Liane Gabora |
Although educators claim to value creativity, they don’t always prioritize it.
Teachers often have biases against creative students, fearing that creativity in the classroom will be
disruptive. They devalue creative personality attributes such as risk taking,
impulsivity and independence. They inhibit creativity by focusing on the
reproduction of knowledge and obedience in class.
Why the disconnect between educators’ official
stance toward creativity, and what actually happens in school?
How can teachers nurture creativity in the
classroom in an era of rapid technological change, when human innovation is
needed more than ever and children are more distracted and hyper-stimulated?
These are some of the questions we ask in my
research lab at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia.
We study the creative process, as well as how ideas evolve over time and across
societies. I’ve written almost 200 scholarly papers and book chapters on
creativity, and lectured on it worldwide. My research involves both
computational models and studies with human participants. I also write fiction,
compose music for the piano and do freestyle dance.
What is creativity?
Although creativity is often defined in terms of
new and useful products, I believe it makes more sense to define it in terms of
processes. Specifically, creativity involves cognitive processes that transform
one’s understanding of, or relationship to, the world.
There may be adaptive value to the seemingly
mixed messages that teachers send about creativity. Creativity is the
novelty-generating component of cultural evolution. As in any kind of
evolutionary process, novelty must be balanced by preservation.
In biological evolution, the novelty-generating
components are genetic mutation and recombination, and the novelty-preserving
components include the survival and reproduction of “fit” individuals. In cultural evolution,
the novelty-generating component is creativity, and the novelty-preserving
components include imitation and other forms of social learning.
It isn’t actually necessary for everyone to be
creative for the benefits of creativity to be felt by all. We can reap the
rewards of the creative person’s ideas by copying them, buying from them or
simply admiring them. Few of us can build a computer or write a symphony, but
they are ours to use and enjoy nevertheless.
Inventor or imitator?
There are also draw backs to creativity. Sure, creative people solve problems, crack jokes, invent
stuff; they make the world pretty and interesting and fun. But generating
creative ideas is time-consuming. A creative solution to one problem often
generates other problems, or has unexpected negative side effects.
Creativity is correlated with rule bending, law breaking,
social unrest, aggression, group conflict and dishonesty. Creative people often
direct their nurturing energy towards ideas rather than relationships, and may
be viewed as aloof, arrogant, competitive, hostile, independent or unfriendly.
Also, if I’m wrapped up in my own creative
reverie, I may fail to notice that someone else has already solved the problem
I’m working on. In an agent-based computational model of cultural evolution, in which artificial neural
network-based agents invent and imitate ideas, the society’s ideas evolve
most quickly when there is a good mix of creative “inventors” and
conforming “imitators.” Too many creative agents and the collective suffers.
They are like holes in the fabric of society, fixated on their own (potentially
inferior) ideas, rather than propagating proven effective ideas.
A
society thrives when individuals are given the space to create or imitate
ideas. (Unsplash/Chris Barbalis), CC BY
|
Of course, a computational model of this sort is
highly artificial. The results of such simulations must be taken with a grain
of salt. However, they suggest an adaptive value to the mixed signals teachers
send about creativity. A society thrives when some individuals create and
others preserve their best ideas.
This also makes sense given how creative people
encode and process information. Creative people tend to encode episodes of experience in
much more detail than is actually needed. This has drawbacks: Each episode
takes up more memory space and has a richer network of associations. Some of
these associations will be spurious. On the bright side, some may lead to new
ideas that are useful or aesthetically pleasing.
So, there’s a trade-off to peppering the world
with creative minds. They may fail to see the forest for the trees but they may
produce the next Mona Lisa.
Innovation might keep us afloat
So will society naturally self-organize into
creators and conformers? Should we avoid trying to enhance creativity in the
classroom?
The answer is: No! The pace of cultural change is
accelerating more quickly than ever before. In some biological systems, when
the environment is changing quickly, the mutation rate goes up. Similarly, in
times of change we need to bump up creativity levels — to generate the
innovative ideas that will keep us afloat.
This is particularly important now. In our
high-stimulation environment, children spend so much time processing new
stimuli that there is less time to “go deep” with the stimuli they’ve already
encountered. There is less time for thinking about ideas and situations from
different perspectives, such that their ideas become more interconnected and
their mental models of understanding become more integrated.
This “going deep” process has been modeled computationally using
a program called Deep Dream, a variation on the machine learning technique
“Deep Learning” and used to generate images such as the ones in the figure
below.
The images show how an input is subjected to
different kinds of processing at different levels, in the same way that our
minds gain a deeper understanding of something by looking at it from different
perspectives. It is this kind of deep processing and the resulting integrated webs of understanding that
make the crucial connections that lead to important advances and innovations.
Cultivating creativity in the
classroom
So the obvious next question is: How can
creativity be cultivated in the classroom? It turns out there are lots of ways! Here are three key ways in which teachers can begin:
- Focus less on the reproduction of information and more on critical thinking and problem solving.
- Curate activities that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as by painting murals that depict biological food chains, or acting out plays about historical events, or writing poems about the cosmos. After all, the world doesn’t come carved up into different subject areas. Our culture tells us these disciplinary boundaries are real and our thinking becomes trapped in them.
- Pose questions and challenges, and follow up with opportunities for solitude and reflection. This provides time and space to foster the forging of new connections that is so vital to creativity.
Liane
Gabora, Associate Professor of Psychology and Creative Studies, University of
British Columbia
Originally published on THE CONVERSATION
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