Week 3

What is the most creative experience you’ve had or encountered in your life? It could be a creative project that you yourself did, or seen others do. What is your take on what it means to be creative? How do you agree or disagree with the authors of the readings? Use at least one of the assigned readings to reflect on your perspective on creativity. Your writing does not need to be long, but it should be thoughtful

16 thoughts on “Week 3

  1. I’m not sure if there was a “most” creative part of my life. I feel, as Florida said, creativity is multi-faceted, it is multi-dimensional. In order for me to describe “what is the most creative encounter” that I’ve experienced, I would have to value a certain quality of creativity over another (ie. architecture, conversation, transportation, product design, etc). I’ve had feelings and memories about points in my life that are exciting because I unlocked something new with my creativity – but I don’t think it was necessarily as important as the last great feeling of discovery. My ideas/ creativity is built off of every encounter. It’s like what Duckworth was saying – we create more wonderful ideas off of other wonderful ideas. That is my view of creativity. I would disagree with Florida’s emphasis of capitalism fueling creativity and agree with his definition of creativity being a synthesis of ideas. It would seem that he correlates productivity with an increase in creativity. I think people have been creative all along in several respects (Florida says this himself). Productivity is a seemingly interesting notion of progress of creativity. However, productivity or the development and entrepreneurship of mass production of commodities is at the very least one facet of creativity. Who is to say that piece is any more valuable then other pieces in measuring creativity. One could argue that since the great innovation of the assembly line and other mass producing technologies – that we have lost creativity in other areas such as handcrafts, resourcefulness, writing letters, etc. Or who is to say that our creativity has gone up, because we now have technology and mass commodification at our service? Human creativity is. It isn’t biased towards one aspect or another.

  2. In Sawyer’s “Thinking Skills and Creativity”, he states “Creative performance genres such as music, theatre, and dance provide opportunities for students to work collectively to create a shared improvised creative product” (43). This article reminded me of one of my most creative experiences that I am still working on today. While copying arts and crafts that I see on Pinterest.com can express my creative side, I feel most creative when I am imagining, designing, and defining my own self-expression. Right now I am choreographing a modern Tahitian dance for a Christian Talent Show. Through this creative performance I have been able to imagine my own interpretation of dance rather than following a routine from a dance teacher. Using my previous dance experiences and inspiration from other dancers, I am collaborating with a friend to bounce ideas off of each other, and create new forms of Tahitian dance that have never been created. Using Resnick’s model of Kindergarten creativity, I imagine certain moves, practice and create them, share them with my friend, reflect on how to improve it, and continue to imagine in order to strengthen our performance. While I might come up with the first part of the dance, my friend will improve it and “add something to the frame” by adding another move (Sawyer 43). By working with my friend, we have been able to merge our experiences, knowledge, and ideas together to create a new and unique style of dance.

  3. Improv. The New Oxford American Dictionary states that it stands for ‘improvisation, especially as a theatrical technique.’ As a child, I grew up doing musical theater. I took many classes on how to become better at performing, and improv was one of those techniques. Growing up I always figured that it was just something you should do if someone forgot their lines in the middle of a play, and a way to hide those flaws. However, after reading Sawyers article, I have realized that there is a lot more to the silly activities then I thought. One activity that we would always do was a game called Questions. In the game, someone started by asking a question. You then went in a circle, and you had to follow a question with a question. If you couldn’t find a good question to ask that related to the previous question asked then you were eliminated. This game, as Sawyer suggests, required improvisational creativity, meaning that the members played off of each other, with each person’s contributions raising the bar to think of new ideas. Florida also validates this game by listing some of the dimensions of creativity. He states that creativity requires the ability to take risks, and that it is multidimensional and experimental. In these theater games I grew up playing, we had to take risks in what we were saying, and we had to sometimes get creative in our answers and responses. I feel that being creative means to think a little differently, and to take something that we know to be true (like a cardboard box is a square shape), and find think about ways that it could be changed (if we make it out of a different material would the shape change?) I also think that creativity requires a level of self-motivation. You could be the one that simply comes up with random ideas, but unless you act upon them no one would ever know the creative things that could happen. However, I partially disagree with Resnick’s article. I feel that he is attempting to tell us that there is pattern for being creative. I think that this process may work on some projects, and some experiments, but it really doesn’t develop the creative part in someones mind. Rather, it finds what that could possibly be and pushes it even further. It is one big loop. I think that creativity, for the most part, comes and goes at random, and is influenced by our surroundings (peers, places, etc).

  4. One of the implicit tensions I found in the readings for this week was between an idealized, childlike creativity and creativity as an economic activity. Florida’s chapters discuss creativity in the latter sense: widespread creativity is the foundation of a post-industrial economic model, one that comes equipped with its new modes of organizing labor and even with its own class–“the creative class” (30). The articles by Resnik and Sawyer, however, try to wed the economic with the pedagogical, and in doing so they try to link forms of childhood education to this new economic mode. Resnik valorizes the collaborative cycles of learning and critique that can happen in kindergarten, saying that they are good training for students poised to meet the “needs of the 21st century” (1) (i.e. to become members of Florida’s “creative class”). Sawyer is a bit more explicit: the sort of “disciplined improvisation” that has traditionally found a place in arts curricula for young learners (such as jazz and theater) is analogous to the creativity that occurs at successful new firms in this creativity economy, such is IDEO (42).

    My most creative experience–the collaborative creation of an online poetry journal–makes me agree with these authors’ assumptions, but with a couple of important caveats.

    My friend Adam and I wanted to make a venue for poetry online that would not just reproduce a print format in digital means, gathering a diverse batch of texts and simply arranging them into an issue. We wanted something that would take advantage of the affordances of online publication. Armed only with this vague idea, we recruited Adam’s brother Josh, a talented web developer. Resnik argues that creativity in kindergarten follows a cycle: imagine, create, play, share, reflect, imagine. I must add a couple steps to this cycle. One is dissonance, a type of reflection. Adam and I, the self-proclaimed creative types, would come up with some outlandish idea. Josh would say, “that is impossible” or “that would take me forever. No way.” (One of the rules of our “disciplined improvisation” was that production would have to be relatively quick and easy for all parties involved.) We had to compromise. Together we came up with an idea that was practical: we would solicit writers to write texts composed using just the 100 most common words in English hence the project’s title, just [which you can visit at http://www.justzine.com]). Josh came up with a way to produce a second, “ghost” text next to each poem, based on the use and frequency of the 100 words. It was a solution that emerged at the point between pipe dream and practicality, between the two discourses of poetic theory and technological practice.

    At other times, however, the dissonance between our respective discourses was helpful, even serendipitous. For instance, as we designed the second issue, I prepared (first on paper, then digitally) a word-cloud that would be our primary graphic. Josh suggested, however, that the page would load much more quickly if he just wrote a piece of code to randomly distribute a bank of words into a cloud each time a visitor accessed the page. I was intrigued—the page would be different every time? This was exactly the sort of odd, potentially “user-unfriendly” feature that Adam and I had hoped to create. This step might be called the synthesis of dissonant ideas or discourses.
    One final point about our collaboration: while I think the authors are right that activities like kindergarten play and jazz improvisation can be useful training for certain business endeavors, I think it is worth considering the various ways that creativity manifests itself. The way we designed just was in some sense determined by its status outside any “market.” We were free, for instance, to implement a design for the second issue that would intentionally and playfully frustrate the visitor’s desire for fluid, intuitive navigation. Such a design would likely be totally inappropriate for any “product,” and so it is important not to overgeneralize the concept of creativity. One has different degrees of freedom in different economic contexts. I think there is a danger in tying the value of childlike play or artistic production too closely to economic invention. It may lead to a sort of “economic determinism” according to which the only creative practices that are valued are those that can be said to create better workers.

  5. I don’t feel that it takes that much to be creative. I associate the term with experimentation, imagination and the desire to create something new. Whether or not the result of the creative process is acutally new or not is not relevant as long as the intention is to create an original object or a new perspective on an existing object or concept. For instance, buying a piece of Ikea furniture and assembling it isn’t neccessarily creative. Yet, if while building the piece you stray from the instructions and do something a different way than intended, that is creative. Again, it doesn’t matter if millions of people have also made the same hack as long as the individual believed themselves to have an original idea.

    I believe that my definiton aligns most closely with Resnik’s kindergarten approach to creativity where children take experiment with inputs and constraints and developing an output. I also agree that “learning and creating are fundamentally the same process,” which is argued by Piaget and reiterated by Sawyer. In Sawyer’s article, he argues that improvisational learning is neccessary to teach creative thinking & problem solving to students. While I agree that this style of teaching is constructive, I don’t think it, exclusively, is a way to teach creativity. I say this because creative problem solving and improvisational learning implies arriving at a correct answer where much creative output has no correct answer and is merely a perspective on an idea.

    My most creative experience is more closely alighned with Resnik’s definition. For the past few years, I had set up a “hand-made card booth” at community events. Each person who comes to the booth tells me who they want the card for and what might be important features of the card. Descriptions have ranged from “I want me and a guy hugging and the guy is playing a guitar with light sabers for strings” to “can you draw something for our nephew…he like fishing in rivers and speaks Chinese.” Some people are really specific, others aren’t, and some people even stand there and want you to draw them. In the process, you get to learn something about someone you never met before. Making the cards is a colaboration between myself and the requester and throughout the day, I collaborate on cards with about 20-30 people (it’s around this point that my hand is so sore that can no longer hold the pen). I get to meet someone and sythesize their ideas through my own lens. The best part is giving the person the result, there is something inherently fun about seeing how someone else invisioned your ideas. It is also nice to know that they, then, will give the card to someone else, a simple, nice sentiment that I believe is too often lost to email.

    An aspect that was not discussed in any of the readings was the internal motivations that make one desire to be creative in the first place. I don’t think it is enought to say that the “knowledge economy” makes people want to be creative, it just rewards creative thinking. I think gifting, sharing and self expression are all motivating factors that I would have like to see discussed in more detail.

  6. The notion of “the most creative experience” of my life seems a little intimidating and I’m not quite sure how to respond! Creative in my writing? Creative in sewing projects? Creative in problem solving? Creative in my personal life? However, after reading Resnick’s article “All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten” I kept thinking back on my time as a drama teacher and theatre director in a local middle school.

    Being creative, in my estimation, really requires work. Maybe for others, it comes easily, but the task of being creative always involves active participation on my part. It can be fun, but it isn’t easy. Resnick argues that we should hearken back to the creative process found in traditional kindergarten classes (compared with the current trend toward rote learning that is encroaching classes today). I focused largely on this notion of process – creativity does not arrive, fully formed, out of the head of its creator. Instead, it is steps, collaboration, experimentation, failure and contemplation. He outlines the unending relationship between imagining, creating, playing, sharing and reflecting as real steps in the creative process.

    In teaching a performing art, I found that the most difficult task I faced was the reality that i had to get creative myself in how I encouraged students to be creative in turn. This was not something I learned in my credential program. Instead, I had to retrace my own creative processes and try to find engaging ways to impart that on my students. One key factor I found that was important was the role of play – as long as I could engage students in playful games and activities, they began stretching themselves out of their comfort zones and into developing new ideas. Resnick talks about the importance of creative materials in the classroom and I certainly found that providing my students with props and costumes to simply play with provided them with a freedom to experiment and, most importantly, get comfortable playing in a classroom (a space not typically encouraging of rambunctious play).

    Resnick also discusses the importance of sharing in the creative process which I agree with. However, teaching students how to not only feel comfortable trying things out but to share these experiences with their peers was immensely challenging. It was particularly hard to find a way to make space for those students who were more shy or less visibly enthusiastic about the work. One thing that I thought the article may have missed is the importance of developing a culture of creativity in a classroom and as such, a culture of safety. Being creative and taking those risks can be a scary and intimidating endeavor and teachers/facilitators need to take time to foster and nurture that before real creativity can begin.

  7. Mitchel Resnick’s All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) really resonated with my most creative experiences and personal definition. After having the chance to visit China before the Yangtze flooded, I started to wonder how the sustainable material of Bamboo could be applied to architecture. Of course there are many architects and builders that have built for centuries with bamboo, but I had never seen it applied to Western architecture much or desert dwelling. The diagram and description from Resnick follows this process as he describes creativity as “…a spiraling process in which children imagine what they want to do, create a project based on their ideas, play with their creations, share their ideas and creations with others, reflect on their experiences – all of which leads them to imagine new ideas and new projects.” This spiraling idea mirrors my definition of creativity as a process.; where merely having experiences help to frame a landscape of possible questions. These questions will lead to more answers, hypothesis and sharing.

    An example of imagination,reflecting is when I started researching and documenting all the different ways people used and manipulated bamboo. During my first semester of my final bamboo project, I started drawing diagrams and collecting images and construction drawings of how people manipulated bamboo. They would split bamboo into pieces or use the whole bamboo with one, two, three poles and create various connections. I gathered an entire dictionary of the methodology and typology of bamboo constructions and material manipulations. It wasn’t until my spring break when I had the chance to meet up with a bamboo farmer and builder in Mexico, that I began to “play” with the bamboo that I could gain my own real-world understanding of the material. I am grateful he shared his knowledge with me, and in turn, my new questions and theories pushed his thinking about the material. I saw this type of exchange when I held a bamboo workshop to build my final capstone project. Middle school students came to volunteer who were the most innovative because they came up with new ways to fasten the bamboo quicker. Once learning how to bend bamboo and use zip ties to help weave a bamboo structure allowed our imaginations to start working.

    Now when I see other people’s bamboo works, I understand how it was made and the structures speak to me to share their methods of building. I agree with the readings that it is not “what” is learned in kindergarden, but “how” kindergarden methodology is framed around imagining, creating, playing, sharing and reflecting. It seems easy to ‘over intellectualize’ something, but if one actually builds something and tests out their own theories with their own hands and shares their findings with others, a kindergarten energy is created.

  8. I cannot think of a specific encounter that I perceive as being the most creative in my life. I think creativity is a process and a way of encountering and being immersed in your environment on a daily basis. Resnick in his article brings up one aspect of that process that I have been particularly interested in lately – reflection. I think one of the hardest kind of creative work I have had to do is to engage with my own formation as a researcher and designer, and to realize that the narratives that I tell about myself and my work are also creative and that those narratives have implications. I think it is important to explore why I ask the questions I ask, why they are formulated in the ways they are and what might that formulation give me freedom to dismiss as irrelevant, and what are the implications of that dismissal for any social cause I hope to contribute to? I resonated with the part on reflection in the creative process because helping children learn to reflect on their own creative process is also a way of potentially uncovering the values that are driving their creative process and potentially subverting the values that are dominant but not necessarily ones they wish to feed. In that sense, although I agree with Resnick that we need to foster creativity on a personal daily basis, I disagree with Resnick’s separation of the everyday kind of creativity or little “c” creativity in personal lives and the world changing/discipline shattering kind of big “C” creativity. I think this separation is artificial because of how all aspects of our lives are interconnected and how socially, geographically and temporally situated our ideas and creative processes are. I think it is also a problematic way to think about creativity as it makes it seem that great change cannot come out of an everyday kind of innovation in how we live, relate to each other and perceive the world. While reading “the rise of the creative class”, and listening to the author talk about techno-utopia and technological determinism, it left me wondering why there is such a strong tendency to look for something outside of ourselves to cause all sorts of good social outcomes such as equity, kinder human relationships, empowerment etc. I think this notion of big C creativity leads us to think that world changing creativity needs something more than we already have and that can be quite disempowering.

    I also agree with Kyle on his point that the risk of relating creativity to the economy is that we run the risk of feeding what the economy wants and maybe ignoring the alternative kinds of creativity that can challenge aspects of the economy that needs changing.

  9. The most creative experience I’ve had was in my own personal jazz band. In this jazz band, we would occasionally hold some practices for paid gigs, local performances along with other events. The jazz band was comprised of a saxophonist, a drummer, a bassist, a keyboardist, and myself on trumpet. Whenever one of us improvised, we would feed off of each other some of the same ideas. Say for a jazz ballad, such as “In a Sentimental Mood,” I was playing it as normal and then wanted to switch the style of the tune to something like an easy funk. As the other guys picked up on this, we all changed it up together and had a blast.

    As for my own take of creativity, I think it can be building/improving upon what has already been, which is more easily fostered in collaborative settings. As to this personal example that I gave, I felt this meshed well with the ‘improvisational teams’ as stated in the improvisational creativity section in the Sawyer article. But, also in relating to more academic and professional settings that I have experienced as a computer scientist, this is also the case that creativity seems to arise in teams that are making a collaborative effort to just try some things out.

  10. Having been fortunate enough to have spent the better part of my life in the company of theater (and theatre) troupes, painters, writers, filmmakers, reggae musicians and the occasional ukulele player, I cannot isolate the “most” creative experience. There are two that resonate with respect to this week’s readings – one involving multiple tubes of paint, the other, Bill Murray.

    It took a long time before they graduated our painting cohort from the weak, and often fiddly, watercolor paints to acrylics and oils. Having made it to the heavy stuff, I chose to tackle a fishbowl with a blue backdrop for my first still life. I spent weeks on this work – agonizing over every line, shadow, contour and color. When the time came to turn in our work, I was surprised that we would be presenting this by way of a group critique. I had no idea what this practice entailed, and was therefore horrified to learn that we had to present our work before our peers – allowing each to dissect each piece. As my work was splayed out before these comrades, I was shocked to see how original and un-lifelike many of my fellow student’s other pieces were. Most were abstract, some unrecognizable, all electrifying expressions of their own individual style. I shrank in my chair. Theirs showed real bravado, whereas I merely followed the rules. Indeed as the class moved onto evaluating my work, many commented on how beautifully I had captured the object, but that the piece lacked soul. Though I had followed all the “rules”, I wasn’t really tapping into the essence of painting.

    The second took place during my MA program. Whilst learning the theoretical and analytical techniques of script analysis by the academics at King’s College, we were sent to script boot-camp at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. It was there that we learned how these literary artifacts sprung to life. For our final project, we were given a series of books by the writer Radclyffe Hall, assigned into groups and told to create any theatrical response to the work. Our group chose to do depict a Coward-esque tableau of Hall’s life and work, each person taking turns to write, direct and perform a scene.

    Whilst rehearsing the night before our performance, our instructor wandered in with a tall man wearing a purple and orange checked suit with a straw hat. It took us a few moments before it dawned on us that Bill Murray was standing before us. Graciously, he and our instructor stood in the background and watched us perform. At the end, he asked Bill whether he had any feedback for us. Murray breathed a deep sigh, looked at us and said, “You guys really need to relax. Not every lesbian stuck stones in her pockets. Have a drink. Lighten up. Try improving some scenes.” He was absolutely right. The next night, we all toasted with a shot of whisky (Hall’s favorite drink) before we went on stage and let loose.

    I have long since been a believer what Sawyer calls, “improvisational creativity”. Whilst participating in these various artforms, I soon realized that both group and individual creation entails bringing together of multiple voices and differing points of view – all of which help inform the process. Sawyer’s advocacy to bring the long-heralded techniques employed by artists to the domain of our classrooms is engendered by what he sees as the moving away from an “informational” to a “knowledge” economy, or what Florida coined, “the creative class.” According to both, because our economy has moved from the industrial (where value was placed in the ordering and systematization of skill) to the informational (where value is placed on people and groups that see the interconnectedness within fields), we must equip our children with the tools to be productive (read: prosperous) when they leave a school. Thus the skills fostered by the arts are so integral, in that they allow students to “create a shared, improvised creative product”(p. 43).

    In addition to supporting the creative classroom, Fischer’s piece reminds us that we must also realize the value in supporting critique and destruction within the creative process. We must learn to embrace the group critique even if it means throwing out a scene or a painting, as most likely, they needed improvement. As Fisher reminds us “breakdowns – although at times costly and painful – offer unique opportunities for reflection and learning” (p. 1). Whilst we support and scaffold our community of creative learners, we must also recognize that the heterogeneousness within a community of learners affords the opportunity for multiply perspectives, and thus multiple ways to solve a problem. Concurrently, when working with a group of like-minded individuals or peers, it is important to mediate the process with experienced mediators, or “experts” – whether they are teacher or Bill Murray. When Florida reminds us that “there is an ongoing tension between creativity and organization”, he, like my painting peers, reminded us that in order to support the creative classroom, we must strike a balance between instantiating some foundational rules and allowing those rules to be thrown out the window – if that’s what’s needed to support the process.

    In other words, sometimes we need to down a little whisky and waste a little paint.

  11. As most people have mentioned, I do not think I have a “most” creative experience. However, last semester I took a course that has become the most process-conscious creative experience I have had so far. It was called “New product development”, and the goal of the course was for us to form multidisciplinary teams and come up with a new product or service to satisfy a certain need. The “how” was also given, we had to go through the design thinking process (http://brynnevans.com/blog/2010/01/31/putting-the-craft-in-design-thinking/) at least twice before we reached a solution.
    I was part of a team that was trying to come up with a solution for couples to manage their household in a fun and effective way. But beyond the need space we were working with and the different backgrounds that we were bringing to the table, our decision to focus on the process rather than the end product was what made the experience so memorable. In each step, whether we were diverging or converging, we went through most of the steps Resnick’s spiraling imagine, create, play, share, and reflect process, thus going through the whole cycle a few times. Yes, “iterate, iterate, and iterate again” (Resnick, M). Every time we ran the cycle the ideation process was richer the reflection process was more insightful and the outcomes were much better. I was surprised to see how we went from a “interesting but not there yet” concept generation point to a “wow that is IT” concept selection/conceptualization point after going through the kindergarten process a few times. Needless to say, as Resnick mentioned, without the iterative aspect we would have lost most of the creative process.
    Moreover, after reading Sawyer’s Educating for Innovation paper, I understood why our diverging sessions were so rich. Without knowing it, we generated a structured improvisational collaboration. One of the team members took the lead in each session, and we started the session by going through the ideas we had generated individually. Naturally, we started to build new concepts over the individual ideas. We did drawings, generated storyboards, connected other ideas to the one we were engaged in, and ultimately improvised, in collaboration, until we had something we all felt was much more than the sum of the parts.
    The caveat: time. Resnick also mentions it. It seems hard to estimate (if not impossible) how much classroom time would students take to get there.

  12. As I read Florida’s definition of the “Creative Class,” I found myself actually wondering if education would be included (it was, thank goodness!). Though educators absolutely should be free to engage in “combinatory play” and synthesis in order to produce new, effective classroom solutions, too often they are stymied by the strong organizational forces Florida mentions. Instead of thriving in an environment that values individual contributions to group solutions, these teachers are bonded to mandated curriculum and strict district policy. Of course, many teachers will still find ways to be creative in such an unfriendly milieu through sheer force of will and desire to help their students, but such choked creativity is bound to contribute to high teacher attrition and low overall job satisfaction.

    Ironically, as Sawyer mentions, the most at-risk school systems are also the most likely to have such “teacher-proofed” scripted curricula. Read – the schools that face the most economic and social challenges are also the schools that are driving away the creative individuals that may be able to enact significant change. And to what end? I agree with Sawyer, of course, that these scripted curricula cannot and will not prepare our students for the “knowledge economy” to which society has shifted. Teacher preparation to foster student creativity is key, I agree, but as important is that teachers are given the same opportunity for creative freedom in their professions.

    My creative experience? Like Tracie, I was initially intimidated by this question – I’ve never considered myself a “creative” individual. But after reading, I decided the skill I always thought of as “problem-solving” is actually my own individual form of creativity. Thus, my most creative work to date (and this can’t be surprising, given the rest of my post) is my….curriculum! My charter school was extremely supportive of teacher freedom, maybe even too extreme-ly. For my 6th grade English course, I was actually given no guidelines except for the state standards, and no textbook. At the time, I felt completely overwhelmed, but after a year of finding my footing, I found the process (as mentioned in Resnick) of Imagine-Create-Play-Share-Reflect-Imagine really fulfilling. I’d consider the constraints I had and my goals, then envision crazy ways to teach things (my personal favorite – a frenetic dance to show environment, time, and place in setting), plan it out, tinker with it as I taught, share it with other teachers and get feedback, reflect, and constantly re-imagine as time passed. This creative process of planning curriculum served two purposes. First of all, I felt highly satisfied in that aspect of my job, and took pride in my work. Secondly, I was able to adjust my teaching to fit the needs of my students. They became part of the social aspect of creativity for me – their input, needs, and wishes became an important part of the classroom.

    This is a bit of a side note – but I want to make a connection to Kyle and Meena’s comments about creativity and economic determinism. I feel like this is an important issue to keep in mind for teacher education as well, because large organizations (such as credentialing institutions) tend to distill current theories on what’s best for kids into “best practices” that may miss the original spirit of the idea. I feel like we should be careful about how we approach teacher preparation in fostering students’ creativity. I worry that someone out there is going to make a scripted “creativity curriculum!” which will be followed up by training on specific modules of fostering “open” class discussion, etc. Then, we’d really be training kids on the type of creativity mandated by whoever mandates those types of things, whereas other types of creativity (like the improvisational kind Jen mentions) go unappreciated.

  13. To be creative means to be able to have a vision of something new that has value. One creative experience that I have had was when I had a group project for my project management class. The guidelines for the team project were to think of a fresh idea for a project that we would like to manage throughout the semester and to create a detailed project plan for it. This project was a creative experience for my group members and I because our professor designed the assignment based on the kindergarten metaphor of education described in Mitch Resnick’s paper “All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten”. Resnick’s paper argues that “the ‘kindergarten approach to learning’ – characterized by a spiraling cycle of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine – is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century, helping learners develop the creative-thinking skills that are critical to success and satisfaction in today’s society.” For this project, my teammates and I were able to develop creative thinking skills through the cycle of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine, that ultimately contributed to the success of managing our project.

    To start off our project, my group met up for our first team meeting and imagined what we wanted to do for our project. Based on everyone’s ideas, we came to a conclusion which idea to use for our project. Our idea was to develop a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) for non-experts using the publicly available data on http://www.data.gov. The plan was to design a system, which we called Time Mapse, that would process multiple forms of information allowing users to visualize time-dependent relationships between the data through heat maps overlaid on a U.S. map.

    The Create part of the project was when we actually tried to figure out what was needed to produce a successful GIS system based on our ideas. We considered all the steps necessary, such as importing the data sets from data.gov, building a framework for the imports, generating a map visualizer prototype, and writing functions for mixing and manipulating multiple data sets. We also considered other technical aspects for the creation of the system, such as technical limits to the system or possible risks that may come up during the development of the system.

    The Play part was when our professor gave us assignments to help us manage our project. She had us turn in weekly assignments, which included drafting an executive summary, a project plan, a project schedule, a work breakdown structure, and a risk management plan. Drafting all of these plans as a team involved a lot of creative thinking skills because the project really had no limits. We could experiment, explore, and test the boundaries of our GIS project however we wanted to. Through this opportunity to “play” with project Time Mapse, we were able to get a taste of what it is like to be a project manager.

    Next came the sharing process. After turning in our project plans, our professor would give us feedback. When we received the feedback, we met as a team to share our thoughts and suggestions on how we could revise our project plans to make them better. Through this process of sharing ideas and collaborating, my group members and I were able to have a creative experience in the construction process of project Time Mapse that we would not be able to experience working individually.

    Then we went through the Reflect phase. We did this when our project came to an end and we reflected on our experience. We thought about the team’s best practices and also what was good and what could have been done better. This process of reflecting was helpful because it allowed us to really reflect on our design process and thinking process as a team.

    Finally, we were brought back to a new cycle when we reached the Imagine phase again. This occurred at the end of the cycle when our idea inspired us to think about new ideas. We started thinking about how we could adjust, modify, and revise our project to make it better. This began a new opportunity to iterate what we learned and to continue to think creatively.

    All in all, I agree with Resnick that the “kindergarten learning approach” is something that we need today to help us develop creative thinking skills. Having experienced the cycle of Imagine, Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and Imagine, I feel that this process really does help us to sharpen our abilities to think creatively. The process gives us the opportunity to “develop our own ideas, try them out, test the boundaries, experiment with alternatives, get input from others – and, perhaps most significantly, generate new ideas based on [our] experiences.” I think that collaborating with others is a key component of developing creativity skills because everyone has their own unique ideas, so working together can help us to learn from one another and perhaps spark new ideas.

  14. I took a painting class my senior winter of college. Our assignments were to complete several paintings a week, ranging from still lifes to copies of famous works. Towards the end of the class, we were assigned to paint self portraits. By then, we were familiar enough with the medium to capture a vision – it was less about learning how to mix colors or how to apply the paint than it was about the creation itself. We progressed from copying something had a fixed form (an existing painting, still lifes) to choosing our source material (arranging our own still lifes) – an example of the scaffolding mentioned in Sawyer’s “Educating for Innovation” article. In painting, creativity lies in the choice of what to depict and how to depict it. The portraits were an expression of what should be the most familiar – the self. They conveyed subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) a sense of identity – one guy painted himself making a series of silly faces, one girl was really into comics, and her paintings had a cartoony feel.

    Throughout this process, we went through a lot of what Mitchel Resnick mentioned in his article about kindergarten. From critiques to experimentation and “iteration”, the structure of the class seemed to model that prescription for creative work. I know, what a great argument for arts in higher education – “It’s like kindergarten.” Creativity can be useful in a work context, though, and several of this week’s articles make that point. It goes beyond that, too. There’s something inherently human about it, and I think I caught a glimpse of that in the painting studio. I liked what one of the articles said about creativity not being a genius, but something that people can cultivate within themselves.

  15. Before I read the Sawyer article I had already been thinking about improv comedy as a great example of an intensely creative/innovative environment — so I was really excited that he and I were apparently on the same wavelength. A couple of years ago I took about 16 weeks of improv classes on a lark at the UCB theater in New York. As Sawyer’s article hints, the environment of improv is unique in that it is focused almost exclusively on creativity — creativity is the goal, or very near to the goal, of the whole enterprise, as opposed to being some kind of byproduct or smaller component in a larger goal. Improv also turned out to be incredibly difficult. At first one would assume that the most important aspect in being good at improv is simply being funny and having a good sense of humor and comic timing, and those traits are indeed important, but it turned out that they almost become incidental compared to your main focus of learning to work with others on a shared project. Because you are not planning what to do beforehand, it is necessary to pay incredibly close attention to other performers and to almost try and read their minds by listening to the intonation of their voice and their body language. As Sawyer details somewhat, this leads to a strange mindmeld state where performers private intentions feed into one another and create a shared project that no single one of them could have created on their own.

    It turns out that shutting off one’s semi-selfish desire to micromanage and control the direction of the project is incredibly difficult. In traditional “creative” environments such as visual arts or writing one is allowed or in fact expected to completely manage the direction of one’s own work. Usually this is part and parcel with the idea of creating a “personal voice.” It also seems like this solitary emphasis is encouraged in traditional schoolwork, where the majority of assignments are completed by individual students. Improv, then, does indeed seem like an instructive example of the benefits of a form of collaboration that is intensely non-individual and creative in the most literal sense: something is created between the performers that never would have existed on its own or in a different contingent time and space. Our class of course was full of beginners. Watching professionals, it was interesting to see that although their skill level was much much highers, they were still emphasizing a sort of democratic teamwork and openness to ideas above all else.

  16. Thinking about the most creative experience I have had, my first thought was a play I worked on and acted in a few years ago. I saw that some of the posts were similarly about artistic collaborative projects, and in those circumstances, I definitely agree with our readings (specifically Resnick and Sawyer) on the process of teaching and fostering creativity. In traditionally ‘creative’ pursuits – art, dance, music, etc. – an iterative, collaborative, and (restrained) improvisational approach probably leads to the most ‘creative’ output. In thinking more broadly about education and how to improve it, I wanted to think about a work experience that required a lot of creativity, although not necessarily in the artistic sense, because I think that collaboration and creative problem solving should be a direct goal of education.

    Prior to school, I worked for a non-profit that provided a project-based entrepreneurship curriculum in low-income high schools. With the goal of getting more of our students excited about creating business ideas that used technology, we wanted to host a mobile app design hackathon, which would be open to all Bay Area high school students. We had access to the students and teachers, but we didn’t have space, money, visibility, technical expertise, or technology, so we took on several partnerships – with large and small companies and with other organizations – to pull it together. We ended up with a lot of moving parts and diverse stakeholders, all of whom had slightly different interests and who offered the event different contributions. To make sure the event met our goals, we worked collaboratively as a team but also individually on specific aspects of the event, and we were forced to adapt, compromise, and strategize several times along the way.

    It is my experience that projects in the professional space are often like that, and I agree with Resnick’s and Sawyer’s recommended approaches to education to the extent that they could make students more prepared for them. However, coming from working in education and now studying education policy, I couldn’t imagine how Sawyer’s philosophy could be implemented and scaled broadly. His article does not pay much attention to that reality, nodding vaguely at ‘urban school districts’ in the last sentence. It is conceivable that creating space for improvisational creativity in US public schools would require an investment in teacher professional development and class-size that would double the cost of K12 education.

Leave a Reply