Analogies of Creativity and Curriculum Standards for Integrating Arts for Creative Arts Education

A distinctive feature of arts education in Australia is that the individual arts of music, visual arts, dance, and drama are taught in primary schools as Creative Arts Education. A certain topic is taught by singing, drawing pictures, moving, and making a short drama of it. For me, as a researcher of creativity in music and being educated in Korea and the United States, it was interesting to see that creativity in the arts is strongly emphasised in Australian schools. The United States and Korea have emphasised creativity in school instructions and arts curricula for decades but they do not seem to have made much progress in the practice of it. I conducted research with American primary students (fifth and sixth graders) by asking each of them to compose music on an Orff xylophone (Auh, 1996, 1997, 1998). Also, I did research with Korean secondary students living in Korea composing music with graphic notations (Auh, in press). It was interesting for me to see different features in their compositions, and I explain more about this below. The quality of music and arts education should be explained only after systematic assessments are conducted.