engleski

Discourses on childhood and children in scholarly articles about creativity in the context of education in Croatia

This paper presents a review of the different discourses on childhood and children in scholarly articles about creativity in the context of education in Croatian scholarly journals. The theoretical underpinning of this qualitative analysis is the conceptualization of childhood as a social, symbolic, ideological and political construct, which is also the foundation for the conceptualization of children. Creativity has been the focus of academics for many years now, and in the last decades creativity in the context of education has become one of the more prominent topics within the academic community. Within this context, deliberations about creativity could be placed on a continuum, from a romantic understanding of creativity as a generic human attribute and authentic self-expression to an instrumentalized understanding of creativity as visible, for example, from international supranational organizations by emphasizing its implementation into national curricula in the context of the neoliberal approach to social development and the post-Fordist labour market. Within this approach, the emphasis is on the child’s preparation for the continuation of schooling and the labour market (the so-called readiness discourse), where the creative child is seen as universal and naturally playful, without taking into consideration the specific sociocultural and class context. In order to gain insight into the discourses on childhood and children in Croatian academic literature about creativity in the context of education, a search of relevant journals was conducted, focusing on 207 scholarly and professional articles available at Hrčak, the central portal of academic journals in Croatia including all years of publication. After searching for the notion of creativity as the subject, the results were filtered according to scientific field(s) related to education and according to publication type which resulted in the analysis of 122 scholarly articles. The qualitative analysis of the content of the filtered articles indicated that the authors balanced between viewing childhood and children as a value here-and-now and as a value in the sense of becoming future adults when writing about creativity in the context of education.

discourses on childhood, the creative child, creativity, scholarly articles, qualitative analysis

nije evidentirano