Transform Toolkit - Creativity - Brian Boyd - Transcript

Creativity - Brian Boyd

In Scotland as in most advanced industrial countries, there is a huge emphasis… growing emphasis on creativity within the educational process. Now I think that is really born of a realisation in the 21st century, that the knowledge economy will require people to be creative thinkers - people who can think out of the box, who can look at problems differently and who can bring solutions to unanticipated events and so on. So that most countries are looking at creativity - including those who are amongst the most successful educationally. Somewhere like Singapore for example, which consistently comes very high up any league tables that are created. They are trying to make every school a creative school and a thinking school. That doesn’t however make it easy to identify what creativity is. Now, Howard Gardner the author of 'The Multiple Intelligence Theory' has also written on this subject, he I think, has helpfully categorised creativity as ‘Big C’ creativity and ‘Small C’ creativity. The ‘Big C’ creativity would be that which would attribute to people that would normally be considered as geniuses throughout the ages. But in a sense what he has done through his study of geniuses is to indicate that it’s very difficult to use them, to use that as models because in fact very few of these people were the most intelligent amongst their contemporaries. What really singled them out was their resilience; their stickability; the fact that they were able to deal with failure and bounce back stronger. So for example, someone like Einstein was an overnight success after 20 years of failure. In some respect what that indicates is that there is nothing magical about creativity, it’s not something that one or two people are born with and the rest of us cannot aspire to - it’s a product of a whole series of events and human traits. The 99 per cent perspiration and the 1 per cent inspiration becomes close to the truth. However, he has helpfully suggested that there is something called a ‘Small C’ creativity to which everybody can aspire. And I think that’s more of a disposition, it’s a way of thinking about problem solving. For example, if you come across a real difficult situation what’s your attitude to that - what’s your response? If your response is to give up; is to find some kind of excuse for not being able to engage with it - you are unlikely to ever come up with a creative solution. If, however, you have got a different view of the problem and a view of the ability to solve it - then you may be more disposed to look at new and unusual solutions. There is a work here of a woman called Carol Dweck which is quite interesting, where she has written about self theories and she feels that your self-theory - theory of yourself as a learner and what intelligence means is quite crucial to what you are likely to do when you come across a difficulty. She said 'If you believe intelligence is fixed, it’s inherited' and you only have a limited amount of it and it’s only important in certain areas like academic areas. Then if you come across a real problem that you can’t solve, you are more than likely to give up and rationalise it away as being something that’s not important - but if however you believe that intelligence is actually quite a plastic entity - that it can be grown and it can be adapted and it can be influenced, then when you come across a real problem you will say 'uh! This is interesting. I wonder how I should cover this differently. Where else can I find a solution?' So in some respects I think that’s what education can do. It can inculcate in young people a disposition to be creative, to look for new solutions and to try things in different ways. I think that would be a big step forward for most education systems in advanced industrial societies.