Creative Development

Robert Kelly

• Publisher: Brush Education
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781550596717
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Spark continual creative growth for both learners and educators.

Topics include:

• How to create an educational culture conducive to creative development.
• Effective instructional design and assessment as creativity.
• Bridging the gap between design thinking and design doing.
• Teacher education and training for creative classrooms.
• Key vocabulary and theory in the field of creativity.

Creativity is a key ingredient for success in the knowledge economy of the 21st century, where skills such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking are central. Most educators agree that encouraging creativity must become a central goal in the classroom, but they face an ongoing struggle to build and maintain an environment that promotes their students' creative development.

In Creative Development: Transforming Education through Design Thinking, Innovation, and Invention, Robert Kelly equips educators with the theory, strategies, and tactics that allow creativity to flourish. Creative Development features voices from the field to showcase practical, real-life examples of successfully fostering creative development in education.

1 Understanding Creativity, Creative Capacity, and Creative Development

ROBERT KELLY

The Core Concepts of Creativity, Creative Capacity, and Creative Development

To begin to develop an understanding of the concept of creative development we must first examine the nature and meaning of the core concept of creativity. Creativity can mean so many different things to so many different people in so many different contexts. This poses a problem when building educational practice around the concept of creativity, as the set of assumptions that we make about this concept will inform how it manifests itself in application to teaching practice. Diverse interpretations of the concept of creativity can have profound implications for the nature and extent of enabled potentials. It is important to arrive at an operating definition of the concept of creativity that lends itself to the growth and development of engagement in creative practice over time.

Defining creativity

Piirto (2004) describes the word creativity as having its roots in Latin and meaning “to make or produce” or “to grow.” She goes on to describe the concept of creativity or the practice of being creative as being originative. She describes the word originative as implying the making of something new; therefore, to be creative is to make something new or novel. The concepts of originality and creativity are inextricably linked in this description of creativity.

Sawyer (2012) describes two definitions of creativity rooted in an individualist approach and a sociocultural approach. He describes the individualist definition as “Creativity is a new mental combination that is expressed in the world” (p. 7). He further elaborates that, in this context, creative combinations of thought and production may not be new to the world, but as long as they are new to the person’s mind they would fit into an individualist definition. He likens this to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) little-c creativity, which encompasses creative acts carried out on an everyday basis. Improvising while cooking or thinking of ways to prevent the family dog from escaping out of the backyard are examples of this everyday creativity. Sawyer (2012) describes the sociocultural definition as “Creativity is the generation of a product that is judged to be novel, and also to be appropriate, useful, or valuable by a suitably knowledgeable social group.” This is likened to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) Big-C creativity, where creative production is recognized as novel and important in a field or domain.

These two definitional strands are complementary and are very useful when applied to the concept of creative development in an educational setting. They potentially represent a developmental continuum—the level of sophistication of engagement in creative practice by a learner evolves from being novel, relative to their own developmental history, to having significance within a broader social group in a domain or field.

Perhaps one of the most educationally useful definitions of creativity that can be applied to both contexts is Lubart’s (2000) “a sequence of thoughts and actions that leads to novel, adaptive production.” Creativity ultimately involves bringing ideas or thoughts into some kind of form that can be shared in a currency or medium of the field where it occurs. The level of complexity or sophistication at which an individual engages in creative practice at a point in time is referred to as creative capacity. The growth in creative capacity over time is referred to as creative development. This developmental evolution begins with an understanding that human beings, by nature, are an adaptive species. Human beings from their earliest days to their senior years engage in Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) small-c creativity in everyday living that shares an affinity with Sawyer’s (2012) individualistic creativity. This intuitive/adaptive creativity is part of the innate human disposition. The educational imperative is to enable the longitudinal growth and development of a learner’s creative capacity to grow from innate intuitive/adaptive creativity to the ability to engage in sustained creative practice through original research and production that takes on increasing levels of sociocultural importance.

Understanding originality

Being creative implies being originative (Piirto, 2004). The concept of original work as a result of creative production has to be taken into consideration here as well. If the desired outcome of a collaborative educational culture of creativity is to enable learners to ultimately engage in original research and production, then the context of the application of the word original must be carefully examined. Guilford (1962) described the concept of originality as a response that is unusual, farfetched, or remote representing something that is statistically infrequent among a common group. When interpreting the degree of originality of a given response, it is important to use a dual-tracked definition in educational application. It is educationally inappropriate and unrealistic to compare a young learner to creative practitioners at the top of their respective fields to assess whether the learner’s response is original or not (Kelly, 2012). When facilitating creative development, it is more useful and productive to assess a learner’s response for its degree of originality relative to the past creative production outcomes of the learner (Starko, 2010). This creates developmental space for reachable, realistic goals for creative development over time without the onerous constant comparisons to mature, creative producers who have developed work through intense research and experimentation over considerable periods or even lifetimes.

In an educational context, it is important to apply a sliding or evolving definition to the concepts of creativity and originality to enable the operationalization of systematic and continuous creative development over a learner’s educational and life journey. This respects the diverse developmental paces in creative growth of individual learners by assessing creative development relative to the individual’s previous creative production. The ultimate educational goal is to have each learner engage over time in increasingly more complex creative practice that has increasing sociocultural value.

The vocabulary of creative processes

The concepts of creativity, creative capacity, and creative development have many associated terms and vocabulary that need to be clarified to enable greater precision in the application of tactics and strategies for the creative development of learners in educational practice. A definition of terms also advances the understanding of creative processes. Terms such as imagination, innovation, and invention are often used interchangeably with the concept of creativity and require closer examination for more precise application. Terms such as divergent thinking, flexible thinking, elaborative thinking, and ideational fluency need to be understood in relation to creative development or they can be easily be taken out of context in educational practice and be perceived as teaching creativity without any sense of their relation to comprehensive creative development. How do the terms entrepreneurship, enterprise, and design thinking relate to the concepts of creativity and creative development? A clear understanding of these interrelated and often overlapping concepts will enhance their application to teaching and learning.

Wallas (1926) described a stage theory of creative process that informed many variations of descriptions of creative processes that followed. He broke the creative process down into four discernable stages (shown in Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Wallas’s Stages of the Creative Process

Stage 1	Preparation refers to setting the problem to start the process in motion.
Stage 2	Incubation refers to the active subconscious stage where ideas are elaborated upon and redefined.
Stage 3	Illumination is the idea that emerges as a potential solution to the original problem.
Stage 4	Verification points to testing out the idea in the currency of the discipline or field where the problem is located to see if it is a viable solution.

Over time, many variations of the stage theory of creative process emerged. As these variations unfolded, a shift occurred from a belief that the creative process was largely a su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction—The Concept of Creative Development
• Chapter 1 Understanding Creativity, Creative Capacity, and Creative Development
• Creating Development 1—A Journey into Connectivity, Creativity, Imagination, and Perception: A Conversation with John J. Cimino Jr.
• Chapter 2 The Educational Culture of Collaborative Creativity
• Part 2—Creating Conditions for a Culture of Collaborative Creativity
• Creating Development 2—Building Trust and Accepting Ideas
• Chapter 3 Engaging in Creative Practice: From Design Thinking to Design Doing
• Creating Development 3—Introducing Design Practice: The Idea Exchange, Mousetraps, and Elephants in the Room
• Creating Development 4—Design Thinking for Change
• Creating Development 5—Designing Educational Space for Creativity
• Chapter 4 Learning Experience Design for Creative Development
• Creating Development 6—Learning to Let Go: Transferring Creative Ownership to Students
• Creating Development 7—Lingering with Words: Developing Creative Writing and Living Creatively
• Creating Development 8—Creative Development in Mathematics Education: A Conversation with Conrad Wolfram
• Chapter 5 Assessment as Creative Development
• Chapter 6 Creative Development in Teacher Education, in the Field, and Beyond
• Part 2—Creating Change in the Field
• Creating Development 9—Transforming My Elementary School Culture: A Principal’s Story
• Creating Development 10—Challenge Convention
• Creating Development 11—Scaling Creative Development from District to Nation
• Creating Development 12—Inventing and Creating a New School: A Conversation with Andy Smallman
• Epilogue: The Way Forward: Implications for Global Education and Its Transformation
• Afterword: Flying into the Unknown
• Glossary
• About the Author