CREATIVITY AS AN APPROACH AND TEACHING METHOD OF TRADITIONAL GREEK DANCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

Education should always incorporate children’s creative and free expression at a general level and this should also apply at the level of movement. Creativity can be cultivated, developed and expressed within an environment of acceptance, freedom and communication as long as appropriate qualitative and quantitative stimuli are provided. This is the reason why pedagogues should be seriously concerned with the types of tasks introduced at schools, student’s cognitive preparation and teaching procedures. Different studies show that although children’s creative ability is steadily developing since early infancy, it falls into decline during their school initiation. During their school life students are forced to inhibit their creative and innovative expression and yield to the process of “mechanical memorizing” oriented towards imitation and reproduction. The aim of this paper is to investigate creativity as an approach and teaching method of traditional Greek dance in secondary schools. More specifically, a comparison was made between two teaching methods: “teacher-centric” versus “guided discovery” or “guided reinvention style” in combination with the “divergent production style” in a Greek middle school. A six-month pilot study was carried out in the A and B grades of two middle schools of the Prefecture Department of Thessaloniki. The study sample consisted of