Tag Archive for ‘creativity’ at Students 2.0

Tag Archive for 'creativity'

Of Creativity & Art

Published by Morgante Pell on November 19, 2008 in Meta. 5 Comments

This entry is cross-posted from my personal blog. Please direct your responses there.

What is creativity? I doubt many people, including teachers, could give you a good definition. In simplest terms, it is the ability to create. However, I like to use a more specific definition:

Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.

Leonardo da Vinci

Above: Leonardo da Vinci was a master of mixing creativity and art.

The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box. In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.

If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativityUnlocking creativity is a scary proposition in and of itself. Who locked it up in the first place?. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.”

What many school officials and teachers mean by creativity is really art. Art is all about practice and method. Art is about the perfection of technique. Art is about applying techniques rigorously in pursuit of a goal. In short, art is studied action; artificiality in behavior.

Painting yet another landscape is art, and neither is solving a mathematical equation. Both of them involve substantial practice and application of traditional rules.In many ways, art is very similar to science. Make no mistake: both can be very difficult. The level of effort it takes to perfect any art is astounding. However, this is distinct from creativity. Remember, creativity is all about transcending tradition. In many ways, creativity and art are polar opposites.

Actually, creativity and art are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin.Sick of the casual metaphors yet? Creativity is used to think of new ideas and sources of ideas. Art is used to translate those ideas into presentable forms. To create a brilliant work, both creativity and art must be used.

In many ways, schools fail to recognize this. Art is constantly drilled in schools: when not directly transferring content, teachers often focus on teaching new skillsMost skills are really just a combination of practice and knowledge of method, similar to art.. However, very little attention is paid to the application of those skills in novel ways. Writing thousands of 5-paragraph essays will give you perfect form and will make you a very precise writer, but it will not make you a great and innovative one. Translating notes into a science fair board will, optimally, teach art to a degree. However, none of these things will teach creativity. When schools talk about their wealth of creativity, they usually mean art.

To a certain degree, I do not think creativity can be taught. The very nature of it makes creativity unteachable—you cannot teach someone to positively ignore convention, since in doing so they would simply be internalizing another rule. However, creativity can be practiced. Constantly making new ideas teaches you to see which work and which will not. Searching for pattens helps you to see patterns faster in the future. Luckily, art can be taught—and it should be taught. Without art, nobody will respect your creativity. The point is, creativity can be practiced but not taught.

Train

Above: A great example of tilt-shift photography from Vincent Laforet.

The next time you brag about how much creativity you foster, ask yourself if you really mean art.

The Well of Inspiration

Published by Kaelie Giffel on March 9, 2008 in Learning. 21 Comments

The students of Students 2.0 would like to extend a warm welcome to Kaelie Giffel, our newest author. Please enjoy her debut post below.

Inspiration is a fickle thing. Sometimes it hits you like a truck, and other times it swerves off the road to avoid you. I know an art teacher who has a quote about inspiration on his wall as a rule: “Inspiration is lazy. Don’t wait for it.” That has been my inspiration, my drive to continue writing even through the stress of high school.

Writing in high school is like walking through a mine field without getting hurt—it’s difficult, but possible. I find myself making difficult decisions regarding how to spend my time. I have a constant homework load, because of my AP social studies class, and it isn’t something I can put off for a night. It always comes back to haunt me in a failing quiz grade. So, I use class time to write. It took me a few weeks to figure out that English class is the dead zone for writing (much like the dead zone for electronics in Siberia). American literature is bad enough for my brain cells, let alone my creativity.

Everyone in high school has some sort of creative outlet: music, books, writing, athletics, science. (The last two may not seem creative, but I’ve utilized both; they take a different kind of creativity.) Writing and music are the most common. In the middle of writing Tarot Cards and Black Roses, my first novel, someone said something to me that put a halt to the book’s production. She said, “You’re a writer? I am, too! We should share our work!” In that second, the cold truth hit me: I’m not the only teenage writer in the world.

It was an odd thought, because it sounded so general, but it in my mind it was specific. I didn’t mean bloggers, poets, or young journalists; I meant the supernatural writers who delved into the darker part of the world. The thought hurt. It really did. How was I so stupid? Why did I believe that I was unique? My beloved story became just a really big file on my computer that I refused to tend to.

I sulked for two months, trying to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t as unique as I thought I was. At the end of the two months, I got my butt into gear. I wasn’t the only student writer trying to get published, but that was a horrible excuse to use for not writing. I needed to get over myself because the sweet seductress inspiration was calling to me. I was unique because I was fulfilling my dream. I could write a novel and finish it. I had the drive and the endless encouragement of my support network.

Never in my life has someone straight up told me I couldn’t do something. All my friends and relatives want me to be a writer. They think it’s a very good possibility for my career. My dad’s favorite question is, “How’s that novel coming?” Even my teachers have encouraged me. Except once. Early in the year, I told my teacher (in response to a question she asked) that I wanted a career in creative writing. The look she gave me said everything I knew she wouldn’t say aloud. It was a look that whispered, Abandon your dream. That’s not going to happen. That broke my heart. After that day, I picked up my writing with a vengeance.

The best way to motivate a stubborn person is to tell them they can’t. Because they will do exactly what you told them they couldn’t and they will exceed previous expectations. I continued my novel for one reason: to prove I could. That mindset is what propels me through the novel, even when my well of inspiration has dried.

Teaching the Process of Design (or, making student videos interesting)

Published by Anthony Chivetta on January 7, 2008 in Teaching. 48 Comments

As I watch students (myself included, as always) work on video projects for their foreign language, English, or other classes, I see a striking similarity between those videos and my family’s home movies. Just like home movies, most of these student videos are lacking a thesis and a design to support them. As technology allows us to integrate creative projects further into our curriculum, we need to give students the tools to funnel their creative efforts into an effective and cohesive whole.

The need to teach students how to design is not a new idea. Dan Meyer has been posting wonderful lessons from his class on Information Design. Scott S. Floyd in his year-end photo post writes:

While we focus on design being important in educating our youth (or their learning), I have begun to pay particular attention in how things look around me. I think that giving our students the opportunity to understand and appreciate the elements of design will allow them to create better finished products to display their learning.

There are many ways that one can approach design. Practitioners of the visual arts might look at it in terms of the principles of design. My background, however, is in theatre and video production. I will also add that my teacher/mentor Mr. Patrick Huber gets full credit for instilling this process in me.

If you asked a director of a theatrical or video production for the thesis of their production, you would surely get a cogent statement of purpose. It might be as simple as “My production is ‘historically accurate’” or a more grandiose theory about the world we inhabit: “by allowing ones’ ambition, not rationality, to take control of the choices we make, we lead ourselves into our failure” (That Scottish Play) or “our perception of our environment is a function of the people in it and our relationships with them” (The Zoo Story). Once a thesis is decided on, a concept for the production is formed that expresses the thesis and every design decision made during the production serves the thesis. This gives directors (or designers, or actors) a basic structure on which to base their production. Used correctly, a thesis can be the most powerful tool in a designer’s arsenal.

I would argue that the reason watching student videos can at times be excruciatingly painful is that they lack a cohesive design. Often, they represent a hodgepodge of ideas strewn together with very little thought to creating a unified whole. However, when students begin with picking a thesis, and then work from that thesis, a pattern, a design, begins to emerge. When the question for every single decision is “what supports my thesis?” those awkward transitions, strange cuts, and random effects begin to make sense.

Let us take, as an example, foreign language video projects. In my school, it is not uncommon for a foreign language student to be producing a short three- or five-minute video to demonstrate their mastery of the curriculum. Normally, the first “production meeting” starts with the question: “What can our video be about that makes it easy for us to use the required tenses and vocabulary?” And so, a script is written and design decisions are made with one goal in mind: satisfying the requirements. The problem is two-fold: While the video satisfies the requirements, it does so only minimally, and while the students are using the class’s language, they may not be fully expressing an idea with the language.

Rather than simply asking our students to combine video technology with their foreign language, we need to be asking them to use both their foreign language and video technology to express an idea. Asking students to reach beyond the requirements is where the real gold lies: it is when we really start to see how well students can use the tools given to them.

This isn’t, of course, limited to foreign language videos. I would classify student video productions into two categories: (1) videos demonstrating mastery of material (such as the above foreign language example), and (2) videos demonstrating the material (such as a video one might produce for a history class explaining some historical event). In this second case, the purpose of a thesis is simple: to make the video interesting. If students are trying to convey information in a video, they need to hold their audience’s attention. Structuring their video and design decisions around a thesis is a powerful tool for creating a cohesive and powerful piece.

I leave you with a series of questions: How and when do you teach students design skills at your school? What types of design skills do you teach them? Do they have the design skills to effectively utilize the creative mediums you provide them? What attributes have you found make student designs particularly effective?

Edit: Changed the title, and corrected some small errors. ~AJC (2008-01-07)

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