Creativity - Initial Thoughts

I have started my Masters Degree in Education. The focus of the degree is to study critical, creative, and collaborative thinking as it relates to inquiry. The journey has been stretching, and immensely practical as I work to integrate strategies for encouraging my students to be better critical thinkers, more creative, and more collaborative.

One of the areas that really struck me is the topic of creativity. I realized we have so many misconceptions about what creativity is, and how to foster it. Some think it is an unknowable sources of inspiration that comes out of no where, and others think it a deep structured process that leads to new things.

At its core, I have realized that creativity is about creating something new, a product if you will. This product need not be physical. It could be a concept, an idea and more. But beyond just any product, for something to be creative, it must at the most basic level be novel to the creator, and it must be a useful product. Sawyer wrote a seminal work on creativity, trying to combine all the existing research in the western world on the subject. He wrote in his book these things.

"Creativity is a new mental combination that is expressed in the world." (2012, Sawyer, 7)

This speaks more of creativity on the societal or global level. He also writes this:

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." (2012, Saywer, 8)

This is a great definition, because it nicely constrains creativity, yet doesn't limit the value of creativity on the individual level. Students don't often create something new on the societal level, but they do often make breakthroughs, or create something novel and useful for themselves and potentially the class environment.

This has really allowed my idea of creativity and how to value even the small instances of creativity in my classroom.

References:

Sawyer, R. Keith. Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.