature (e.g., grasslands) and culture (e.g., double happiness) across the many rocks.

Students’ beautification and personalization of garden and school spaces brought nature, family, and culture to the school. As framed pictures showed, these schoolchildren enjoyed the locally grown foods and rituals of family feasts. Participating in the work involved as beginning gardeners and cooks, they were developing life skills while learning about food in its natural forms.

Rural Public Elementary School

Connected by many small fish tanks, an L-shape aquarium was a feature on the property of a remote mountainous region. Not just objects of beauty, the fish were fed every day by the children with teacher guidance. Creating the habitat for the fish was a school project that taught students to care for nature and humans.

One-third of the children were boarders at the school whose families lived at considerable distances. Environmental and economic conditions have long made it necessary for some disadvantaged children in the country to be accommodated as boarders at school. One such preschool in southwest China was viewed by outsiders as a stark, barren place, not equipped to house or even teach youngsters. 71

Yet, at the elementary school being visited, students took care of the sheltered guppies throughout the aquatic lifespan. This core curriculum was infused in the arts and sciences. They had the time, then, to learn about classifications of plants and animals, the circulatory system and brain unique to fish, and healthy environments for enabling fish to thrive. Caring for Earth, and humans, was taught through the high-interest, related topic of fish habitats and aquatic ecosystems.

Children had fish friends and were on life-stage teams. The whole-child curriculum included “A Tadpole Looks for Her Mum,” a story from an English teacher’s first-grade text. Students adapted it for performance, selecting their role (e.g., tadpole, mother) and writing a script to be performed (noting stage directions). The drama introduced the young performers to life cycles and solutions for overcoming difficulties, such as isolation and homesickness.

Here art and performance taught the value of familial-like communities and nature. A unique element of this school was its adoption of a tradition of Chinese culture in its curriculum—the dragon bench dance. Like the care of fish, it was a potent embodiment of ancestral worship. The teaching staff innovated the school’s dragon bench dance to benefit their community of students. All children at the school and everywhere can experience as well as perform it in groups.

figure 2

Dragon bench dance by students channeling ancestry.

In 2012, the performance, enacted by kid teams, was broadcast live by two tv stations in China. Prominently framed pictures chronicled the public dragon bench demonstrations—hundreds of red-and-gold costumed students moved as one in orchestrated, undulating motion. Here is one such artifact—the leadership team told the story. Pointing to photographic elements, they described details of the event, including its impact on the children and the community (Figure 2).

Rural Public Special Education School

The teachers of disadvantaged special education children and an entrepreneurial principal and staff awakened artistry. Active fund-raising involved ingenuity. The teachers generated traditional Chinese arts and crafts, among these porcelain-engraved plates. School materials and supplies were purchased this way, to help support the low-income student population.

This popular cultural art form was also curricular: Students safely executed porcelain engraving under close teacher supervision. In the art course where they did engraving, nature was observed. Sometimes, they would go outside to sketch their ideas. Then they would improve upon their paper sketches (without the aid of technology). Following discussion with the teacher, in the classroom these artisan-like apprentices would begin the time-consuming work of chiseling their designs (e.g., butterflies in motion) onto plates.

Shown in Figure 3 was an engraved plate in a stack of places in the teachers’ lounge. This lively, skillful artwork had transpired from an art teacher’s tutoring and a student’s playful take on the dragon in Chinese culture.

figure 3

Child–teacher collaboration of porcelain-engraved dragon.

During the interview, the school principal (director) also spoke of another situation. She described it as the most impressive and motivational creative lesson she had observed to date at her school. It had taken place in math class where mathematical concepts were conveyed as shapes that human bodies form. A semicircle was used for student introductions. Delighted, students thought their teacher was doing magic by turning their semicircle (and bodies) into a circle and other shapes. This game of high involvement encouraged understanding of subject content by way of an interactive kinesthetic activity through which mathematical concepts and numbers were being taught. When I clarified that the most creative lesson to her had been in a math teacher’s class, she nodded, adding that he was exceptionally creative and attuned to helping special needs children learn.

In this special education school, the director stayed with me at all times. I was disallowed from visiting classrooms and interacting with the children, except in passing. They would wave in the company of their teachers. I was shown creative processes and products, though, which included framed posters of events and actual displays of the children, which the director took the time to describe.

Urban Schools Vignette

Urban Private Primary Montessori School

Cultural examples of creativity were witnessed in this school’s eco-friendly, specially constructed environment. Real-world student simulations of activities (e.g., cooking and building objects) were part of daily school life. Developmental creative learning activities involved teacher guidance, including reading, play, cooperation, and negotiation.

Each classroom had three teachers. The lead educator was an Association Montessori International certified teacher with three years training in Europe. Another teacher, a native English speaker, fostered a bilingual environment. The educators, inventing to scale, personally made some of the tools and materials.

A discovery model was used to teach students from China, America, and Europe concepts by doing rather than by direct instruction. Children, some of whose parents were foreigners working in the region, moved among the special stations, trying out new things, preparing for life while having their childhood respected and preserved. The creativity advantage in learning was allowing children to find their way in a safe but philosophical world of exploration.

Rooftop gardens and open-air play spaces helped complete this environment (see Figure 4). Vegetables and fruits were served as dishes to the children who clamored in the kitchen area to observe and learn culinary skills. Hands-on connections linked the table and planet with the sources of their meals.

Urban Public High School

At a top-ranking pisa competitive high school, teachers creatively adapted their curriculum beyond the core of internationally tested subjects. Arts and technologies were brought to life throughout the campus, suggestive of student–student and student–teacher synergies. Productive and affirming relationships on the part of the adults with their students was suggested by the teachers’ original designs of numerous displays and renovated spaces that housed—and indeed highlighted—student projects.

figure 4

Rooftop garden as creative place to learn new skills.

Nonetheless, this stellar, award-winning multimedia arts site, which participated in gallery showings and competed in contests, adhered to the national curriculum standards. The curricular testing requirements of math, science, and reading were key subjects, but this school also excelled at the arts and technology.

Creativity was being cultivated through an interdisciplinary approach to coursework and student-driven elective courses. Real-world components in the curriculum allowed for such activities as taking measurements outside the math classroom and interviewing family members who had left their rural communities.

Creatively doing science, a few youth had earned patents for their robotic and computer-assisted design projects. Entire spaces—made into student galleys—showcased thematically organized science and arts projects. Shown in Figure 5 are the sprawling cityscapes and landscapes of a diverse China.

figure 5

Student showcase of artworks and performance artifacts.

Urban Teaching Training Institute

The institute’s education leaders I interviewed at the end of my school visits confirmed that creative education is alive within some preK-12 schools in their region. A powerful spoken message was that “creativity is manifesting in China’s schools at tiers lower than the government, given its tightly controlled structure.” So, despite the Chinese government’s apparent lack of direction and interest, creativity was occurring.

Discussion

While evidences of critical thinking fell outside the parameters and methodologies of this study, the teacher leaders at the institute uttered this powerful statement (just quoted). The critique of authoritarian governmental control and disinterest in what happens within schools outside of the competitive international testing arena has left a lasting impression. While it proved challenging to elicit criticism during the school visits, with the exception of the special education school, the leaders at the teacher training institute pushed the boundaries of the status quo.

With the analyses completed a year later, thematic results suggest that the Chinese teachers and principals were open to discussing creative work, processes, and successes at their schools. In fact, they seemed eager to point out the creative activity in their schools, shining the light on student works (and not themselves), some impressively displayed.

Images of family, dragon festivity, and ancient symbolism seemed pervasive. Communal celebrations of ancestry came across as highly prized by the schools. Moreover, expressions of creative teaching and learning struck me as remarkable at times as did the conscientiousness of the staff in their efforts to design meaningful and engaging learning on behalf of their students. All of the creativity I observed, then, seemed highly attuned to Chinese culture, myth, and ancestry. Yet, there were many different examples of creative sense-making and on different topics encompassing subject matter and global themes, much of it supportive of students’ development as well-rounded, culturally attuned citizens.

However, in the primary schools I noticed examples of creative work that fed stereotypical gender-based images, such as of males (fathers) as powerful and females (mothers) as nurturing. When I asked about the socialization of girls and boys, I learned of efforts taken to debunk gender stereotypes in some places. At the Montessori school, there were stark differences in the dress of boys (informal) and girls (formal), except for the youngest children. Upon inquiring, the Chinese director responded that the girls’ parents were being persuaded by the administration to dress their daughters for comfort in the high activity environment, not in expensive dresses and formal shoes. However, he added, progress was slow. This expectation befitting Montessori schooling was being thwarted by some of the elite Chinese parents whom he thought might come around with their exposure to the wealthy American families’ relaxed style.

Overall, creativity came across as a natural, integrated part of the curriculum within the school sites. Teachers and leaders, presenting themselves as tightly knit teams, were expressive about the creativity within their buildings and its impact on the community. For example, invitations to participate in the dragon bench celebrations and even to join in on the live performances would be sent to the local residents by the rural public elementary school.

School teams invited me to explore by asking questions and, except for in the Montessori and special education schools due to policy restrictions, by freely roaming around during the guided tours. Regardless, I was able to observe creativity as process and product in varied forms at all of the schools, especially the more permissive ones. Despite the packed classrooms dominated by direct instruction, there was creative work occurring at all grade levels and across subject areas. At times, creativity was blatant; at other times, I inferred it.

Actually, China’s schools seemed accustomed to handling the substantial populations of students. The nation’s top-rated schools have “high student/teacher ratios and enrollments that grow to the capacity of the building,” according to long-time scholars of schooling in China. 72 These researchers exhibit a deep understanding of primary schools in China (and relative to schools in Japan and the United States), although their fieldwork concluded in 2005.

Classical and contemporary life themes were expressed, often through myth and metaphor. Science and art had a seamless quality, as in the way that fish were the object of care within one school’s living laboratory and anthropomorphized in child-centered, fish-like dramas. There was also innovative use of space, and quiet time reserved for creative engagement across a spectrum of grades and ages. Additionally, creative performances were planned and then executed, sometimes in a particular subject, such as English, and at other times with the full strength of the student body and teaching staff.

The creativity paradox came to mind as a way to describe an abundance of contradictory messages. For example, China’s political leadership and people, worldwide, believe that Chinese citizens are not creative. Yet, the region-wide teacher training institute’s leaders confirmed that some of the primary schools are active places of creativity and innovation. This testimony and my study results at least “trouble” the creativity deficit belief that plays into global mindsets about China and its schools.

China’s government has often been reported by the global press as wanting China to become a world-class innovator. Paradoxically, it clings to control and the one-party political system. According to a team of American professors, one a specialist in Chinese studies, something important has to happen: The Chinese government needs to dispel myths that its nation cannot innovate if it wants to see robust creative innovation in the future. 73 Creative innovation is a springboard for nurturing collaboration and cooperation not only within countries but also across nations within global contexts. At a minimum, all Chinese teachers and advocates keen on generating 21st-century opportunities for students need encouragement within a bounded structure that may be transforming in the global era.

Conclusion

Innovation and control—this is the very “paradox” that has been described as “at the heart of China’s future.” 74 Just how attuned are education policy officials to the creative processes and productivity within Chinese schools, particularly in poverty-stricken parts of the vast country? While the rote mechanization tactics used in education are surely oppressive, it cannot stamp out creativity and individuality altogether, which says something about the inner strength of these schools.

Finally, transformation of Chinese society could come from a vigorous generation that pushes boundaries, asks questions, and interrogates authority in the process of becoming creative. Looking forward, my hope is that the creative work already occurring in China’s schools will be recognized—not missed or ignored—as China pursues becoming a leading global creator.