NEWS

"CREATIVITY IN THE CLASSROOM"

In April 2004, Marilyn Bergman, President of The ASCAP Foundation, launched "Creativity in the Classroom" at the MENC: The National Association for Music Education 59th Biennial In-Service Conference in Minneapolis. "Creativity in the Classroom" is designed to help students recognize their own creative work and to understand their rights as owners of intellectual property as well as the ethics of protecting the creative property of others. The premise of the project is to encourage students to label their creative work with the copyright symbol, the year and their names, just as they see on any published, professional creative work.

While "Creativity in the Classroom" focuses on student music compositions, it is directly applicable to all types of creative work and can 'float' on top of the Standards-based goals of any number of curricula. The materials are found on www.menc.org which is the website of MENC: The National Association for Music Education, and they may be duplicated freely by teachers for direct use in the classroom.

As Marilyn Bergman, president of The ASCAP Foundation, stated in her speech to MENC Conference attendees in April 2004, "The challenge is: How to teach our children the need for valuing copyright so that there will be creators in the future who can make a living from their work. Placing a copyright circle © at the end of a song or poem that a student creates is a tangible way of driving home the point that this work was created by someone, belongs to that person, and must be respected as that person's property. And then it isn't such a leap to understand that piracy on the internet or anywhere else goes against the values that they have been taught."

"Creativity in the Classroom" was developed by MENC: The National Association for Music Education with funds provided by The ASCAP Foundation through the Irving Caesar Trust. Development also included input from the National School Boards Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the American Bar Association, and the United States Copyright Office.

"Creativity in the Classroom" Curriculum