Search

What can science and science fiction tell us about the intertwining of the actual and the possible, the relations of imagination and reality? What are some of the ways those relationships can work? Should we be foregrounding possibilities that come primarily from our imaginations or the realities that push our imaginations? Contrary to common assumptions, this essay argues that imagination itself tends to be quite limited, but in some situations can become dangerously ungrounded. In contrast, the challenges of reality are more likely to push us to imagine previously inconceivable and transformative possibilities.

Este manifiesto, discutido por 20 académicos y académicas que representan diversas líneas de investigación sobre la creatividad, marca un cambio conceptual dentro de los estudios de este campo. Los enfoques socioculturales han hecho contribuciones sustanciales al concepto de creatividad en las últimas décadas y hoy pueden proporcionar un conjunto de propuestas para guiar nuestra comprensión de la investigación anterior y generar nuevas direcciones en investigación y práctica. Estas proposiciones son urgentemente necesarias en respuesta a la transición de una Sociedad de la Información a una Sociedad Post-Información. A través de las proposiciones descritas aquí, nuestro objetivo es construir un terreno común e invitar a la comunidad de investigadores y profesionales de la creatividad a reflexionar, estudiar y cultivar la creatividad como un fenómeno sociocultural.

Howard Gruber was an activist, developmental psychologist, and educator. His life left a rich legacy, especially his view of creativity, a systems perspective on the individual as a force of change. Gruber was inspired by two conflicting views of social change. The first: historical materialism with its analysis of complex and powerful social, economic, and historical forces. The second: individual agency as necessary for human morality. His work with Piaget and his own extensive research on Charles Darwin were part of a quest to understand how individuals can have social impact, given the constraints of social forces and historical context. The purpose of this paper is to consider the educational implications of Gruber’s understanding of creative agency. The first part of the paper analyzes the development of Gruber’s own point of view through scholarship and activism. The second part analyzes Gruber’s evolving systems approach to the creative development of the individual within socio-historical contexts, including current elaborations of Gruber’s work—distributed and participatory views of creativity. The third discusses implications of these views for education. Lifespan developmental, holistic, and distributed views of creativity differ markedly from older ideation-focused approaches in how they support the education of students as active participants in their worlds.

This manifesto, discussed by 20 scholars, representing diverse lines of creativity research, marks a conceptual shift within the field. Socio-cultural approaches have made substantial contributions to the concept of creativity over recent decades and today can provide a set of propositions to guide our understanding of past research and to generate new directions of inquiry and practice. These propositions are urgently needed in response to the transition from the Information Society to the Post-Information Society. Through the propositions outlined here, we aim to build common ground and invite the community of creativity researchers and practitioners to reflect up, study, and cultivate creativity as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

This chapter introduces the concept of participatory creativity as a dynamic approach to invention and innovation that is particularly relevant to the field of education. Here, the focus of creativity studies shifts from individual ideation to interactions within complex sociohistorical systems. While acknowledging the roles played by those who successfully commit exceptional energy and resources to creative projects and new points of view, the participatory approach reframes those previously deemed as creative individuals as participants in larger narratives. These complex processes of change are described as the biographies of ideas. People play various roles as they contribute to these biographies over time. Such roles are social positions that are neither fixed nor uni-dimensional, but dynamic. After framing this position from a theoretical perspective, the authors offer two examples of participatory creativity in action. These examples show how moving the locus of creativity from individual ideation to social participation makes visible the many ways that young people can participate in the development of creative ideas, while also establishing their own unique “profile of participation” and encouraging creative agency—all while honoring students’ diverse knowledge, expertise, background experiences, and sociocultural perspectives. After discussing some of the limitations of this reframing of creativity as a participatory process, the authors conclude by suggesting implications for practice and future research.

A growing number of scholars have come to see creativity, not as a trait or force or process, but as ideology – a set of seldom questioned values and assumptions about individuals and change that characterizes our time while unifying and reinforcing other ideological concepts, such as individualism and neophilia. What does this ideology look like in education? Can educators manage its impact, and even influence its meaning? In other words, inevitably working from within our ideology of creativity, what moves are available once we are aware of the stakes?

The relationship of individuals to groups has been central, and problematic, to the construct of creativity since it emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Psychological research has often used the idea of creativity to differentiate and/or advocate constructs of the individual as creator, but has used a sociocultural criterion— eminence—to assure validity. Researchers and creative practitioners are then caught in a contradiction in psychology’s own terms: using extrinsic outcomes at the level of culture as the starting point to conceptualize individual activities characterized by intrinsic motivation. Even research that focuses on everyday creativity often identifies creativity only through judgment of products. Sociocultural approaches go further, defining creativity as social judgment of individuals’ works. But what does the eminence of relatively few individuals indicate about social questions (changes in discourse and power relations) or about psychological questions (the people in the system)? This article explores an alternative approach, using Foucault’s analysis of the author function, technologies of self and the related technology typology (production, signs, power and self). Comparing Foucault’s analyses to the psychological discourse demonstrates advantages of integrating Foucault’s ideas into the study of creativity. Analyzing the functions of creativity, rather than its ontology or location, provides a unifying framework for the wide array of approaches psychologists have developed. Within that framework individual experiences can be examined in relation to the distorting nature of the author function, needs for production and shifts in power relations, rather than conflated with them.

By definition irony is surprising, an undermining of assumptions in comparing alternative scenarios. It should, therefore, contribute to innovative planning, especially when questioning assumptions...

Humanistic analyses of creativity spoke stirringly about the possibilities of life with optimism and courage. Extending the tone that Kurt Goldstein set, these were heroic narratives of human potential. Today, humanistic constructs are not at the leading edge of psychological research in creativity, but their ideals remain implicit in much of that research, influential in clinical applications and readily familiar in the broader culture. To think seriously about creativity, it is important to consider the controversies to which the humanistic theories contributed and the new ones they posed.

The story of the development of creativity theories covered in previous chapters provides a basis for thinking, not just about the particular theories, but also about the relation of individuals to their cultural contexts. Every theorist profiled developed a distinct, individual perspective on creativity. Sigmund Freud was a bold thinker who constantly challenged others’ and his own ideas, even though he did not take well to his colleagues’ deviations from his model. J. P. Guilford’s original call for the study of creativity, speaking to an audience dominated by behaviorists and psychometricians, was a bold move. It was part of an even bigger, though not wholly successful, project to disprove the existence of a general intelligence factor and replace it with a broader, more nuanced view of intelligence. The humanistic psychologists exemplified the high aspirations they preached. Howard Gruber went to Geneva to meet Jean Piaget on his own initiative and then helped promote Piaget in America, helped start the cognitive revolution, and produced a groundbreaking study of Charles Darwin’s thinking. Patricia Stokes left a successful career in advertising to pursue psychology and, even then, took an unusual path to the study of creativity through behaviorism. And a directionless teenager in the aftermath of World War II, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, stumbled onto a field that responded to his questions about the world. Then he came to America to study psychology, where his research on flow and his sociocultural model would have wide impact.

When J. P. Guilford proposed that American psychology take up the study of creativity in 1950, he defined creativity as behaviors that came from creative personalities. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, Guilford’s focus was on cognitive traits contributing to ideation, but the larger challenge was to understand the overall creative personality. Other theorists have looked at creativity as essential to personality development. The humanistic psychologists who defined and promoted the concept of self-actualization have been particularly influential in this category, going beyond how creativity produces ideas and considering how it could be part of personal fulfillment.

Participatory views of creativity, including the emerging participatory synthesis described in Chapter 8, have some advantages over previous theories of creativity. The synthesis includes collaborative and field roles that were previously considered marginal to creativity. Like other participatory views, this synthesis promises to resolve some of the more problematic dichotomies that have arisen within creativity research, such as views of tradition and novelty as definitively oppositional and individuals and culture as inherently antagonist. Importantly, this emerging synthesis also aligns with much of the experience of everyday life in the early twenty-first century.

The theories of creativity covered so far have focused on individuals, as idea generators and problems solvers in Chapters 2 and 3, and then as self-actualizing organisms and existential individuals in Chapters 4 and 5. As previously discussed, all creativity theories concern people, ideas and change in the world but to varying degrees and differing conclusions. This chapter and the next cover theories that focus more directly on changing the world. This chapter discusses theories of individual, cognitive development across lifespan with emphasis on how people make contributions to their domains of expertise. Chapter 7 examines sociocultural theories, the social dynamics of change in groups and across history. Chapter 8 then discusses the worldmaking implications for both sets of theories.

Defining creativity has been a daunting challenge for psychology. The concept originates in culture, and it brings to research the breadth of meaning that it occupies in larger cultural discourses. Social scientists must operationalize a definition in order to use their empirical methodologies, which is a reductive process. Even as the researchers work to define their topic, however, the everyday use of the term can expand, making it a moving target. Creativity has been addressed as a component of philosophy (for example, Bergson, 1907/1998; Nietzsche, 1882/1910), economics (for example, Christensen, 1997/2003; Schumpeter, 2008), psychology (see Chapters 2, 4, 6 and 7), business management (for example, Osborn, 1948; Wright, Woock & Lichtenberg, 2008), education (for example, Beghetto & Kaufman, 2010), urban planning (Florida, 2005), artistic development, self-help (for example, Booth, 2001; Tharp & Reiter, 2003/2006) and spiritual practice (for example, Cameron, 2007). Furthermore, the social scientists’ research and theories contribute to the expansion of the idea, producing a complex set of looping effects (Hacking, 1995). Psychologists offer a particular operationalization, and their colleagues respond positively and negatively, expanding the idea. People then take on and apply the expanded set of ideas, integrating them into their current uses of the concept in ways that the social scientists may not have considered. Even among psychological constructs, which are often subject to this kind of looping effect, creativity stands out as particularly challenging.

‘Thinking outside the box’ is possibly the best known description of creativity. Metaphors can powerfully influence thinking (Gruber & Davis, 1988; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and this metaphor is rich with implications. It responds to a number of the philosophical questions that have made the concept of creativity important, as discussed in Chapter 1. What is the nature of change? By this common metaphor creative change is an escape from constraints. The old and new are clearly delineated and mutually exclusive. What vision of the self is implied? The ‘outside-the-box’ imperative assumes, and applies primarily to, individuals. People have to get outside of the assumptions they hold to see things differently. The self who is thinking outside the box is, therefore, continually conflicted. What he or she has assumed, believed or learned becomes ‘the box’ from which to escape. As a reflection of received knowledge, the box is also an expression of what culture holds to be true. The individual must escape both self and cultural conventions. Only a person seen as a self-contained unit can move, not only from context to context, but also to the non-context of ‘outside’. Context, culture, habits, experiences or even beliefs cannot be constitutive of the self who is given this mission.

At the end of World War II, the ground was fertile for making creativity a focus for psychological research, as well as a powerful social concept, first in the Cold War and then in global culture. That year Max Wertheimer’s Productive Thinking, which included a series of case studies based on Gestalt theory, was published posthumously. Abraham Maslow, inspired by Wertheimer, Kurt Goldstein, Alfred Adler and others, had just published his first piece on human motivation, prominently linking creativity to human actualization. J. P. Guilford left his role as chief of the U.S. Army Psychological Testing Unit, personally convinced that there is no such thing as a general intelligence factor. Five years later he would give the presidential address to the American Psychological Association, calling for the psychological study of creativity. Carl Rogers had developed a new approach to clinical practice at Rochester and accepted an invitation from the University of Chicago to set up a counseling center. Over the next 40 years he would have extraordinary influence on the fields of counseling and therapy and, like Maslow, would link creativity to self-actualization. And a young Howard Gruber, having finished his tour of duty in the army, more convinced than ever about the need to change the world.

Controversies about what creativity is; how it works; what the roles of ideation, perception and unconscious might be; who creative people are; and how and whether creativity should be measured — all these debates are already evident (and we have just begun the story of creativity research). These controversies begin and end, of course, well beyond the field of psychology. As much as any construct that psychology studies, creativity has practical applications in many directions. The significance and use of the theories can be very confusing, however.

Humanity faces unprecedented social, economic, political and ecological challenges. Old ways have proven inadequate. Our problems call for new solutions. Today’s Edisons, Ghandis, Curies and Picassos will be essential to making a sustainable future of prosperity and peace. Just as the world desperately needs creativity, our economy demands it. To participate and succeed in shaping the future everyone must be free to achieve his or her creative potential. Doing so will be not only good for the world but will also bring happiness and a sense of fulfillment as people exercise this most innately human aspect of their being.

In the Preface, I wrote about discussions with graduate students in my classes on the development of creativity at a school of education. Those discussions have been crucial to the viewpoint expressed in this analysis of the ideology of creativity, especially its identification of pragmatic functions. In line with the participatory synthesis, the concepts presented here have emerged from participation in collaborative networks where I acted in the official role of professor, as well as the longer-term creative roles of producer (instigator and sustainer of the enterprise), provocateur and curator. In that process many artifacts of the material world played important roles, from the institutional spaces where classes and advanced readings groups met to art materials students used to schematize ideas to, of course, books that convey thinking from one context to others.