ABSTRACT
Creativity is one of those words that suggests loose, abstract individualism, and as such the term is rarely employed in the service of schooling. Politicians and policy-makers extol the virtues of creativity, presumably because they now see it as a driver of economic activity through the processes of innovation and entrepreneurship. The difficulty for institutions when it comes to developing creative thinking is that creative thinking often challenges the status quo. The role of the arts, and in particular drama and film, is to question creatively our community’s ‘taken for granted’ assumptions about the world. In some places, creativity has been depicted as an individual’s struggle for greatness devoid of any real support— the artist alone and starving in a garret, writing the next great novel, play or film. A cursory understanding of the collaborative processes involved in drama, music and film argues against this stereotype of isolated creativity.
