ABSTRACT
Creativity has become a key international educational priority in the twenty-first century (Wyse and Ferrari 2015). It is suggested that creativity is ‘core to progress in knowledge societies’ (Collard and Looney 2014: 348). A central rationale is concerned with its role in supporting the needs of industry and the development of individuals capable of originality and innovation (Hoffmann and Russ 2016). In this chapter I want to argue that such a rationale, whilst it may be valuable, also risks losing sight of the importance of young children’s creativity for who and what young children are now, rather than what they may become. In so doing, I focus on the idea that young children (and adults!) are inherently creative, and that, in young children in particular, this manifests itself in a symbiotic relationship between young children’s play and their creativity, an idea which goes back to the theories of Friedrich Froebel (1907/1826). For Vygotsky (2004), children’s play is the creative reworking of their impressions, not just a reproduction of their experiences. Duffy (2006: 180) argues that ‘creativity and imagination must be at the heart of the experiences we offer children to promote their learning, development and well-being’.
