Cultivating creativity through digital art

The Hong Kong Education Bureau has encouraged the use of tablets and technology in education to promote the creativity of children (Hong Kong Education Bureau, 2015). Digital art applications have become the prevalent technologies utilized by Visual Arts teachers for cultivating the creativity of students (McQuiggan et al., 2015; Ainsworth, Prain, & Tytler, 2011; Subramanian, 2012; Wang, 2015; Wang, 2018; Yang, 2013). However, it is shown that teachers lack technological pedagogical and content knowledge for designing creativity-facilitating lessons and teaching strategies (Black, & Browning, 2011). There is also a lack of concrete guidelines to assist teachers to design digital art units (Ontario Ministry of Education and Training, 2009). To provide more guidance on using digital art apps in Visual Arts education to cultivate the creativity of children, the researcher aims to investigate how to design the lessons to cultivate students’ creativity and how to implement pedagogies to enhance children’s creativity.

Qualitative research methods are used to explore the views of teachers. Through interviewing Visual Arts teachers experienced in teaching digital art in primary schools, the results of the findings show that the technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) of teachers is the key to effective teaching for cultivating student creativity. TPACK provides a reference for teachers to design favorable digital art unit plans, apply useful pedagogies, create a creativity-supporting learning environment, and design assessments for learning. A concrete way for designing digital art units and specific pedagogies are summarized in this research. It is hoped that the summarized strategy for designing digital art units and pedagogies can be a reference for the pre-service and in-service Visual Arts teachers to assist them to design digital art units for developing the creativity of children.