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Caleb Warnar
Kari K Veblen
Music 1800
October 18, 2015

Brinkman, D. J. (2010). Teaching creatively and teaching for creativity. Arts Education Policy
Review, 111(2), 48-50. doi:10.1080/10632910903455785



In this article, I found Brinkmans concepts surrounding creativity to be very interesting.
For example, he states that big C creators are the iconic composers that we study, while little c
creativity is more ordinary. I find little c creativity to be much more open and casual, rather
than big C creativity which I think can be intimidating to some individuals. Additionally,
Brinkman describes how ones personality traits influence their own creativity. Qualities such as
being a risk taker, humourous, persistent, and motivated are all traits that show through ones
creative work. In this way, since everyone is truly unique and different, the creative works of
society as a whole should also be unique and different. However, the focus in teaching is to
make students the same, while teaching with creativity involves refining the unique skills and
qualities possessed by students.
Towards the middle of the article, Brinkman elaborates on surprising new ways to
describe new musical concepts. He suggests that perhaps the term staccato can be described as
popcorn popping, and he encourages teachers to always be thinking of creative ways to
illustrate a concept. This is a vital part of teaching, because students will remain more attentive
to the content that is presented to them as a result.

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As Brinkman points out, teachers often will not educate their students to be creative.

This frustrates me, since creativity is what fuels new musical discoveries. For instance, the
creation of genres such as jazz, pop, alternative, and rock must all be a product of creativity and
experimentation, since they at one point did not exist. Without the experimentation and
creativity involved with making new sounds, we would have very few musical instruments at
our disposal. For these reasons, I find it frustrating that some teachers that I have known will
even discourage creativity in music when ironically the content that they strictly teach was
once created by someone who was creative.

As a comment to the author, I found that this article contained a great deal of practical

information and instruction. By defining and describing creativity as a whole, Brinkman outlines
the benefits of creative education as well as how it may be achieved.