need help with thesis proposal, theme: creativity, idiolect, education

Once can teach the technique of a creative art. One can teach a prospective writer about grammar, handling point of view, motivation, scene construction, effective vs wooden dialog, and many other skills which separate the polished from the naive writer. These may not "teach" creativity, but they can help one use whatever create talents are there better. And then, just as an athlete can develop his or her physical prowess and skills by practice, and often better by guided and critiqued practice (this is what a coach or trainer is for). The same can be done by anyone aspiring to do creative work in whatever field. Such practice probably will not turn a person with little or no talent into a da Vinci, a Rembrandt, a Mark Twain, or even a John Benson. But they will usually maximize the effective creative abilities, whether you call that developing an innate talent or increasing a moderate talent. I incline to think that talent can be nurtured to some extent, and it can surely be stifled or allowed to wither.

In teaching one to use the creative side of their minds, my wife tell all her brand new adult guitar students to keep strumming the guitar while attempting to change chords while playing. Most of these students have never play a guitar before in their life, however in 10 weeks at about an hour and a half lesson a week they walk out of class playing at least 12 songs. Should be mentioned here that most of these students play at a Open Mike night in a local restaurant as part of their graduation ceremonies. Of course we know there is practice involved, but like most practice things at home, I would bet no one practices more then a hour per week.

The reason she is always stressing to keep strumming is that it keeps the student from going to their logical part of their minds and thinking or over thinking how to change chords. She teaches by finger shape rather then the regular method, so with that picture of what their fingers should look like and constantly strumming, the students pick up new chords very fast.

We saw the same method used in a Teaching English as a Second Language course. Attempting to say a sentence in Japanese is very difficult, however after all the students tried to say the sentence the instructor changed tactics. He had all the students bounce a balloon on their hands, up and down by several inches, and while doing so, he had them try to say the Japanese sentence. An amazing number of the students could say the sentence correctly, even in a acceptable accent. Once again, all he did was keep the students out of their logical sides and into their creative sides.

This does not teach creativity, but it does show a method that is used to teach people to get out of their logical sides and into their creative sides. If one can or could expand on these types of methods to teach others to think with the non-logical side of their brains, then I would perhaps argue that creativity could be taught.

CS

In the classroom, brainstorming, in small group situations, about a given image is designed to expand individual thought processes and foster further creativity. Many students, even if not innately creative, will come up with good ideas for fictional stories when presented with a visual image, especially when the picture is discussed with peers. I guess this works a bit like the inspiration provided to LSF authors by the LSF picture themes I guess!! These often inspire ideas in the 'blocked' writers among us!

Agree with you totally Don. Student success, & motivation to achieve success, is determined by the educational system / systems they attend, and parental support / encouragement, to a large degree, whether or not the person is innately gifted.

Oh so true! My kids always seemed to enjoy the boxes more than the item inside when small. One can only wonder if modern technology is partly / or largely responsible for stifling natural creativity.

Isn't nurturing and developing the modern, fundamental philosophy behind primary/middle school teaching? Having trained and worked in the field I would have to say 'yes'.

wow. thanks for all the epic-awesome replies. i never thought that this thread would have garnered any responses at all.

quick shoutout to canadianspankee - the concept of splitting brain space is interesting. actively engaging/distracting yourself to achieve the right balance for a creative state is something which i'm familiar with. i tend to play endless dramas (like gilmore girls!) in the background whilst writing academic essays, it somehow forces my brain to concentrate and focus more on what i'm writing/reading.

i don't doubt that creativity is innate. i strongly believe that everyone is creative. the preconception of creativity has always been to do with the arts, but my masters thesis advocated creativity in administration and management as well. creativity can be applied to the sciences and management - creative problem solving, thinking out of the box, etc. are all examples of innovation through intelligence and cognition.

the idea is that is when we refer to these wonderfully creative things, can we somehow codify how the idea was conceived in the first place and the process used to develop the end product? for example, newton and the apple falling on his head - the eureka moment - he was inspired by the moment of the apple falling on his head to develop the concept of gravity. but what about those of us who aren't as lucky as newton to have an apple hit us on the head to develop the next great innovation?

how to we learn to be inspired?
how do we teach people to be inspired?
is what inspires us determined by our background/surroundings/interests?
how do we get from inspiration to end product?

Creativity to me implies imagination and originality; to try to teach creativity therefore seems to me to be a contradiction as teaching implies conformity to a set of rules. It is the antithesis of creativity. Creativity is innate - at best you can foster it and create the conditions that allow it to flourish, but (in my opinion) you cannot teach it. Children when they start school at the age of 4 or 5 are wonderfully imaginative and creative, but when they finish 10 or 15 years later the imaginative spark has been knocked out of most of them by the education system. To survive they know they have to pass exams which unfortunately requires them to conform (i.e. not get things wrong) rather than be creative. If you wish to encourage creativity, you need to restructure the education system to do as little damage as possible. (However, imagination without some factual basis to build upon is no good either, so you also need to strike some sort of balance).

BashfulBob states the problem well. You need creativity in order to come up with something new but then you need technical skills to be able to make that idea into something useful. For example a pianist may come up with a brilliant composition in his mind but he has to have the fundamental skill on the piano to be able to play it. And that skill comes from boring practice, practice, practice.

Unfortunately most people, although not all, in the education system are SJ temperament types. That is, they are the type of people who follow rules while the creative students are the iconoclasts who are forever questioning the rules. This leads to an invertible conflict as the teachers try to force the most creative students to forget their "silliness" and just do things by the book.

That is one of the reasons that it is difficult to teach creativity, teachers using standard teaching methods stifle it. It's like a dog trying to teach a kangaroo to move fast.

"No! No! Don't hop! Keep all four limbs on the ground. I don't understand why you can't just follow my directions and do it in the standard way."

One tragedy is that some people have creativity that they just can't express. I have read several terribly written stories - and I mean terribly. Tense confusion, mismatched verbs (ex "Then I does that"), vague pronouns, terrible punctuation, etc - but some of those stories had wonderful plots. I could tell the person writing them had stories to tell but didn't know how to write.

When I see something like that (after checking to make sure it's not a ESL writer) I do everything I can to encourage them to learn about sentence structure. To gain the tools that they need in order to craft the stories they are trying to tell. That creative spark, the idea behind the story, it often matters more than knowing the rules of the English language. That's why so few English teachers have bestselling books; most have a mastery of the tools but lack the spark to write something interesting.

(Note - the reason I used the word "most" is because some people have gone from teaching English to writing novels, but they are a minority among authors. An author who has a story to tell can find an editor to shape his words into something more understandable, but an editor rarely has the ability to write original work.)

Goodgulf