Creativity in the College Classroom

Abstract

Encouraging and inculcating creativity in the college classroom has become a priority in American education policy and theory. Modern educational systems developed when human cognition was not yet well understood and before the modern concept of creativity had been articulated. Since the importance of creativity and the imagination were recognized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they have gradually been embraced as part of the overall classroom experience at all levels of education. Creative activities can be part of the course work in all disciplines, not simply in the arts.

Overview

Traditional modes of education, whether at the primary, secondary, or college level, are often criticized for stifling rather than fostering creativity. This has increasingly become an area of concern in pedagogy: to teach students skills and areas of competence rather than a set of facts to be regurgitated. Creative classroom activities focus on non-linear, free-associative, non-judgmental thinking processes and are not easily assessed using standard exam methods. As in other areas of teaching, there is always a tension between pedagogical notions of what is best or most useful for students, and a need to demonstrate student performance or achievement through quantitative means. Nevertheless, creativity is seen as a kind of intelligence and is essential to innovation.

Encouraging creativity increases student engagement by rewarding curiosity, especially when teaching methods are well-matched to course material and student interests. It is necessarily a more personalized approach to learning, and so easiest to accomplish with smaller teacher-to-student ratios, though large classes with teaching assistants or other aids can always be broken up into small groups for specific activities.

In 2002, the nonprofit Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills identified the “four Cs of twenty-first century learning” (a reference to the “Three Rs” of reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic), which were subsequently adopted as part of American education policy, with a bipartisan twenty-first century Skills Caucus created in the House of Representatives in 2016. The four Cs are critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, a formulation that underscores just how important creativity is in modern American educational thought.

Creative activities in the classroom differ from other activities in the type and mode of thinking that they engage. Creative activities are usually marked by their focus on divergent thinking—non-linear, free-associative, non-judgmental thinking processes—over the convergent thinking that is engaged by test-taking. Test-taking and other traditional classroom activities have the goal of the student producing a specific answer or result—whether in discussion, on a test, or in an assignment—that the instructor anticipates. Creative activities are instead intended either to produce unforeseen results, or to arrive at a “correct” solution through means the instructor does not anticipate. It is not necessarily that there is no right answer—but it is likely true that there is not only one right answer. Some theorists point to counterfactual thinking as the simplest form of creativity: thinking that is occupied not with the facts as they are, but wondering what it would be like if the facts were different. Counterfactual thought is also closely related to planning (which similarly requires imagining something “not real,” in the sense of a future action and its consequences), an important cognitive process. Some psychologists make little differentiation between creativity and planning.

Creative ability can be assessed, whether qualitatively (evaluating a short story or musical composition, for instance), through self-reporting questionnaires or through psychometric testing. Generally, proponents of encouraging creativity in the classroom point out that there are enough means by which student performance is measured as it is.

Further Insights

Some college courses naturally lend themselves to creative activities, particularly the arts, music, design, and communications courses. In other disciplines, upper-level and graduate-level work similarly lends itself more easily to creative work: students in the sciences are more likely to be expected to design experiments, for instance, while those in the humanities pursue research projects. Discussion sessions in upper-level courses tend to be smaller, making it easier to guide the class in creative directions than in large survey courses that are traditionally lecture-driven. Given sufficient freedom of time, though, any course can include creative work in the classroom as one mode of approaching the course material, and homework outside of class offers easy opportunities to encourage creativity through journaling responses to in-class material or readings, idea and sketchbooks, brainstorming exercises, and design challenges, among other possibilities.

A common activity in geometry classes, for instance, is to explore real-world spaces and look for shapes, situations, and physical relationships that can serve as math problems, from computing the total surface area of doors in a campus building to calculating the velocity of a purchased object in a vending machine. The real creative work here is not in solving the math problem, but in identifying what in one’s surroundings is appropriate for such a problem.

One of the keys to encouraging creativity in the classroom is to put aside the need for practicality and develop activities designed less to impart facts and procedures and more to engage the student with the material. English classes can be asked to imagine how a given novel would be different if its characters and plot were transferred to the present day, for instance—what if Gatsby had made his money from cryptocurrency, or what if Bob Cratchit was an unpaid intern working for Scrooge’s new media startup? Engaging with the texts like this asks students to discern what the essence of the story is, rather than which facts can be memorized for an upcoming test. This engagement still has practical ramifications—a student who has grappled with the essence of the story is better able to understand it in other contexts and better able to recall the important details later—but eschews the stuff of quantitative testing for the period of the activity.

Some class exercises are designed simply to foster creative thinking. An assignment in Cyndi Burnett’s Introduction to Creative Studies course at Buffalo State College asks students to walk around campus writing down at least one hundred things they encounter that annoy them, and then generate solutions (however impractical or unlikely to be approved) to those annoyances. For example, one student pointed out that prepared food was not available after eleven o’clock and proposed a 24-hour area with frozen meals and a microwave; another, annoyed with the campus printers that only accept university-issued campus cash, proposed a printer that accepts barter and would resell traded items in a vending machine. As with many similar exercises, often called brainstorming or free thinking exercises, the point was not to propose solutions that were likely to be implemented, but to exercise creativity and generate innovative ideas.

In the business world, the “20 percent rule” was popularized by Google and received a good deal of attention. Beginning in 2004, Google encouraged employees to spend 20 percent of their time on side projects, a sensible-seeming indulgence in an industry where numerous startups had begun as small projects their founders had tinkered with on their own time. By encouraging employees to pursue these projects during work hours, of course, Google would also have a legal claim to any ideas thus developed. However, in practice it did not work, and while the idea of the 20 percent rule is still frequently touted as a solution to creativity in the business world, Google itself has long since discontinued it. Part of the problem is that while some people need no prompting and always have a project in mind, most need some sort of guidance, impetus, or motivation. The same is true in the world of education. While many alternative schools or gifted programs grant students a good deal of autonomy, like the self-designed curriculum of institutions such as Hampshire College, the average student is neither prepared for nor interested in an approach that is that hands-off and will suffer without more help and guidance. That said, a “20 percent”-like initiative called the Genius Hour has been used in primary and secondary education to encourage self-directed learning.

Issues

Creativity is often thought of as a type or application of intelligence. The concept of a human cognitive capacity for creating things developed fairly recently (after the Enlightenment) compared to the ideas of general intelligence or critical thinking. In particular, while in modern times both arts and science are commonly associated with innovation, in the ancient world—both West and East—science and art were seen as processes of discovery rather than innovation: works of art and technological inventions were seen as imitations of the natural world, while new scientific ideas were not innovations but revelations of natural principles. In the West, especially after the rise of Christianity, creativity was the domain of God. This did not truly begin to change until the Renaissance, when artistic and scientific endeavors alike were increasingly seen as the works of individual minds, but the modern idea of creativity was still not developed until the writings of Thomas Hobbes and William Duff, both of whom dealt extensively with the idea of imagination. The rise of modern psychology and the organization of the professions and academic disciplines in the nineteenth century led to a more in-depth discussion of creativity and creative processes.

Beyond the vague notion that creativity involves innovation and the creation, in some sense, of something new, there is no widespread agreement on a definition or analysis of what creativity is. Frequently it is associated with artistry—not just artistic pursuits, but artistic passions and temperaments, such that speaking of “a creative type” carries a different connotation than “an intelligent type,” and implies some degree of non-conformity or fluidity. How one conceives of the relationship between creativity and intelligence depends on how one conceives of intelligence. Conceptions of intelligence vary across cultures. In the West, intelligence is often thought of in terms of logic, deductive reasoning, and problem solving, and is especially associated with capacities that can be quantified, tested, and measured. In Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, it is more common to discuss intelligence in terms of empathy, interpersonal skills, and what westerners call social or emotional intelligence. Increasingly, the theory of multiple intelligences, or variations thereon, has taken hold, with most educators, psychologists, and others supporting the idea that “intelligence” is best thought of as a blanket term for a set of capacities and competencies, only some of which are related to the traditional Western idea of intelligence as rational, linear convergent thinking.

While intelligence is, in essence, a social or cultural construct, brain function is not. Creativity is often talked about, especially in pop psychology texts, in terms of the lateralization of the brain—specifically the idea that someone is right- or left-brained in the same sense that one is right- or left-handed. The human brain is separated into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, and many neural and cognitive processes are lateralized, meaning they occur mainly on one side of the brain or the other. However, in many cases, a function once believed to be strictly lateralized has, with further study, proven to require neurons in both hemispheres. Furthermore, in some cases lateralization is impacted by handedness: language functions are left-lateralized in most right-handed people, for instance, but left-lateralized or bilateral in most left-handed people. In the early history of modern psychology, it was believed that the left side of the brain was associated primarily with masculinity, but this merely recapitulated gender-based stereotypes according to which logic and rationality are male and artistic expression female.

Lateralization comes up in discussions of creativity because of the common belief that the right hemisphere of the brain is implicated in more creative functions, while the left is involved in logic, reasoning, and rationality. This is really an evolution of the older sex-based idea of lateralization, and is an oversimplification of the actual findings of neuroscience, but remains a popular model with the general public, including professionals and academics outside of the biological or neurological fields. One consequence is the discussion of people as either left- or right-brained, which encourages deterministic thinking: one is either creative or logical, depending on one’s anatomy.

Creativity is often thought of as a subset of general intelligence: creative expression and capacity are moderated by the individual’s intelligence. (Other views construct intelligence as a subset of creativity, creativity as a type of intelligence, or creativity and intelligence as separate but related cognitive capacities.) Some theorists who accept this view do not necessarily mean that it prescribes a correlation between greater intelligence and greater creative ability. Rather, creativity is a capacity that draws on intelligence and benefits from a certain minimum level of intelligence, but is developed on its own rather than increasing as intelligence increases; high levels of intelligence may even discourage creative development, especially in cultures where highly intelligent children are driven toward rationalistic, linear pursuits like science, mathematics, and technology. The stereotype of the “smart kid” is one who is a member of the chess club or the math club, not a member of the drama club. These social constructions impact the capacities that individuals develop, especially when they are young.

Terms & Concepts

Convergent Thinking: A mode of thinking driven by logic and speed, focused on coming up with an unambiguously correct answer to a problem; the type of thinking invoked by multiple-choice tests.

Creativity: The mental process of creating something original, or the capacity for that process; by implication, creativity embraces divergent thinking and multiple modalities of intelligence.

Critical Thinking: Critical thinking is the capacity to perceive and reason about a set of facts in order to come to an objective conclusion through processes that are rational, evidence-based, and open-minded.

Divergent Thinking: A mode of thinking focused on generating multiple possible answers to a question, emphasizing spontaneity, playfulness, and non-linear thinking.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation: The factors motivating any activity can be either extrinsic (originating outside the individual, such as the reward of good grades or the punishment of bad ones) or intrinsic (originating within the individual as, for example, enjoyment or satisfaction); some people are more readily motivated by one type than the other, which has important ramifications for teaching.

Imagination: Closely related to creativity, imagination is the capacity to generate images, ideas, and other affects in the mind, without sensory stimulus.

Intelligence (or General Intelligence): Intelligence is a cognitive capacity for handling and retaining knowledge and includes abilities like learning, reasoning, and planning.

Multiple Intelligences: The theory of multiple intelligences, first proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983, suggests that human intelligence is not a single ability but a collection of cognitive modalities, which could for instance include interpersonal intelligence, visual/spatial intelligence, and logical/mathematical intelligence.

Problem Solving: Problem solving includes any activity in which an individual or group applies a variety of methods to find a solution to a problem that is either well-defined (meaning it is clear what the problem and goal are) or ill-defined (meaning that the problem itself must be identified as part of the problem-solving process). For instance, “What is the trajectory of a thrown projectile” is a well-defined problem, while “How does one become good at mathematics” is an ill-defined one.

Right-Brained/Left-Brained: The pop psychology idea of left- vs. right-brained thinkers is an oversimplification of brain lateralization and proposes that right-brained thinkers are more creative or artistic than left-brained thinkers.

Bibliography

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Kinsella, V. (2018). The use of activity theory as a methodology for developing creativity within the art and design classroom. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 37(3), 493–506. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=131152982&site=ehost-live

Liao, Y.-H., Chen, Y.-L., Chen, H.-C. (2018). Infusing creative pedagogy into an English as a foreign language classroom: Learning performance, creativity, and motivation. Thinking Skills & Creativity, 29, 213–223. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=131402110&site=ehost-live

Meyer, A. A., & Lederman, N. G. (2013). Inventing creativity: An exploration of the pedagogy of ingenuity in science classrooms. School Science & Mathematics, 113(8), 400–409. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=92765361&site=ehost-live

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Şahin, F. (2016). Investigating the competence of classroom teachers in terms of nominating the students with high creativity and gender-biased decisions. International Journal of Progressive Education, 12(3), 110–120. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118645422&site=ehost-live

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Suggested Reading

Hemati, F., & Raeesi, A. (2015). Exploring the connection between stability and variability in language classrooms and EFL teachers’ creativity and burnout. Theory & Practice in Language Studies, 5(7), 1438–1445. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=108778224&site=ehost-live

Studente, S. S., Seppala, N., & Sadowska, N. (2016). Facilitating creative thinking in the classroom: Investigating the effects of plants and the colour green on visual and verbal creativity. Thinking Skills & Creativity, 19, 1–8. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=113052043&site=ehost-live

Sullivan, P. (2015). The unessay: Making room for creativity in the composition classroom. College Composition & Communication, 67(1), 6–34. Retrieved January 1, 2019 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=109369073&site=ehost-live