Creativity does not get much attention in vocational education. Competency based outcomes often discount the input of creativity as the need to quantify aspects of aethestics or 'taste' is difficult. Many trade occupations require learners to attain creativity in their practice. The most obvious being chefs, hairdressers, florist and joiners.
I came across this article via my Google Scholar alerts this morning. The duality of a pastry chef discusses the need for pastry chefs to be both creative and also technically strong in the knowledge of baking sciences and the manual skills required to work with a range of organic materials (i.e chocolate, sugar). The article uses interviews (through the research method of portraiture) to try to understand how top pastry chefs create desserts and showpieces. The participants were all members of the Malaysian pastry chef team. This year, the Malaysian team won the Coupe de Monde, the world pastry competitions.
The article is published in a new journal from the Events and Tourism Institute at Indiana University. The Institute's research area have a strong slant towards events and tourism management.
1 comment:
The skill that turns technical competence into magic.
Very hard to assess.
I remember asking tutors at the jazz school about this- I think they felt that students had to be passed on technical competence but ultimately the real question, was did they want to play along with them.... sometimes there was just no soul, spark or magic there.
It’s always been the same for us in our area too.
Great to see the need for creativity acknowledged.
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