Learning Creativity: Creativity is Normal, Developed, and Special
June 5, 2016 • 0 Likes • 0 Comments
by Duane Sharrock (revised 6/15/16)
After I had graduated from college, I became obsessed with the arts, especially the art of fiction writing. In pursuit of my obsessions, I discovered that there are a few ways to “learn” creativity and there are ways to “teach” creativity.
Creativity is natural. We are creative every day, in minor ways, and occasionally, we are creative in big ways. Some of us are creative in huge ways. I say this because I prescribe to Kaufman’s and Beghetto’s Four-C description of creativity: “mini-c is the creativity that happens in the learning process. It could be a child learning to write a song. Pro-c is expert-level creativity. It might be someone who’s composed music that is currently popular.”
The life of a creative writer, for example, might progress through these stages as follows:
Judging the magnitude of a creative product, process, or performance depends on the judge’s emotional and social intelligence, the judge’s engagement with the society’s culture, and the judge’s ability to reflect on personal experiences. Those are just a few of the judge’s prerequisite abilities, knowledge, and aptitude needed before reliably, validly judging the value and impact of a creative’s work. These are prerequisites because there are instances where incredible work is ignored or dismissed because the judge didn’t “get” the work or because the name of the creative is not established. Then history becomes the judge. Someone revisits the work or discovers and gives the creative her due based on a more enlightened evaluative process. This more enlightened view didn’t happen though while the creative is alive. It may take years for society to appreciate the work’s power. The importance of the Four-C model of creativity though is that it accounts for the everyday creativity involved with learning and creating knowledge.
We are creative in minor ways when we decide to be better parents to our kids. Our solutions to the daily problems parents face can be dogmatic, slavish parroting of what our parents have told us to do. That’s not being creative. Instead, it’s when we look at a problem, creatively explore the problem in its context, review the values you are actively promoting in your family to your child, and then, like someone in public relations, we construct the message and the narrative and the response you have designed in order to deal with the problem. Part of this process may involve ruling out parental responses that you haven’t seen work. Another part of the process is ruling out possible responses that you don’t believe will work in your present situation, since you know your family and your child best.
Teaching others how to be creative is possible. Learning how to be creative is possible as well.
Walking the Earth
I was obsessed with “great writing.” I had no cohesive set of examples of great writing though, so I could not articulate what “great writing” is. I had some examples of great works, but it was also true that I didn’t enjoy every passage of every page. I had read some classics as assignments and on my own, so as a result, my list of “great writing” examples included some popular fiction. Soon, I found myself with a kind of dilemma.It was a kind of crisis of taste.
I struggled with the aesthetics of my past English teachers and the learned literary critics. On the one hand, I struggled with what I *should* love. These perceived values conflicted with my own aesthetics, the sensibilities of what I actually “do” love. My quest led me to The Paris Reviews and to fiction writing instruction books.
The Paris Review is described in Wikipedia as “a quarterly English language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953[1] by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, andGeorge Plimpton.” I read their author interviews so that I could get into the heads of different authors. Many of the more established authors even published books about writing. John Gardner published one called On Moral Fiction, but I’ve read many others.
Authors have their favorites, but they write what they like. From these authors, I found that each believed that the author’s way–his or her way–is the best way.
In “The Complex Psychology of Why People Like Things” Vanderbilt makes this important point: “The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something.”
My exploration opened a window, a glimpse, into a relationship between choice and taste. After all, these aesthetics were refined from the reading of many books and short stories.
Authors describe their reading of texts as having two levels. At least two.
At one level, authors read for entertainment. If a story doesn’t engage you, make you care about what happens, evoke emotions, or works to maintain the reader’s interest in reaching the end of the story, then the story was a failure. It may have had its moments, but it may not have entertained enough to inspire a wish to be able to write like that. It wasn’t enough to make you want to figure out how certain experiences were achieved.
The other level is reading with the intention of learning how certain effects were achieved. If an emotional response is evoked, you might analyze the writing for the elements that worked together to achieve that emotion. If you experienced a high level of suspense, you might analyze the writing for techniques the author used to create tension and worry enough that you cared about the events described on the pages. You might discover other effects that, upon further analysis, you realize that the author never explicitly told you the mood of the setting or the fear you should feel about the place. With this kind of analytic reading, you may discover that the author achieved what she did by what was written as much as by what was not written or by what was left out.
The authors read texts multiple times. Then they reflect on the reading. They also evaluate it for quality and analyze the texts to see how the author makes it all work. In the process, a kind of conversation develops between the author and the reader. In this conversation, the reader and the author may agree about some choices, about some arguments, about the quality of the evidence used to develop the arguments, but they may also disagree.
This is where a third level to the author’s reading emerges: reading to learn about life, about being human, about being in a relationship, about making choices, and finding meaning. All artists make a statement about the human condition. Some statements can be profound. The artists also may make these statements in the form of questions: Why do we do what we do? Why can’t we do this other thing? When do we turn our lives around for the better? The moment the reader realizes he might do better or may have a response to the questions posed and begins to collect and create the evidence to support this response, that’s the moment the reader becomes a writer.
Writers have role models, and these role models can be found within the domain of writing, but can also be found outside of that domain. This is true of many kinds of creatives. The creatives may specialize in one domain but can expand their appreciation and expression by exploring other domains.
Seeking and Finding
Artists, scientists, philosophers have a tendency to collect together in coffee houses, wine shops, parlors and salons. They are drawn together by their ideas. When they could not meet face to face, they exchanged letters. They exchanged ideas, they challenged each other’s assumptions, and they delved deeply into each other’s perspectives. These experiences also offer opportunities for discovery since each person shares their understandings of new ideas. In their creative productions, in their own ways, they rephrased these discussions and offered solutions. Sometimes, they suggested future outcomes based on those ideas, and even posed more questions as a means to challenge each other’s thinking. These discussions can act as a kind of research.
This is another way to teach students how to be more creative: teach them how to find what what resonates within them. To be more creative, students need to open themselves to new experiences, new information, and to the discovery of connections. Discovery can be overlooked though because of the myth of the madness of creativity.
People may seem crazy because they are attuned to certain concepts, certain qualities of relationships, or the importance of certain elements to a singular, heightened degree, with an acuity few others can see. It is a way of seeing that is not limited to the sense of sight, though. Other senses can be involved. How often has an artist described the heat of a relationship? How often is water, or metaphors of water, used in poetry? Weight can be felt in the air around combatants. Character and character traits have smells that border taste even as they press against the forms of your own feelings and sentiments. Meaning is discovered in the ways things connect. Creativity is about how things connect, how they relate, and where they fit in a certain context. Connections cause and correlate, but they only exist because you are there to sense them.
Connections are how things relate to the different parts of you and the information you seek. Paradoxically, experiences and information can be discovered and consumed. They transform in ways that not only alters how you see things but also makes you see what you can see.
Research is at the heart of every creative endeavor, but aesthetics also inform what we uncover in our research. Our preferences for certain kinds of artistic goals are aesthetic in nature, but the creative’s skills and resources are directed towards achieving the expression of that vision. Research helps us explore possibilities, which in turn gives us ideas and the means of expressing those ideas.
For example, chefs research recipes and “experiment” with them. Their research explores the qualities of ingredients as well as the effects of certain methods, certain techniques.
Don’t be so surprised that research includes more than the picking apart of text in scholarly journals. Research can also include videos found on YouTube and can include conversations with experts, the conversations that can take place in the bars and parlors that I mentioned earlier. Research is also practice and the attempts one makes trying to duplicate someone else’s techniques. Research includes primary sources and secondary sources that can be mined for missing information, conflicting evidence, or as a source of more questions based on exceptions and implications.
I even suggest that the memory of your own personal experiences as well as the experiences of others are research. Anecdotal research is useful for performance arts as well as for the narrative arts. Anecdotal research might also be useful in the sciences, especially when using your imagination to roll out mental simulations and thought experiments. Scientists make leaps using their intuition, mental models, and imagery. How these discoveries are expressed, and how these insights are supported and explained, using which media and avenue of delivery influences how successfully the creative expresses them.
This brings me to the next thing that needs to be taught about being creative: communication.
Seven Basic Types of Dialogue
Students need to learn how to speak with others, because just as these students may discover wonder and awe, and can become curious, students need to find other people, like experts and practitioners, who can clarify distinctions, share their own perspectives on these topics, provide insights, or to relate their own personal experiences of wonder, awe, and curiosity. These others might share their own questions and may suggest implications. They can explain their own connections and understanding. Just as the artists, intellectuals, and writers had their own impassioned discussions in the days before computer technologies, meeting in cafes or salons, your students may also find themselves embroiled in exciting, engaging, and emotional dialogues. There are different kinds of dialogue. Each type of dialogue has its value.
According to Douglas Walton, there are seven kinds of dialogue. Each kind of dialogue has its context (or its “initial situation” if you read the chart), the participant’s goal, and the ultimate goal (or “goal of the dialogue) . We dialogue when we communicate. Each type of dialogue has its use, but the types are also listed and more fully explored here:
Without question, not every type of dialogue will serve the creativity seekers, but if you explore each type of dialogue, each supposed goal of the participants, and about the goals of each dialogue type in general, you can begin to understand how problems can develop. In problems, there are opportunities.
Some of these dialogues may lead to long-standing arguments and hates. Many will not though. In the development of my own aesthetics, I learned that as we learn in life, many emotions motivate differently, and there is no accounting for taste. As a result, the more you study and reflect on the elements involved in what you study, the more strongly you develop opinions and insights about their truth, beauty, power, and importance. You may prioritize those qualities over other qualities that the topic may possess. For the connoisseur, these beliefs may gain religious and political implications, and the connoisseur may come to believe that the greatest thinkers of a given society would do well to share the creative’s worldview and perspectives. In other words, you may passionately conclude that people who believe as you do will thrive; rejection of your beliefs will lead to their destruction.
Of the passions, there are few more invigorating and motivating than resentment, hate, and envy. I have never been more attentive and engaged in any topic than when I could use information to prove my opponent wrong. This experience is almost as satisfying as when I find information to prove that I am right, right, right. On top of this, you can gain allies who agree with you. Your squad can become a “school of thought.”
This negativity will disappoint a large number of people.
This is not to say though that the more socially productive emotions of love are not valuable. They definitely are. But a creative can’t afford to commit to only recognizing positive emotions; the creative has to see as much of the whole to make clearer, wiser choices, greater insights. One way to understand what I am saying is to recognize the meaning of duality in the Taijitu symbol (aka, the Yin and Yang symbol). Those who study the duality understand that the taijitu “describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another,” but we westerners have a tendency to fit so much into categories and parts and focus less on bigger pictures, systems, and a “whole”, so adding shades of grey can remind us how oppositions are interconnected and interdependent. Westerners might understand this better by imagining that shades of grey separate the black and the white.
Mirror, Mirror
Reflection is another important practice for learning. It makes the information you have learned into knowledge you will use. Reflection is also a big part of developing aesthetics, so teaching students how to be reflective can also teach them how to be creative. Students need to relate to the product, process, or production. They need to engage to such a degree that you can find distinctions between one example and another, but you engage with the art by asking questions of our senses and emotions. Thinking includes physical or the sensorimotor “thoughts” as they are expressed in sensation, qualities of motions, and more. This also includes your noting the connections you make to your other personal experiences–not just your intellectual connections, but to your emotional connections and to your values as well. Art asks questions of those connections and suggests answers to those questions at the same time.
Some people can look at paintings and only think about how art makes them feel. Which is fine. You can search for the emotions that the art triggers in you. Artists though work on more than one level. Masters do more than try to make you “feel” something. They also suggest that reality can be attained or perceived with more of some elements or less of other elements–color, lines, shades, light, detail, etc. Science is involved to varying degrees of formal understandings of physics and psychology.
Engagement is a set of skills that can be deepened and broadened depending on how you practice these skills. Practice can also develop the creative’s prowess at attunement, awareness, and attention, and can increase the speed with which the creative achieves these attentive states of mind. One can get started with these questions because these questions access the affective domain of thinking as well as the cognitive and ethos domains of thinking. In the various performing arts, there are methods of reflection promoted by various acting and dance schools. Authors have used meditative practices to generate ideas and to break through creative blocks. The sciences also accesses methods like systems thinking, systems dynamics, and design thinking to generate ideas and to address problems. There are many forms of meditation, reflection, contemplation, creative methods and processes.
Design Thinking
Lately, design thinking has captured the imaginations of engineers, leaders, educators, and other knowledge workers. The questions of design thinking are different from other kinds of thinkers, especially because it insists on considering the human needs a design is supposed to address. This introductory video lists five key elements of design thinking: Learn from people, find patterns (access “informed intuition”), define design principles by addressing questions/needs accumulated from people data, make tangible, and iterate relentlessly. These elements are probably simplified for us lay people, but I can already see that social networking can support the “learning from people” information and access.
On the other hand, another approach to design thinking is described here “Design Thinking… What is That?” Allen Samuels, through the Fast Company Staff author, explains design thinking as including these four elements. One element is to define the problem: “The goal of the definition stage is to target the right problem to solve, and then to frame the problem in a way that invites creative solutions.” Another element is create and consider many options: “Design thinking requires that no matter how obvious the solution may seem, many solutions be created for consideration. And created in a way that allows them to be judged equally as possible answers.” A third element to design thinking involves refining selected directions: “At this stage many times options will need to be combined and smaller ideas integrated into the selected schemes that make it through.” The author suggests that the second and third elements may need to be revisited a few times until the right answers emerge. And finally, the fourth element or step requires the choosing of a solution and its development or execution: “Prototypes of solutions are created in earnest, and testing becomes more critical and intense. At the end of stage 4 the problem is solved or the opportunity is fully uncovered.”
Facilitating Creative Thinking
Teachers miss these opportunities and forget these learning goals because of time constraints, urgency, and the need to fit within the school’s culture and to honor the requirements of the school’s leadership. Teachers also don’t teach creativity nor teach how to learn to be creative because of popular misconceptions that limit teaching and learning of reflection, research, and what amounts to deliberate practice.
For example, we think aesthetics can’t be taught, but this is not true. As I describe the process of developing aesthetics above, we can develop our aesthetics and acquire our own personal tastes by exposing ourselves to variety, reflecting on qualities, and making choices.
Aesthetics are educated, and people really hate to learn this fact. They prefer to believe that aesthetics are like passionate love and hate “at first sight”, and that tastes are spontaneous reactions or they become evident upon exposure. It’s the old “I can’t define art, but I know it when I see it” way of thinking.
Wine connoisseurs are one example of acquiring a taste. Although one might argue that many wine tasters are frauds, we cannot fail to recognize that there are some gifted wine tasters who prove to be accurate identifying the wines they drink through the use of their sophisticated taste and sense of history. We should never forget that our aesthetics are acquired tastes.
Developing our aesthetics and acquiring our tastes amounts to education, to learning. Sometimes, we are self-taught. Other times, we are taught. This is true of foods and drinks, but also true of any product, process, and performance. Tastes change over time, with more experiences, exposures, reflection, and even through appreciation as we deliberately practice the techniques and thinking approaches towards mastery.
Ultimately though, we must remember that there is a large taxonomy of thinking methods. There are different kinds of knowledge that result. It is pointless to restrict how we think of thought, and to cram our examples of creativity into non creative categories. Except when it doesn’t get in the way of being creative (it happens). However, in “The Complex Psychology of Why People Like Things” Julie Beck interviews Tom Vanderbilt, where they explore aesthetics and taste. Vanderbilt makes this important point: “The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something. Obviously we should not just stop with our gut reaction and say “I don’t like this.” If we did that, we would never get to a lot of the things we end up liking.”
Aesthetics give rise to values, which in turn, gives rise to vision. Your vision informs what things you do, what gets created, but it also informs how these things should be done. Your vision embodies your sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good.
Vision can be creative, but to achieve one’s vision, one must also employ creativity. Steve Jobs had a vision of a music collection that fit in your pocket. Creativity was used to achieve that vision.
On my journey, I learned that creativity can be learned as well as “taught”. This can be achieved with facilitation or by encouraging habits of thinking and reflection, encouraging habits of attention and focus, and in providing varieties of exemplary products, performances, and experiences. But teachers can more indirectly –yet effectively– teach how to be creative by teaching the student how to self-teach and explore. If students are taught how to open their minds, research for their own interests and needs, reflect on on what is found, and taught ways of communicating their insights to others, the students will become more obviously creative. This is to say that they were already creative. It’s just that there are many aspects to creativity. Some are easier to recognize than others.
Out of the Weaving Secret 