Teachers’ conceptions of student creativity in higher education

What I read

In this article, the researchers conducted interviews and a survey to understand the way teachers in higher education view the idea of creativity. They identified that traditional definitions that focus on novelty are not sufficient in representing the views of the teachers.

First, the authors briefly describe the historic academic views that have defined creativity as being novel and having value for someone. Then, they set a context for their work, in higher education. In these settings, creativity is valued, but teachers aren’t trained to “see and discover what a creative effort is and how to evaluate it.”

They then look deeper at existing definitions of creativity, revisiting the accepted idea that a creative idea is novel. They question how “breakthrough” an event needs to be to be considered creative. Some researchers, like May, have indicated that “The creation of new ideas without realizing them is a form of imagination,” rather than creativity. Other examples are provided that take different perspectives on creativity, including a definition that offers a “Big”, “Little,” and “Mini” creativity model to judge the impact of creative output. The authors conclude that “Creativity is not an objective category—rather, it depends on the individual person, whether she labels another person or product/process as creative or not… creativity is then a subjective observation category.”

Next, the authors describe their research approach. This began with interviews with 20 university instructors, representing a variety of disciplines. The authors used these interviews to create a theoretical model called Facets of Creativity. They then conducted an online survey to see if their interview findings were generalizable.

The authors walk through their findings, which led to the development of the 6 facets. These facets include self reflective learning, independent learning, showing curiosity and motivation, producing something, showing multi-perspectives, and reaching for original, entirely new ideas. They provide quotes from the larger questionnaire, which received 296 teacher responses. The respondents categorized their answers into the six facet buckets, or indicated that their answer didn’t fit into any of the buckets. Only .5 of 1844 responses were placed in the “did not fit” category.

The authors then reflect on their findings. First, they conclude that “the results provide empirical evidence that there is no single understanding of what creativity is.” Next, they indicate that, because nearly all of the responses fit into the 6 categories that emerged, the facet-based model is a successful way of thinking about creativity in a university setting, but that not all facets need to be present for a teacher to consider a student’s work creative.

They indicate that a large contribution from the work is that they “made the teacher’s view visible,” and that showed that What one thinks is creative does not necessarily mean that all other people label or value it as novel – it depends on the observer position. It might be useful to apply an open concept, where the involved stakeholders and informants should beasked what they think about creativity and let the informants tell the story.”

What I learned and what I think

This is the first paper on creativity I’ve found that rejects, in part, the idea that a creative solution needs to be unique or novel in order to “count.” Instead, they indicate that other things are creative, and that creativity depends on how a viewer reacts to the content. I really appreciate that they actually asked people what they think is creative, rather than just working from an assumption (which would then indicate that these teachers are “wrong.”) It’s the first paper that takes a user-centered or people-centered or practical approach to exploring the topic, and I think this is one of the things that’s been bothering me about the other papers—they are taking an autocratic view that the discussion’s settled, in spite of evidence (that they didn’t bother to gather) that it just isn’t.

The context of higher education, or any other context, shapes and helps determine the nature of creativity, and all of the contextual details matter. This extends the idea that creativity is contextually moderated and embodied in a moment, into showing that it is embodied in a system, too.

And it makes a ton of sense, too, that “unique” is not necessarily indicative of a successful, but still creative, educational experiences.

I struggle with the idea that creativity is only in the eyes of the beholder, though. White on white is creative, even if the viewer doesn’t think so, for so many reasons: it’s hanging in a gallery, the person who made it had craft enough to make it, it defined a moment of creative conversation and debate both in its context and in retrospect, and in the private moment of an artist doing their thing.

I also start to question, or at least think about, the nature of expertise in craft and in relationship to material. Students showing creativity through the various facets above don’t have creative ability in any refined sense, by definition: they are still students. They may have practice in the creative behaviors described (such as self reflective learning), but certainly not in the subject matter (economics, or literature), and so they won’t be able to make things with any degree of refinement. So, is creativity only something you can do when you are older, because being older means you’ve had the time to gain the skill and material respect? I’m not sold on the idea that a kid screwing around with paint as having the same meaning as an expert potter.

I’ll do Amabile’s stuff tomorrow and see where it goes.