Unlocking Creativity

A Teacher's Guide to Creativity Across the Curriculum

Robert Fisher, Mary Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135397821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 2005. Promoting creativity can be a powerful way of engaging children in their learning. Showing how creativity can be developed across the curriculum, this book offers advice on how to: Develop children's capacity for creative thinking and achievement; use creativity to increase levels of motivation and self-esteem; teach the creative skills pupils need for success in learning and life. Combining the latest research with practical ideas and tasks, this multi-dimensional book is a must for teachers, students and educators who wish to know more about creativity in teaching and learning.

CHAPTER
1

What is creativity?

Robert Fisher

‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited while imagination embraces the whole world.’

(Albert Einstein)

‘Creativity is not just art. It is thinking deeply and having original thoughts about something.’

(Georgie Eccles, aged 10, from Westbury Park School, Bristol)

IN A RECENT COMPETITION teachers were asked to set their own ‘targets for creativity’ for the children in their schools.¹ The entries had much in common. They nearly all wanted to ensure children had a wide range of experience, not only for intellectual but also for personal and cultural development. Among the more unorthodox creativity targets included were:

• dance until your legs ached
• play in the snow
• care for an animal
• admire a rainbow.

But in what ways are these objectives creative? What makes an experience, thought or activity creative? This chapter seeks answers to the questions: What is ‘creativity’? Why is it important? How is it best developed in individuals, in classrooms and in schools?

In the Victorian era there was little room for creativity in British schools. It was a time of ‘payment by results’ and of rote learning. The common idea of education in those days was that of memorisation; and a regime of central control, inspection and testing ensured little time for creativity. In recent years, for many teachers in England, this has sounded like a familiar regime.

Although interest in creativity goes back to the ancient world, what is now thought of as the ‘creativity movement’ began in Europe and America after the Second World War. There were two impulses for this. First, there was the perceived need to train scientists, engineers and designers to be more creative and innovative in response to global competition. Second, there was a reaction against prevailing values that were seen as excessively bureaucratic and manipulative. In the classroom this meant wanting to shake education free from excessive testing and rote learning and to encourage more open-ended, student-centred learning. There was a new focus on the arts and creativity to broaden the basic curriculum. A pamphlet of advice to teachers, published in the 1940s and ’50s spoke of ‘unlocking the minds and opening the shut chambers of the hearts’ of the deprived postwar generation.² There followed much research into the nature of creativity and innovation, into the lives of creative people and the processes of creative thinking.

The postwar flowering of the arts and creativity had many benefits, but it had a downside in that many teachers forgot about the importance of the ‘basics’. Hence, in England, as elsewhere, came the backlash of the ‘back to basics’ movement that resulted in a more prescribed curriculum. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in creativity — not just in the arts but also across the curriculum — fostered in England by the publication of Ken Robinson's seminal report in 1999.³ Since then a new consensus has grown around the view that attending to the basics and encouraging creativity, far from being mutually exclusive, are both needed for success in learning and in life. However, the question remains: What is creativity?

What is creativity?

The trouble with creativity, as with intelligence and other brain-based functions, is that the concept is ethereal and elusive. Years of research has gone into trying to specify what creativity is, but despite all the checklists, models and tests, researchers admit that we do not know how fully to explain the creative power of the brain. We lack a proper language to describe the brain activity associated with creativity. We know creativity when we see it but the mental processes involved are difficult to describe. As a student once said to me, ‘If I knew what creativity meant I'd know if I was creative’. What follows is an attempt to describe what creativity is and how it can be fostered.

If we ask, ‘What is creativity?’ we are asking, in a Socratic sense, what all examples of creativity have in common by virtue of which they are creative. More exactly, we are looking for the necessary and sufficient conditions for creativity. The assumption here is that creativity is a type of thing — something with an essence or nature. Creativity may not have an exact nature. We can say with precision what all triangles have in common, by virtue of which they are triangles, but the concept of creativity seems to be fuzzy at the edges. However, a good definition of creativity will help us to identify what it is we are talking about, why certain things are clearly creative and others are not.

Many attempts have been made to define creativity. Howard Gardner (1997) has described it as ‘the ability to solve problems and fashion products and to raise new questions’. Bill Lucas (2001) says that it is ‘a state of mind in which all our intelligences are working together’, and Ken Robinson (2001) states that it is ‘imaginative processes with outcomes that are original and of value’. Part of the reason for this diversity of definitions is that creativity can be seen as a property of people (who we are), processes (what we do) or products (what we make). I will argue that the processes that underpin creativity also underpin the evolution of life.

Processes of creative evolution

The principle processes of creative evolution are:

• generation
• variation
• originality.

To create is to generate something. At the simplest level creativity is making, forming or bringing something into being. To create is to be productive in thought, word or deed. The first principle of evolution, of creative minds and schools, is that of generation. In the natural world organisms must produce more progeny than are needed. The same principle applies to ideas. Generating outputs such as ideas, experiments and innovations is a necessary part of creative effort. When Linus Pauling, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, was asked how he had come up with so many creative discoveries he replied: ‘It's easy; you think of a lot of ideas, and throw away the bad ones’. Creativity begins with generation or bringing forth — whether it be ideas, designs or species. However, generation by itself is not sufficient for creativity. Bees make honey and ants make nests through instinctive activity. Machines make cars through mechanical activity. Much that we do may be the result of routine and habit. We should not confuse mere generative activity with creativity.

Every organism or member of a species (including teachers) varies in some way from every other one. The second principle of creativity is differentiation. To be creative outputs must be varied. Creativity is not evidenced in mere repetition. Andy Warhol, the artist, generated images of multiple copies of Campbell's soup cans in his art, but each work contained images that were variations on the original design — hence they were creative. Creative teachers do not merely repeat lessons, they add to them and vary them. New knowledge and better adaptation derives from exploratory processes that seek to vary what is given. The most effective primary schools are characterised by innovation in teaching and an emphasis on developing pupils' creativity and self-confidence according to an Ofsted report on successful primary schools.⁴ Variation is the exploratory process of evolution. We need to adapt to survive. Those who do not adapt become like the dinosaurs — extinct. Creativity, like evolution and education, is founded on experimentation, variations that sometimes succeed, sometimes fail. Creativity, therefore, requires the courage to take risks — the risk to be different.

Where evolution succeeds in creative adaptation aspects of these variations are inherited by offspring. Unique features, when effective, are adopted and further adapted by others. Jerome Bruner (1962) defines creativity as ‘an act that produces effective surprise’. It is originality that provides effective surprise. To do the same things in the same way is not to be creative, to do things differently adds variation to mere habit, but when we do or think things we have not done or thought before, and they are effective, we are being original and fully creative. Such originality is a matter of degree. Some things may be original to an individual mind, some original within a group or community and some are universally unique.

Degrees of originality

• individual: being original in relation to one's previous thoughts, words or deeds, e.g. ‘I have not thought or done this before’;
• social: being original in relation to one's social group, community or organisation, e.g. ‘We have not thought or done this before’;
• universal: being original in terms of all previous known human experience, e.g. ‘No-one has thought or done this before’.

A creative act is of value if it generates something novel, original or unique. Creativity is important and of educative value because, in whatever field it occurs, it adds something new to human knowledge and/or experience, although that something new may not at the time be recognised as ‘valuable’ or ‘useful’ by others. The history of art and science is littered with examples of original ideas that were at first, or for a long time, rejected. We would not want to say that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, or Copernican theory was not creative because it was rejected by many experts at the time. A creative act or idea may or may not be given the seal of approval by others. Being creative may mean going beyond the limits (or targets or curriculum) set by others. For schools it may mean creating their own recipes for excellence, rather than following the recipes of others.

Creativity can be thought of as embodied imagination. Imaginative activity is the process by which we generate something that is original. As Miercoles, aged 10, from Westbury Park School put it, ‘Creativity is like imagination because when you create something you need to imagine it first’. What imagination does is to enable the mind to represent images and ideas of what is not actually present to the senses. It can refer to the capacity to predict, plan and foresee possible future consequences. In short, imagination is the capacity to conceive possible (or impossible) worlds that lie beyond this time and place. These possible worlds may derive from actual worlds reproduced from our store of memories. As William Blake said: ‘What is now proved was once imagined’.

Imagination is both reproductive and productive. ‘Reproductive imagination’ is the capacity to represent in the mind external objects that are absent as if they were present, as when we bring to mind remembered experiences, as in: ‘I can imagine being there now’ or ‘It happened like this’. Reproductive imagination is characteristic of adaptors — people who build on or adapt existing ideas. ‘Productive imagination’ is the mind's ability to form concepts beyond those derived from external objects. Productive imagination is characteristic of innovators who fuse new concepts out of existing ideas.

‘Imagination rules the world,’ said Napoleon. It is the faculty that provides colour to our lives and underpins our curiosity and wonder. It is essential not only to creativity but also to our capacity to respond to and appreciate the creativity of others. It informs our emotional lives, including our ability to understand ourselves and others. The downside of imagination is that it feeds fantasy and false belief. Plato banished artists from his ideal Republic on the grounds that imagination distorts reality, creates illusions and encourages people to feel rather than think. Imagination can be used to serve evil ends, so it needs to be informed by values; it can lead to false ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 What is creativity?
• 2 Creative literacy: learning in the early years
• 3 Creative writing: taking risks with words
• 4 Creative drama: thinking from within
• 5 Creative mathematics: allowing caged birds to fly
• 6 Creativity in science: leaping the void
• 7 Unlocking creativity with ICT
• 8 Creative design and technology
• 9 Creativity through geography
• 10 Creativity in music and art
• 11 Creativity through religious education
• 12 Creativity across the curriculum
• Appendix: Reviewing creativity
• Index