Semelhanças e diferenças socioculturais no potencial criativo de crianças do 1º ciclo básico

Artistic education is one of the educational strands conducive to the child global development, which also stimulates their creative potencial and imagination. Nowadays, creativity is consensually considered as an existing adaptive capacity in all the individuals, in a greater or lesser degree. This capacity can be reflected in the way one solve’s their problems. The main goal of this study was to understand the implications that social-cultural background has on the children creative potencial, particularly on the 1st and 2nd years of the primary school. The study was developed at two schools with a sample of 77 individuals. These schools have different social-cultural backgrounds and districts. One of the schools is from a rural enviroment, in Estremoz, Alentejo and the other from a urban enviroment, in Caxias, from Oeiras Municipality. Therefore, an investigation methodology was developed and gathered data from three different tools with distint purposes and characteristics. The tools were: a survey for the tutors of the children, with a set of questions built to understand their cultural interests not only on their individual free time but also on their family free time together; an exercise-inducing forms (Fustier, 2001) to evaluate the creative potencial; at last, an activity of artwork through paintings and collages using different materials. Different methods of evaluation were used to comprehend the obtained results, like the evaluation grid on graphic representations performance indicators which was adapted to the level age, based on the graphic indicators grid of Mendes (2002). Besides the different social-cultural contexts, the results obtained were very similar, showing a slight difference in the cultural activities done with the families of the children. In comparison, on the creativity exercise-inducing forms the students from the urban context presented a larger number of creative results than the students from the rural context. On the other hand, on the paintings and collages activity, it was the rural context that presented more creative and reflected results. From the analysis of the numerous creative productions made by the students and cross-linking data with the answers of the families to the surveys, it was possible to observe that the social-cultural background and the family dynamics have some influence on the creative potencial on this sample of childre