Creativity Developed in the Classroom

My thoughts on creativity in the classroom and DON'T YAWN

Since I’m a literary person (at this moment in time, teaching college writing courses), I’m drawn to using analogies and metaphors in developing creativity in the classroom. As a mechanism for divergent thinking, using metaphors and analogies allow for old ideas to be transferred into new ideas, new insights, and new perspectives, which are gained from borrowing and synthesizing information, allowing for originality to emerge. It sounds like a paradox: to borrow old ideas in order to form original ideas. My belief is further reinforced by the notion of pulling ideas, merging them with others, and creating vastly different perspectives. I think that retelling a story (something seen) through art, literature, film, writing, etc., is exactly creative. The whole idea that "everything has been done" is true to some degree, but the personal perspective will always allow deviation from the original story. Unless you are copying a master painting, for technique, it certainly won't be celebrated as original, but it still takes creativity to accomplish such a task. A painter of the past used unique paint strokes to achieve certain degrees of light, and the copying artist has to also figure out the maneuver to achieve the same result.

What if instead of painting dancing ballerinas, using the same Impressionist movements on canvas Degas captured with his works, we painted dancing pandas? How would pandas dance together? Would they bump around with their fatness and be less graceful, then let’s say, thirteen year old girls? Would the paint strokes be more chaotic and anxious, as opposed to Degas delicate, graceful strokes and soft colors? We have to mimic, copy, mold, create, in order to evolve to become original. 

It is pretty fantastic to think that just by watching chickens squeeze through fences, the idea for the cotton gin was developed, or comparing how a germ enters a body to the conquest of Mexico could help kids draw relationships; basically, relating dissimilar things and drawing conclusions by analogous comparisons. This allows the student to think in individual terms (synectics).  I read this somewhere: “Making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange." There is so much liberation at play for the child, and for the teacher, when students are able to think abstractly!

 When using visual images, direct analogies allow for literary gems to emerge in the students thought process. For example, referring to a pencil as “tired and worn out from the day,” according to my son after answering a question about how a pencil feels (if it could feel), allows the visual to emerge that the pencil has been picked up, chewed on, drawn with, erased with, stories written with, math problems solved with, and many other things the life of a pencil goes through during the day.  We generally call attributing human feelings to non-animate things or animals as anthropomorphism, but supporting empathetic identifications with living or nonliving things, helps kids with providing the basis for discussions, writing projects, art activities, or design projects. Additionally, any other problem solving or problem finding exercises are supported by using analogies.  

Kids love to draw, they love humor, and allowing them to access prior knowledge on stories, will help them with original ideas.  Adults do it all the time! I just saw a movie trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on television.

It is a shame that so many of our classrooms are operating under constant threats of tests and grades centered on controlling extrinsic motivation. In the past, when I taught at-risk youth, I used extrinsic motivation to control behavioral problems with my students. I would give tickets out to each student for their best behavior for the day. They would sign the back of the ticket and I would put it into an envelope. At the end of the week, I would draw a couple lucky names, and whoever had the most tickets in the envelope, the greater the chance their name would be drawn. They would win gift cards, gag gifts, candy, whatever. This worked for a while, until the ones who never got tickets became increasingly more hostile. I wasn’t good at dealing with these particular individuals as a first-year teacher, but damned if I tried my best. As far as creativity goes, when they drew something or wrote something amazing (even the kids who made bad choices), I put their work up on the board, and it stayed there for a long time. Peers would go up to see what they’ve done. Just by having their peers say "wow" or "cool" was enough of an award for their creativity.

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose: intrinsic motivators for corporations, based on Dan Pink’s evaluation supporting creativity.  We know how well this works with kids, and have seen this work well with huge companies like Google, Microsoft, Zynga, and Zappos, so why aren’t many other businesses adapting this philosophy? I look at it like Bain Capital and standardized tests: only the winners (the successors) are the small majority, while the rest of us get taken to the bank, are left picking up the pieces, and are trying to figure out what went wrong.