Hi Chuck,
I recently finished my doctoral thesis on creativity in fashion design education. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/4234
The first big push in educating for creativity began in the 50s, after Guildford's paper about 'divergent thnking'. Post Sputnik, there seemed a need to boost creative thinking for national security in the US. The more recent creativity discourse emerged in response to slow-downs in national productivity from the 1980s. Creativity really took off in the UK in the early 1990s with the notion of 'creative industries' as a critical resource for building a knowledge economy. Now in 2009 we have the European Year of Creativity and Innovation.
The need for more creativity is always brought up to argue there's a lack of something else - in society, the economy, or some other domain. At least 9 different rhetorics have been identified in the core literature about educating for creativity: Creative genius, Democratic and political creativity, Ubiquitous creativity, Creativity as a social good, Creativity as economic imperative, Play and creativity, Creativity and cognition, Creative affordances of technology, Creative Classroom (see Banaji, S., Burn, A., & Buckingham, D. (2006). The rhetorics of creativity: A review of the literature. London: Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, Institute of Education, University of London)
My feeling is that it would be more productive to understand why we want to educate for creativity, before trying to address its "correlates".
Cheers,
Amanda
Dr Amanda Bill
Senior Lecturer
Institute of Design for Industry and Environment
College of Creative Arts
Massey University, Wellington
New Zealand
________________________________________
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Charles Burnette [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, 21 July 2009 3:28 a.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Educating for Creativity
Colleagues
With the increasing commoditization of design research and practice I
have grown concerned about how we are educating for creativity and
fostering creative personality characteristics in our students.
Many on the list may not know about the seminal research by Donald W.
Mackinnon "The Personality Correlates of Creativity: A Study of
American Architects" undertaken at the Institute of Personality
Assessment and Research, University of California Berkeley as part of
a larger investigation of creativity in the arts, sciences and
professions.
40 creative architects among 124 identified and ranked in three
levels of creativity by professors, editors and peers, were invited to
Berkeley for a week of testing. Mackinnon's summary after this
exhaustive testing stated goals that, in my opinion, we should seek in
ourselves as well as the students we educate. He wrote:
"If I were to summarize what is most generally characteristic of the
creative architect as we have seen him (sic), it is his high level of
effective intelligence, his openness to experience, his freedom from
petty constraints, and impoverishing inhibitions, his aesthetic
sensitivity, his cognitive flexibility, his independence of thought
and action, his high level of energy, his unquestioning commitment to
creative endeavor, and his unceasing striving for creative solutions
to the ever more difficult architectural problems he constantly sets
for himself". end quote
Are we consciously addressing these correlates of creativity?
Shouldn't we be?
Charles Burnette
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MacKinnon D W. The nature and nurture of creative talent.
Amer. Psychol. 17:484-95, 1962. [University of California, Berkeley,
CA] Cited over 195 times between 1962 and December 28 1981
In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing
Creativity (Paperback)
by Donald W. MacKinnon, Creative Education Foundation, 1978
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