The Historical and Cultural Perspectives of Creativity: A Qualitative Study of Thai Early Childhood Curriculum

This article aims to analyze the places of creativity in Early Childhood Curriculum in Thailand. Since, creativity appears in several disciplines and play a big role in childhood education for decades. The paper includes the main points of the overview of creativity in early childhood curriculum in Thailand in the past decades, then it focuses on the perspectives of creativity in the school curriculum and discusses the perspective of creativity and cultural context in the curriculum. This article analyzes the aspects of the creativity in curriculum in Thailand based on the cultural perspectives stated by Anoumou and Formella (2016). The qualitative analysis conducted through document analysis which was set as follows; the challenge of early childhood curriculum during the 1970s-2003, the promotion of children’s creativity in the classroom after curriculum reform 2003-2010, Thai Early Childhood Curriculum (2017). Overall, the main themes of research were seen in three perspectives including the view of creativity in the curriculum, instructional methods and teaching media, and subject domains towards creativity. The view of creativity was linked to several activities such as play, arts, and sciences, etc. This is agreed with several authors who proposed that children can use their imagination to theorise and develop skills and knowledge to improve creativity through those activities (Innamorato, 1998 and Jacob, 2001). On the one hand, the perspective of creativity depends upon the cultural context. Lastly, the research findings recommend that cross-curricular activities are essential for children’s creativity and that ‘the curriculum should enable pupils to think creatively. Creativity should be set as the central pedagogy concept in every domain of learning rather than separated. Furthermore, it can be suggested   that the real factors such as school context, adult role, or cultural perspective should be investigated for future research.