Creativity and Its Nature

Synonyms

Ingenuity; Innovation; Inspiration; Inventiveness; Originality

Definition

Creativity has traditionally been seen as an ability to respond adaptively to the needs for new approaches and new products. It is often defined as the ability to bring something new into existence purposefully. The concept of creativity has expanded and changed in the last decade. In the sciences, creativity is increasingly being viewed as intrinsic to the very nature of the Universe. A new emphasis on “everyday” and “social” creativity is shifting the focus from individual genius in rarified fields (fine arts, advanced science) to collaborative creativity in everyday life, with implications for learning and education that are only beginning to be explored.

Theoretical Background

Historically, creativity has not been fostered in educational contexts (Plucker et al. 2004; Robinson 2001). Until the twenty-first century, this was largely because creativity itself was poorly understood, and because creativity is generally associated with disruptions and challenges to the existing order. Creativity was not considered a phenomenon that could be scientifically explained or fostered, and there was also no sense that creativity was an essential capacity and competence for human beings. The importance of creativity has become prominent for a number of reasons, including its adaptive nature for individuals and societies in a rapidly changing world. Driven by a combination of post-materialist conditions in many technologically advanced countries and the explosion of the discourse of self-help and personal growth, there is also an increasing desire for self-expression and self-creation as individuals break out of traditionally established careers and life-paths. It is also often the case that with rapid technological and economic change, many new professions are emerging as old ones become obsolete and fall by the wayside. Individuals and communities therefore have to reinvent themselves. Self-creation has become a major societal process where creativity takes center stage (Bauman 2008).

The concept of creativity emerged in the West in the Renaissance, along with individualism, and blossomed with the Genius myth of Romanticism. Until the 1980s, research on creativity in the West focused primarily on the three Ps: Person, Process, and Product (Runco 2007). In the romantic mythology underlying this atomistic view, the creative person was mostly a lone, eccentric genius. The “Who” of creativity could therefore only be an individual person. Groups, organizations, cultures, and relationships were representatives of conformity and compliance, and were mostly viewed as potential obstacles.

The “How” of creativity consequently occurred exclusively “inside” the individual. The classic image of the creative process involved a light bulb going on over the creator’s head during the Eureka moment. The creative process was viewed as a solitary process, initially with mystical or divine sources, and then also increasingly associated with mental unbalance or even psychopathology. The focus of the How was on the generation of the idea, not the process leading up to the idea or how the idea would become a reality. The “What” or creative product was associated with “big bang,” earthshaking insights (Montuori and Purser 1999; Runco 2004, 2007). Educational institutions and educators were not meant to cultivate the insights of genius, but merely to reproduce a certain foundational knowledge base and social system. The “Where” of creativity was almost exclusively the arts and sciences, and in the latter mostly physics (Montuori 2011).

If having the Creative Person as the unit of analysis by definition ruled out creativity as a possibility for educational settings, the Where of creativity by definition made it virtually impossible for somebody not in the arts or science to consider herself creative or to be engaged in an enterprise that was labeled as creative by others. This meant that creativity could only “exist” in a limited number of human activities. In the West and many other parts of the world, women were traditionally not given extensive access to these activities. For example, in the arts, no musical performances in public, no study with nude models, and in the sciences, limited access to education and explicit exclusion from many areas. Women were therefore not in a position to be considered creative because they simply could not participate in the activities that were societally labeled as creative (Eisler and Montuori 2007). This characterization of creativity therefore made it a very unusual, subjective, contingent phenomenon that was limited to very few individuals during rare moments of inspiration in a closely circumscribed set of human endeavors.

Creativity was a puzzling phenomenon in Modernity. The Modern scientific worldview was based on a machine or clockwork metaphor in which the world was fundamentally Objective, Rational, and Orderly. Creativity on the other hand was either associated with subjective experience, the irrationality of mystical insight or a breakdown in Order and hence with Disorder, whether socially or personally (mental illness, revolution). Creativity was viewed as essentially contingent and subjective, rather than a lawful, orderly, and objective phenomenon. Science itself could therefore not account for creativity. The creativity of scientists did not begin to be systematically addressed until the 1950s as part of the larger emergence of systematic creativity research. In his important work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, philosopher of science Karl Popper stressed the context of justification, and did not in fact discuss discovery itself, which was, because of it subjectivity and contingency, not considered amenable to scientific inquiry. By leaving the context of discovery to psychologists, he was essentially dismissing it as a worthy subject for science and philosophy, and hence serious inquiry (Popper 2002).

Mainstream education mostly did not address creativity, because it was considered a gift of unique individuals rather than a quality or characteristic that could be cultivated, and also because the social and political purpose of education was to create good law-abiding citizens and workers, not independent thinkers. When the systematic and scientific study of creativity by psychologists was ushered in by J.P. Guildford’s Presidential address at the American Psychological Association meeting in 1950, this was part of a larger Cold War climate. The main concern was to reestablish American scientific supremacy. No effort was made to foster creativity in all students. Greater attention was paid to creativity by finding the “best and the brightest” so they could be given special attention and their gifts nurtured.

Despite the now truly substantial research literature on creativity (Runco 2004, 2007), its impact on education has been slim. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, numerous critiques of education across all levels bemoan the lack of creativity, and the focus on Reproductive Learning that stresses memorization, test-taking, and conformity (Robinson 2001). In the USA, the Ph.D. dissertation is supposed to be an original contribution to one’s field, but tellingly originality and creativity are barely ever discussed during the educational process, unless it is in the context of plagiarism (Montuori 2010). Research on the difficulties American doctoral students have completing their degree found that in large part, the educational system simply does not prepare students to be independent researchers (Lovitts 2005).

Important Scientific Research and Open Questions

There are strong indications that in the twenty-first century, the discourse and practices of creativity itself may be changing. From the Modern individualistic focus oriented to “eminent” or uncontroversial creatives producing exceptional products (Einstein, Picasso, etc.), there has been a shift toward a more collaborative, “everyday,” ecological creativity. The focus is on generative interactions in a variety of mundane contexts, rather than the individual lone genius. Millennial college students associate creativity with everyday activities, and with social interaction. Whereas for Baby Boomers, creativity came from “eminent creatives” in the form of the guitar of Jimi Hendrix or the pens of Herman Hesse or Thomas Pynchon, in today’s “participatory” culture (Jenkins 2009), the focus is not so much “eminent creatives,” but participatory processes in video games like Beaterator, and the Garageband music application.

The new, contextual and collaborative approach to creativity by the younger generation is matched in the research by a new research interest in the social dimensions of creativity (Montuori 2011; Montuori & Purser 1999). There is a move away from an essentialist view of creativity to one that is relational and contextual. The emphasis on these dimensions of creativity may be significant for education. Traditionally fostering creativity meant removing exceptional students from their educational context. Their exceptional nature was the starting point, but essentially the result of contingency and individual characteristics, and not replicable. Historically, there has been little research on the creation of environments that foster creativity across the board for all students (Amabile 1996). The focus on the social dimensions of creativity is showing that creativity is also a function of certain kinds of environments.

Creativity has been consistently mythologized and misunderstood. Educational attempts to go beyond traditional Reproductive Learning and foster creativity have at times veered perilously into Narcissistic Learning, valorizing the subjective, the unusual, and self-expression at the expense of traditional competencies. Typical was the left brain/right brain fad of the 70s and 80s. It seemed to suggest that the “right brain” (the non-dominant hemisphere) was all that was needed for creativity, and the “left brain” was simply a hindrance. Research conclusively shows that creativity involves both hemispheres. Yet it is the simplicity of the right brain explanation that is so appealing and also so misleading. The underlying dichotomizing is the same kind of thinking that leads to Narcissistic Learning and the promotion of a trivial creativity that is exclusively self-expressive but not contextually appropriate. Indeed when creativity is viewed through a binary logic and decontextualized, it is trivialized and mutilated.

The emerging research on and practices of creativity can be summarized as proposing that:

• 1. Creativity is the fundamental nature of the Universe, the process of creation itself, rather the spark of an occasional (C)creator, and is therefore a basic “everyday, everyone, everywhere” human capacity.

• 2. Creativity is a networked, ecological, and relational process rather than an isolated phenomenon.

• 3. Creativity is paradoxical; in the characteristics of the creative person, process, product, and environment are found seemingly incompatible terms: Creativity requires both order and disorder, rigor and imagination, hard work and play, idea generation and idea selection, times of introspection and solitude and times of interaction and exchange.

• 4. Creativity is an emergent process arising out of interactions of a given system and therefore unpredictable.

The challenge facing education is to integrate the new creativity research, and at the same time recognize that creativity should not merely be an interesting or appealing “add-on” to education, situated mainly in the arts, but that it should in fact be at the heart of education (Montuori 2010).

Cross-References

Creative Inquiry

Narcissistic Learning

Reproductive Learning