Creativity Scholarship Comes of Age
The search for understanding creativity and its expressions and processes is not new, not even in education. Since before John Dewey, but probably not as well as he did, educators have been trying to find better ways of bringing not only creative doing but creative thinking into the work of education. Its mercurial nature and cyclical appearance/disappearance have come to a crisis point in the last few years with creative industries redefining creativity in education and the workplace, and our need for it. In an ever-accelerating capitalism that demands innovation, adaptation, and flexibility, in our global economic shift from production industries to knowledge circulation and curation, creativity was bound to shift from being a pursuit to a way of thinking.
Writing 30 years ago in 1985, Michael Mitias notes that,
any human quest or endeavourâwhether it is in art, religion, business, politics, science, philosophy, social interaction, or personal satisfactionâis creative activity; that is, any meaningful achievement in any of these domains requires a creative effort, i.e., (1) an original idea, design, rational intuition, or a vision as a plan of action, (2) a will to actualize this plan, and (3) a skill, or artistic ability, to implement this planâŠ.The essence of this potentialityâŠand the actualization of this content as a form, or pattern, that can guide a possible experience and produce what we call human satisfaction, hence meaning. (1985, p 1)
Mitias is linking creativity and spirituality here, but his words have use for linking creativity and education too. While it is impossible to standardise creativity, inside or outside of the education system, we still needâindeed, craveâa form, pattern, or plan of action in order to instrumentalise the enhancement of creativity in our approach to education.
Certainly the sociocultural role of creativity has changed in recent times, due to marketplace concerns and the effects of an increasingly precarious global workforce. Until recently, those from the professional arts professions, arts education, and creativity scholars have defined and conceptualised creativity in significantly different ways. Today when students and scholars say they are using âcreativity theoryâ I always push them further to identify what kind of creativity theoretics they are in conversation with. Just as ethnography, sociology, and other disciplines before, creativity scholarship is now reaching an evolutionary stage where it is branching into different lineages with different bodies of literature and different approaches to âdoing creativityâ.
Creativity is certainly impacting contemporary work practices in both formal and informal economies and contexts, yet until recently it had made little progress into compulsory education. While the creative industries sector continues to act as a strong driver for introducing creativity as a key skill and capacity into twenty-first-century common parlance (and educational aspirations), it has clear marketplace overtonesâwhich is not the same as claiming that creativity is being viewed as a static commodity (which some have misunderstood me to be arguing). The fact is that creativity has taken on an increasingly commodified and marketplace value in contemporary economics (and education) discourses. This is not all bad, and itâs not completely severed from more traditional âartisticâ notions of creativity. It does signal a complex and important shift, though, in how creativity is viewed as âhaving valueâ in popular culture. While some are encouraged by new national curricula that use the (albeit genericised) language of creativity in which creativity, critical thinking, and innovation are conflated, others see it as dangerous sloganeering that leads to a dilution of the master skills of teaching. The Australian Curriculum now highlights creativity as a core capability and skill of twenty-first-century learners, yet the USâ new Common Core does not mention it explicitly at all. Yet most countries that are pursuing standardised curricula of any kind are aligning with the kind of creative economic drivers that Richard Florida proposed in The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002, and which was roundly criticised.
In the USA, following a series of relative failures at standardising approaches to raising student achievementâthe 2001 No Child Left Behind policy, the 2009 Race to the Top which led more rapidly to standardised testing and teacher evaluation, followed in 2013 by Common Coreânot much has changed except teacher satisfaction. The outcome, some education commentators claim, is that âacademic creativity has been drained from degraded and overworked experienced teachers. Uniformity has sucked the life out of teaching and learningâŠthe average teaching tenure has dropped from approximately 15 years of service in 1990 to less than five in 2013â (Greene 2014, para 15). Proponents of both the Common Core and Australian Curriculum claim that despite a lack of explicit attention to creativity in their approaches (although the Australian Curriculum fares better here), these national frameworks provide plenty of opportunity within the standards to allow students to be creativeâthat is, they donât explicitly prohibit the enhancement of creativity, beyond the fact that time has become so short in classrooms that there is little time to complete the set curriculum, much less the core components of creativity (explored in detail in Chapter 3).
While the Australian Curriculum does advocate for the importance of fostering creative and critical thinking for innovation skills and capacities, it remains focused strongly on digital technology as does the creative industries literature it draws from. Justin OâConnor has warned against such emaciation of creative industries scholarship and investment, and suggests instead the need for a return to a reintegrated creative and cultural industries model, one which is more sustainable educationally, culturally, and economically. Expanding the overfocus on digital technologies is a crucial part of seeking more consistent ways of understanding the sociocultural role of creativity and how to nurture it. Lev Manovich (2001), like OâConnor, cautions that standardisation may be the ultimate side effect of digital technology and its role in the evolution of meaning-making:
What to make of this modern desire to externalize the mind? It can be related to the demand of modern mass society for standardization. The subjects have to be standardized, and the means by which they are standardized need to be standardized as well. Hence the objectification of internal, private mental processes, and their equation with external visual forms that can easily be manipulated, mass produced, and standardized on their own. The private and individual are translated into the public and become regulated. (2001, p 60)
There is a growing body of scholarly work which explores how creativity is situated amidst education, the economy, everyday practices, and environmental issues. Not only do these suggest lineages within creativity studies that are growing and differentiating, but they can also assist educators wishing to consider ways into creativity in different curricular areas. For example, an area of exploration which investigates the interrelationship between creativity, education, and the economy (e.g. Peters and Besley 2013; Peters et al. 2009) provides strong accounts of the role of creativity, institutions, and knowledge in contemporary advanced economies, but stops short of linking economic perspectives with cultural ones. Similarly, some scholars are introducing us to new ways of thinking about creativity through exploring making cultures, multi-sited creativity, and everyday practices (e.g. Gibson 2012; Gauntlett 2011; Harris 2014). These authors examine the diverse locations and practices of creativity, how it can occur in unexpected or informal places, the role of Web 2.0 and social relationships, plus its changing contexts and meaning, an area with rich untapped potential for compulsory schooling and education policy. Others are moving toward an ethics of creative education that takes into account the need for better connections to place, and better continuity throughout the educational and working lifespan. Such scholarship has identified the interrelationship between creativity, education, and ecological awareness (e.g. Barnett 2013; Craft et al. 2008). These books effectively examine knowledge creation and how it impacts on the environment and public good, but insufficiently consider the role of technology in how we can shape social-ecological change. While these authors explore emergent aspects of creativity in compelling ways, none brings these understandings into compulsory years of education in a way that offers real-world ways forward for changing formulaic schooling and testing to better host and germinate creative thinkers and critical citizens.
Yet synthesis and digital cultures remain at the centre of creativity in education. To understand how creative minds would need to cope with the data overloads of an ever-expanding internet, Howard Gardner (2006) asserted that a core characteristic of such a mind is a synthesising ability. In Chapter 5, I compare three main approaches to enhancing creativity in secondary schools that hold sway todayâone is the Design Thinking Model (from Stanford University) which I foreground as my preferred model in Chapter 3; one is the Five Minds of Gardner as above; the last is the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) approach that has motivated school leaders and teachers around the world in the last year or so. They all offer aspects that are useful for going forward, depending on your own school culture and context. Yet they also represent in part the obsessive desire right now within education to find a âsilver bulletâ for solving the âcreativity problemâ which we hope will take us into a prosperous new era. The benefits of this fear-driven push are that those of us who are passionate about creativity see others in diverse fields taking note, and that policy toward institutional patterns of standardisation might change. Yet in our zeal for expert guidance, we must be cautious about not standardising our investigation and conceptualisation of creativity itself.
Creativity as an area of study is as diverse as neuroscience. A neuroscientific (including neuropsychology) approach to creativity studies is only one way of approaching the topic, and indeed it is unsurprising that a scientific, largely positivist field would gain more attention for its creativity research than the arts-based scholarship, or the arts education scholarship into creativity which preceded it. A significant challenge for education is the synthetic or interwoven approaches and sites by and in which creativity thrives. Secondary schools increasingly have the resources and permeable boundaries with outside providers and knowledge creators that water the seeds of creativity, but the rigid structures of schoolsâintensified in Years 11 and 12 by the lead-up to high productivity and university-entrance examsâcounteract these fertile conditions. Schools are already sites in which digital technology, collaboration, and participatory/DIY cultures thrive, but they donât impact significantly on these later years of testing. Young people are increasingly impatient as their teachers become increasingly overworked trying to remain at the centre of secondary learning practices. Digital technology and changes in thinking within global cultures and online/offline lifeworlds suggest that teacher-driven and standards-driven education is a thing of the past. The final chapter of this book looks more closely at networked cultures and how creativity is spontaneously present in such communities of practice, suggesting that a straining education system will benefit from participating in these networks rather than remaining aloof from them. Curatorial practices and creative thinking are already becoming core skills of the new workforce, and yet seem still far removed from compulsory schooling in the secondary years. How then will our students and creative citizens make up for these educational omissions when they ent...