I keep promising myself to finish my self-proclaimed trilogy of posts regarding creativity, but I’m just having a hard time summing things up. I’m also promising myself not to pull a Douglas Adams and create a five-part trilogy! I’m just going to make a quick note right now.

A Lesson In Creative Problem Solving

I recently set down to solve a problem I had with my custom themes in the newest version of Apple’s Keynote presentation software, and that problem is simply that they look bad in the theme chooser. I hammered at this issue much of the night, opening theme files, examining package contents, and scouring plist files for a hint at how Apple’s themes worked in the theme chooser.

The solution I discovered was simple and elegant. You can read about it right here. It was so easy, it became difficult.

Sometimes you have to be able to release yourself from analytical left-brain thinking to find a solution to a problem. In the case of these Keynote themes, I found my answer on a lark. It was a simple moment of, “What if I try this?” Unexpectedly, it worked.

Part of being creative is opening ourselves up to those unexpected solutions. It’s listening to that little voice that says, “This might just work.” That voice is nothing more than your creative spark trying to nudge you down a path you might have otherwise left unconsidered, and who knows? That little voice might just be right.

Tags: creativity

Lawrence Lessig was on Charlie Rose talking about his relationship with Obama from his days as a college professor to today as well as his views on copyright in context of a remix culture. To him, it’s about encouraging creativity, a cause I certainly support.



I could listen to him talk all day.

via Ars Technica

Tags: creativity

Childhood is a time of imagination, and creativity. However, as time passes, many of us seem to lose the creative spark that we enjoyed as children. While our social and academic skills evolve with maturation, our ability to create seems to devolve. We lapse into a pattern of "I can't sing," "I can't dance," "I can't paint." Fill in your own blank. What is it you think you are unable to do? Why don't you think you can do it?

The answer is probably simple. At some point in your life, one or all of the following happened:

• You had a friend or family member tell you you aren't good at something.
• You had a teacher or mentor figure reinforce the notion that you can't do something.
• You had a teacher or other authority figure consistently model learned inability.
• You had a particularly emotional failure in trying to do something creative.

These outside pressures eventually taught you that you can't sing, dance, draw, paint, sculpt. write, etc. You learned helplessness in a given area of human expression, and those teaching you that helplessness were probably unaware of their own influence.

An Aside About Teaching Learned Inability

One of the tenets of a newer movement in education -- usually referred to as Project Approach, Reggio-Emilia Approach, or Child-Directed Learning -- is that every child is an author; every child is a musician; every child is an artist. My wife teaches with this philosophy, and one of her preschoolers might come up and say, "We need a guitar for our campfire," to which she would respond, "Okay, how can we make one?"

In the Project classroom, every child is a teacher as well as a learner. Everyone is an expert in something, but in too many classrooms of the past and present, children are constantly reminded of how much they are helpless and incapable. They grow to rely on Teacher for everything. It is in this time that they learn they are unable to draw, that they are unable to sing. Implicitly, Teacher may be teaching them to disable their creative spark.

Additionally, we educators occasionally model this form of learned helplessness. "Here's what a horse looks like," we might say to draw a representation on the board, followed by the quick disclaimer of, "I'm no artist." I don't know many teachers who would admit, in front of their children, "I can't do math," "I'm not a very good writer," but we'll disclaim our creative talents without a second thought.

Stuck In Another Century

This brings me to the next part of education's role in stifling creativity: our entire education structure is based on the needs and values of the Industrial Revolution. Our basic educational fundamentals have remained largely unchanged for over a century. We just keep covering it with new coats of paint, but the fact remains. Through most of the United States, teachers are trying to prepare children for a twenty-first century world through a nineteenth century curriculum hierarchy.

Fortunately, some new philosophies like Project Approach encourage children to exercise those creative skills that will help them succeed as unique and innovative individuals in the workplace rather than carbon copies of one another. The point is in learning how to independently find answers to questions and problems, how to uniquely and individually share and/or implement those findings, and how to work as a team to reach a common goal. The point is not in reciting rote information. Now, if only we could get proficiency tests to reflect similar progress…

Back On Point

The truth is that you are a creative person. You can sing. You can draw. You can paint. The problem is that you don't believe you can. Whether outside influences have convinced you or you have simply convinced yourself is immaterial. Your creativity is as integral a part of your being as your academic self. It's in there, but you might have to do some work digging it out. We'll save that task for another post.

Tags: education, creativity

Have you ever said to yourself some thing like this? "I'm no artist;" "I'm practically tone deaf;" "I just don't have that good of an imagination."

In our culture (and I'm sure in others), there has developed a form of leaned helplessness when it comes to creative expression. A delusion has evolved informing us that most of us are incapable of true creativity, and we have to rely on others' talents and ideas. This self-inflicted myth is simply that: a myth.

Part 1: A Creative Childhood

Time and again, we read of the creative spirit of children. With few exceptions, they have no inhibitions expressing themselves in writing, in drawing, through song, dance, and other forms of artistic representations. I never hear a first grader tell me, "I can't sing." However, I hear it from adults all the time.

Sir Ken Robinson, an absolute genius on the topics of creativity and education, tells a story of a nativity play in which his son played Joseph. The three magi (also played by children) approach with their gifts of gold myrrh, and frankincense. Unfortunately, the child bearing the frankincense forgets what his gift is called, and he visibly struggles with what to say. Finally, he settles on, "Frank sent this!" The word he was supposed to say was incomprehensible to his mind, but he creatively rearranged the emphasis of syllables to make sense of the phonemes floating about his mind. In other words, he improvised in a moment when many of us would have merely frozen.

The same Ken Robinson also tells a story of Gillian Lynne, a girl who was seen as simply having something wrong with her in the 1930s when she was growing up. Today, she might have been diagnosed with ADHD, but a doctor suggested to her mother that she enroll the girl in dance school. She grew up to become the choreographer for Cats, Phantom of the Opera, the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Imaginary Invalid. She even starred opposite Errol Flynn in a film called The Master of Ballantrae. This was all because the doctor told her mother, "Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer." I shudder to think how many Gillian Lynnes have been stifled over the years due to encountering the wrong adults.

Speaking of Sir Robinson, take a moment and watch his talk. Don't worry. I won't go anywhere.



On a related note, my wife teaches preschool, and her instruction is heavily influenced by Reggio Emilia and Montessori philosophies. The results are amazing. Her children have built a stage to have plays on, have built a post office from PVC pipe and chart paper. They've created sculptures of tornadoes and set up a classroom weather station (correctly using terms like "hook echo" and "Doppler radar" in their discussions), and these are three to four-year-olds. Think about that for minute. All of the preschool academic foundations are incorporated into the class explorations and projects, sometimes even bleeding over into kindergarten and first grade standards. How much less effective might her teaching be if her kids were just sitting at desks completing ditto sheets?

There is no question that childhood is a time of exploration and creativity, but something happens to that spirit and those abilities as we get older. We'll explore that in part two. Stay tuned.

Tags: education, creativity