Thanks for your comments Amanda,

The interest in educating for creativity in so many fields seems to me  
to ask for a better handle on what is involved. My bias is to look for  
research focused on generic dimensions of creativity and then to test  
and adapt them to the different situations and circumstances of  
interest.  If you can point me to recent research in any field having  
data to support dimensions of creativity I would be very interested in  
it.

I'll read your dissertation too.

Thanks,
Chuck



On Jul 20, 2009, at 5:58 PM, Bill, Amanda wrote:

> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>
> 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