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| Annoyed by restroom doors that are always broken? Matthew Lahue, a junior, designed the Bathroom Bodyguard. Image credits: Jim Lahue |
By Laura Pappano
It
bothers Matthew Lahue and it surely bothers you: enter a public restroom and
the stall lock is broken. Fortunately, Mr. Lahue has a solution. It’s called
the Bathroom Bodyguard. Standing before his Buffalo State College classmates
and professor, Cyndi Burnett, Mr. Lahue displayed a device he concocted from a
large washer, metal ring, wall hook, rubber bands and Lincoln Log. Slide the
ring in the crack and twist. The door stays shut. Plus, the device fits in a
jacket pocket.
The
world may be full of problems, but students presenting projects for
Introduction to Creative Studies have uncovered a bunch you probably haven’t
thought of. Elie Fortune, a freshman, revealed his Sneaks ’n Geeks app to
identify the brand of killer sneakers you spot on the street. Jason Cathcart, a
senior, sported a bulky martial arts uniform with sparring pads he had sewn in.
No more forgetting them at home.
“I don’t expect them to be the next Steve Jobs
or invent the flying car,” Dr. Burnett says. “But I do want them to be more
effective and resourceful problem solvers.” Her hope, she says, is that her
course has made them more creative.
Once
considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the
ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a
prized and teachable skill. Pin it on pushback against standardized tests and
standardized thinking, or on the need for ingenuity in a fluid landscape.
“The
reality is that to survive in a fast-changing world you need to be creative,”
says Gerard J. Puccio, chairman of the International Centre for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College, which has the
nation’s oldest creative studies programme, having offered courses in it since
1967.
“That
is why you are seeing more attention to creativity at universities,” he says.
“The marketplace is demanding it.”
Critical
thinking has long been regarded as the essential skill for success, but it’s
not enough, says Dr. Puccio. Creativity moves beyond mere synthesis and
evaluation and is, he says, “the higher order skill.” This has not been a
sudden development. Nearly 20 years ago “creating” replaced “evaluation” at the
top of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning
objectives. In 2010 “creativity” was the factor most crucial for success found
in an I.B.M. survey of 1,500 chief executives in
33 industries. These days “creative” is the most used buzzword in LinkedIn
profiles two years running.
Traditional
academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning
speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies
to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept
and deal with ambiguity.
Creative
studies is popping up on course lists and as a credential. Buffalo State, part
of the State University of New York, plans a Ph.D. and already offers a
master’s degree and undergraduate minor. Saybrook University in San Francisco
has a master’s and certificate, and added a specialization to its psychology
Ph.D. in 2011. Drexel University in Philadelphia has a three-year-old online
master’s. St. Andrews University in Laurinburg, N.C., has added a minor. And
creative studies offerings, sometimes with a transdisciplinary bent, are new
options in business, education, digital media, humanities, arts, science and
engineering programmes across the country.
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Cyndi
Burnett teaches Introduction to Creative Studies at Buffalo State College. Image credits: Brendan
Bannon/The New York Times
|
Suddenly,
says Russell G. Carpenter, programme coordinator for a new minor in applied
creative thinking at Eastern Kentucky University, “there is a larger
conversation happening on campus: ‘Where does creativity fit into the E.K.U.
student experience?’ ” Dr. Carpenter says 40 students from a broad array of
fields, including nursing and justice and safety, have enrolled in the minor —
a number he expects to double as more sections are added to introductory
classes. Justice and safety? Students want tools to help them solve public
safety problems and deal with community issues, Dr. Carpenter explains, and a
credential to take to market.
The
credential’s worth is apparent to Mr. Lahue, a communication major who believes
that a minor in the field carries a message. “It says: ‘This person is not a
drone. They can use this skill set and apply themselves in other parts of the
job.’ ”
On-demand
inventiveness is not as outrageous as it sounds. Sure, some people are
naturally more imaginative than others. What’s igniting campuses, though, is
the conviction that everyone is creative, and can learn to be more so.
Just
about every pedagogical toolbox taps similar strategies, employing divergent
thinking (generating multiple ideas) and convergent thinking (finding what
works).The real genius, of course, is in the how.
Dr.
Puccio developed an approach that he and partners market as FourSight and sell
to schools, businesses and individuals. The method, which is used in Buffalo
State classrooms, has four steps: clarifying, ideating, developing and
implementing. People tend to gravitate to particular steps, suggesting their
primary thinking style. Clarifying — asking the right question — is critical
because people often misstate or misperceive a problem. “If you don’t have the
right frame for the situation, it’s difficult to come up with a breakthrough,”
Dr. Puccio says. Ideating is brainstorming and calls for getting rid of your
inner naysayer to let your imagination fly. Developing is building out a
solution, and maybe finding that it doesn’t work and having to start over.
Implementing calls for convincing others that your idea has value.
Jack
V. Matson, an environmental engineer and a lead instructor of “Creativity,
Innovation and Change,” a MOOC that drew 120,000 in September, teaches a
freshman seminar course at Penn State that
he calls “Failure 101.” That’s because, he says, “the frequency and intensity
of failures is an implicit principle of the course. Getting into a creative
mind-set involves a lot of trial and error.”
His
favorite assignments? Construct a résumé based on things that didn’t work out
and find the meaning and influence these have had on your choices. Or build the
tallest structure you can with 20 Popsicle sticks. The secret to the assignment
is to destroy the sticks and reimagine their use. “As soon as someone in the
class starts breaking the sticks,” he says, “it changes everything.”
Dr.
Matson also asks students to “find some cultural norms to break,” like doing
cartwheels while entering the library. The point: “Examine what in the culture
is preventing you from creating something new or different. And what is it like
to look like a fool because a lot of things won’t work out and you will look
foolish? So how do you handle that?”
It’s
a lesson that has been basic to the ventures of Brad Keywell, a Groupon founder
and a student of Dr. Matson’s at the University of Michigan. “I am an absolute
evangelist about the value of failure as part of creativity,” says Mr. Keywell,
noting that Groupon took off after the failure of ThePoint.com, where people were to organize for collective
action but instead organized discount group purchases. Dr. Matson taught him
not just to be willing to fail but that failure is a critical avenue to a
successful end. Because academics run from failure, Mr. Keywell says,
universities are “way too often shapers of formulaic minds,” and encourage
students to repeat and internalize fail-safe ideas.
Bonnie
Cramond, director of the Torrance Centre for Creativity and Talent Development
at the University of Georgia, is another believer in taking bold risks, which
she calls a competitive necessity. Her center added an interdisciplinary
graduate certificate in creativity and innovation this year. “The new people
who will be creative will sit at the juxtaposition of two or more fields,” she
says. When ideas from different fields collide, Dr. Cramond says, fresh ones
are generated. She cites an undergraduate class that teams engineering and art
students to, say, reimagine the use of public spaces. Basic creativity tools
used at the Torrance Center include thinking by analogy, looking for and making
patterns, playing, literally, to encourage ideas, and learning to abstract
problems to their essence.
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Chanil
Mejia and Yasmine Payton present their big idea, a campus chill spot, in
Introduction to Creative Studies. Image credits: Brendan
Bannon/The New York Times
|
In
Dr. Burnett’s Introduction to Creative Studies survey course, students explore
definitions of creativity, characteristics of creative people and strategies to
enhance their own creativity.These include rephrasing problems as questions,
learning not to instinctively shoot down a new idea (first find three
positives), and categorizing problems as needing a solution that requires
either action, planning or invention. A key objective is to get students to
look around with fresh eyes and be curious. The inventive process, she says,
starts with “How might you…”
Dr.
Burnett is an energetic instructor with a sense of humor — she tested Mr.
Cathcart’s martial arts padding with kung fu whacks. Near the end of last
semester, she dumped Post-it pads (the department uses 400 a semester) onto a
classroom desk with instructions: On pale yellow ones, jot down what you
learned; on rainbow colored pads, share how you will use this learning. She
then sent students off in groups with orders that were a litany of
brainstorming basics: “Defer judgment! Strive for quantity! Wild and unusual!
Build on others’ ideas!”
As
students scribbled and stuck, the takeaways were more than academic. “I will be
optimistic,” read one. “I will look at tasks differently,” said another. And,
“I can generate more ideas.”
Asked
to elaborate, students talked about confidence and adaptability. “A lot of
people can’t deal with things they don’t know and they panic. I can deal with
that more now,” said Rony Parmar, a computer information systems major with Dr.
Dre’s Beats headphones circling his neck.
Mr.
Cathcart added that, given tasks, “you think of other ways of solving the
problem.” For example, he streamlined the check-in and reshelving of DVDs at
the library branch where he works.
The
view of creativity as a practical skill that can be learned and applied in
daily life is a 180-degree flip from the thinking that it requires a little
magic: Throw yourself into a challenge, step back — pause — wait for brilliance
to spout.
The
point of creative studies, says Roger L. Firestien, a Buffalo State professor
and author of several books on creativity, is to learn techniques “to make
creativity happen instead of waiting for it to bubble up. A muse doesn’t have
to hit you.”
Laura Pappano is writer in
residence at Wellesley Center for Women at Wellesley College and author of
several books, including “Inside School Turnarounds.”
Originally published in The New York Times
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