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JUDITH B. AlTER Experiencing Creating and Creativity in the Classroom "Creativity" or "creative" are discussed in the literature variously as an attitude, a process, and an achievement as in making original products (Barron & Harrington, 1981). Perkins (1981) explains how creativity and creating are different "Whereas creativity involves traits that make a person creative, creating calls upon many resources not intrinsically creative". There is a classroom experience that enables students, of almost any age, to grapple with the mystery, fun, and features of their own process of "creating" while workingon two kinds of" creative" products. The experience requires a large number of approximately 100 small objects. Toy stores often sell bags of miniature plastic toys, 1/4" -1/2" in size. A minimum of seven to eight objects per student is necessary for the exercise to be interesting and enjoyable. Uttle plastic toys are not the only objects that are usable for this experience. A wide variety of small objects may be used from anyone's junk drawer in a desk, a workbench, a kitchen drawer, or a toy box. It is essential that a number of the objects be identical. Children can clean up the school yard and sit on the grass and carry out this exercise using the "trash" they have picked up. The experience requires approximatelyone to one and a halfhours. One fourth of the time is spent dividing the toys or objects into categories; another fourth is spent in having the students tell a storythey make up using all their objects; the next segment of the time is spent having the students compare the two activities and describe their feelings about doing them; and the last part involves the students writing down their own "creative" process when composing their stories. This author has been using this experience/technique for fifteen years in classes of all ages, including elementary school children, parent/teacher meetings for preschools, elementaryand high schools and extension classes for teachers. Initially, it was used in a graduateclass in Cognitive Development. Because during the entire term, only a single two hour class was scheduled for the topic of "creativity," the experience, in a consolidated way, synthesized and concretely illustrated the salient features of the creative process and the personality characteristics used when creating. This brief experience encapsulates many of the issues debated in the field while introducing students to the entire subject of creativity. This paper reports on the results of directing this experience in college and graduate level classes for the past three years. 162 Volume 25 Number 2 Second Quarter 1991

Experiencing Creating and Creativity in the Classroom

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Page 1: Experiencing Creating and Creativity in the Classroom

JUDITH B. AlTER

Experiencing Creating and Creativityin the Classroom

"Creativity" or "creative" are discussed in the literature variously as an attitude, aprocess, and an achievement as in making original products (Barron & Harrington,1981). Perkins (1981) explains how creativity and creating are different "Whereascreativity involves traits that make a person creative, creating calls upon many resourcesnot intrinsically creative". There is a classroom experience that enables students, ofalmost any age, to grapple with the mystery, fun, and features of their own process of"creating" while working on two kinds of"creative" products. The experience requires alarge number of approximately 100 small objects. Toy stores often sell bags ofminiature plastic toys, 1/4" -1/2" in size. A minimum of seven to eight objects perstudent is necessary for the exercise to be interesting and enjoyable. Uttle plastic toysare not the only objects that are usable for this experience. A wide variety of smallobjects may be used from anyone's junk drawer in a desk, a workbench, a kitchendrawer, or a toy box. It is essential thata numberofthe objects be identical. Children canclean up the school yard and sit on the grass and carryout this exercise using the "trash"they have picked up.

The experience requires approximatelyone to one and a halfhours. One fourth of thetime is spent dividing the toys or objects into categories; another fourth is spent inhaving the students tell a story they make up using all their objects; the next segment ofthe time is spent having the students compare the two activities and describe theirfeelings about doing them; and the last part involves the students writing down their own"creative" process when composing their stories.

This author has been using this experience/technique for fifteen years in classesofallages, including elementary school children, parent/teacher meetings for preschools,elementary and high schools and extension classes for teachers. Initially, it was used in agraduate class in Cognitive Development. Because during the entire term, onlya singletwo hour class was scheduled for the topic of "creativity," the experience, in aconsolidated way, synthesized and concretely illustrated the salient features of thecreative process and the personality characteristics used when creating. This briefexperience encapsulates many of the issues debated in the field while introducingstudents to the entire subject of creativity. This paper reports on the results of directingthis experience in college and graduate level classes for the past three years.

162 Volume 25 Number 2 Second Quarter 1991

Page 2: Experiencing Creating and Creativity in the Classroom

THE EXPERIENCE The instructions to the students for the first halfof the exercise are:Categories (a) have the students divide their pile of toys (objects) into two

categories. Once everyone has done this, (b) have each studentname his or her categories and (c) write all the categories on the blackboard. Somestudents will naturally identify the same category. Examples are: square or round; forplay or for work; paper or plastic; having lived or never having lived. Throughout theentire experience, the students keep and work with the same pile of objects with whichthey start. Then have the students again divide the same pile of objects into two new .categories which have yet not been written on the blackboard and write the newcategories on the blackboard. Repeat the procedure five to six more times. Eachrepetition may take a little longer because the categories may be less obvious, thoughthis is not always the case.

Students oftenstart with the most obvious categories such as the uses ofthe objects,their relative sizes,their shapes, their origin (manmade or natural), their ability to moveindependentlyor not, where they live or move (water,land, air). Soon students challengethemselves to go beyond their primary impressions of the objects and examine theobjects from differentperspectives such as:their properties -textures, colors, structures,and dimensions; their workings -ability to taste, smell, feel, destroy, entertain; theirqualities· aesthetic, gender, age. dynamic; their values - their uses, such as for war orpeace; their workings, such as reparable or disposable, fueled or autonomous.

The process of discovering new categories becomes one of problem finding alongwith problem solving. The students challenge themselves to examine the objects frommanyperspectives. Students (and teachers) are often relieved to seethat objects do notjust fit into one category but maybe understood from manypoints ofview and thereforefit into a very large number of categories. In an extension course for elementaryteachers. a mathematics specialistdescribed her predicament. When she held up a redsquare block and asked the children, "What is this?" they would say it was red, square,small, smooth, had comers, and had six sides. She wanted them to see it as a cube andso she would sayno to all the othercorrect answers. This exercise helped her seethat allthose answers were correct yet the children had not found the word of her category.

When one student in a class finds a different way of looking at the objects, the newtype of category stimulates other students to look in new ways.This helps many of thestudents to shift their perceptual"set" and then they also find other perspectives fromwhich to examine the objects. Recently, students in college and graduate level classeshave found between 40 and 66 categories with the same 100 miniature toys. Studentsfind categories which represent their current academic and creative foci. The studentsat M.I.T.• students in the College of Fine Arts at UCLA and parents of nursery schoolchildren found many categories that other groups did not discover.

Stories After the students seem to have exhausted their ingenuities infinding new categories, ask them to make a story using all their

(objects) toys. If necessary, encourage the students to be as fanciful as they want. Afterabout three to five minutes, everyone should have completed their story. Then, in tum.have each student tell his or her story to the others.

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ANAlYSIS OfPRODUCTS AND

PAOCESSES

The forms of the stories vary widely. Some stories have a single event which uses allthe objects in a snapshot narrative. Some stories take the form of an adventure story;others a life story; others a battle with winners and losers. Some stories have moralssuch as forworld peace, the ecologyofthe earth orgood biumphing over evil.Some arevery funny, and others very serious. Some students use all the objects as they actuallyare, and other students make their objects into imaginary and magical wonders thathelp or hinder a hero or heroine. Students enjoy the story telling very much andespecially appreciate the wide variety of stories' forms their fellow students use.

The activities of categorizing, story making and telling give thestudents an immediate experience on which to draw during thenext two steps in the exercise for experiencing and examining"creating". Ask the students to compare and contrast the two

experiences and to describe their feelings when doing each of the activities. Write all theanswers and ideas on the blackboard and include the contradictory ideas in columnsentitled categories, stories and similarities.

Moststudents conclude that he categorizing involves grounding the objects in realityaboutwhich their is general agreement They describe the process as logical, scientific,analytical, objective, empirical, limited, judgmental, reasoned, factual, right/wrong,abstract, literal, predetermined, verifiable, conforming, obvious, extemal. Their feelingsabout actually doing the sorting vary from very positive to very negative. Some find itboring, and some enjoythe challenge offinding newcategories. Some find it easy,andothers find it difficult Foreign students often have difficulty finding precise words to .describe their categories and therefore, for them, the categorizing can be more difficultthan making the story. Many students feel they need to be literal and judgmental andtherefore feel the categorizing is limiting.

Students often agree about the main features of making the story, and they havemore to say about this part of-the experience than they doabout the categorizing. Theyall say that in making a story they are finding connections, joining the objects togetherinto an entity, a whole. Theyfeel the possibilities are wide open. They are free to use theirimaginations and therefore the stories are unique, one of a kind and "creative". Theyjudge the appropriateness ofall aspects of their stories intuitively, intemally, "personally"and subjectively. Meaning, they say,can be literal, symbolic or imaginary; they are freetochoose. They can be flexible in their choices because the logic of the story comes fromwithin the story itself.

The feelings students experience during the process of making and telling the storyemphasize freedom. They enjoy the freedom of doing anything they want with theobjects. They find it a "richer" experience than dividing the objects into categories.Some students say they find it challenging, more difficult and scary. They are scaredmost often by the telling of the story, the "performance". Others say they were moremotivated to make a good story than to find original categories. There are students whofeel that their story could be improved, that they need more time because they workbetter without the pressure of getting a product ready quickly. A few say that the storychanged as they told it and did not come out the way they planned it

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The Journal Of Creatfve BehavIor

The students are surprised to find many similarities between the two activities. Bothinvolve finding relationships, and both require separateness. Both activities involveorganizing the objects; both are challenging; and, in both, the students are responsiblefor achieving a result Both are stimulating and arouse the students' curiosities. Theyareboth verbal activities and self·judgement is used in both. Meaning must be understoodbyothers in both, and they both can involve the imagination. Some students identifytheemotional experience of both activities as exciting, fun, heightened. They also realizethat both activities allow them freedom. Some students describe how relaxed they feeldoing these activities, especially in contrast to a"regular" academic class.They like thatthe activity produces visible results.

The focus of the last part of this experience is on each student's"creative" process.Ask the students to write down the steps they went through to make their story. Havethem record what they did first, then what they did next and so on. When they havecompleted their writing, again write several students' series of steps on the blackboardand then compare them. The variety of steps depends on the student's self·analyticalability; they vary in the amount of detail the students recall and record.

The greatest differences among their descriptions of their processes are where thestudents start their stories: some find the end first or are instantly inspired in a 'gestalt'manner and "know" just what the entire sequence will be. Others arbitrarily start bychoosing a "main character" and just take the objects in some kind of random order.Others study their objects for a while, trysome ideas and then tryothers until they findone that feels right When asked, manyof the students realize that the process they usedto make their story closely resembles the process they use in their other activities suchas writing a paper, choreographing a dance, or choosing an evening's entertainmentOthers say their process varies with the task.

WHAT IS This experience accomplishes severalpurposes. One major featureACCOMPlISHED of this experience is that it illustrates the relationship of the

"creative" thinking to "analytical" or "logical" thinking and, there­fore, challenges students' simplistic dichotomy of "reasoned" versus "imagined."Although students' categories remain testable in reality, they see the many newperspectives from which the objects can be understood. The students recognize theunusual categories as "imaginative" and "creative". They are thinking "laterally" (deBono, 1970) while problem solving. The group process introduces them to "brain­storming" (Adams, 1979) and thus they see howthe variety ofviewpoints can stimulatetheir own inventiveness by encouraging "perceptual shifts". "Brainstorming" is not,effective for all students because some students say that their originalityemerges betterwithout competition or time pressure (Weisberg, 1986).

Another issue the experience illustrates is the relationship between problem findingand problem solving. Getzels and Csikszentrnihalyi (1976) suggest that the mostcreative part of a problem is the problem finding part They suggest that, after findingthe problem, the next step is working out the method to solve the problem, and then,soMng the problem is, compared to the first two parts, the easiest part of the problem.Making the story requires students to choose a plot, the problem, and solve it in an event

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or sequence of events. The problem finding aspect is obvious in making the story. The"problem finding partof the categorizing activity is lessobvious:when they choose to findan newperspective from which to lookat the objects, they have found a newproblem tosolve. Both parts of this experience enable students to understand that the problemfinding and method finding part of solving a problem are repeated over and over.

This experience illustrates the connections between "creative" and logical" thinkingand problem finding and problem solving. Students experience the creative aspect of"logical" problems when they find unusual categories and the logical aspect of"creative" problems when they figure out the bestsequence of events in their stories.

The categorizing activity encourages students to examine the objects in the mannerused by the mostcreative studentartists in Getzelsand Csikszentmihalyi's study(1976).They say:

The more objects one manipulates, the more likely it is that one will discoveramong them new relationships, contrasting features-unanticipated blsocia­tions...Similarly, a thorough exploration through different sensory channelsmay lead to the discovery of previously hidden possibilities in even the mostfamiliar objects, and hence result in the formulation ofmore original problems.

Some students acknowledge that this close and thorough examination of theirobjects contributed to the story making because they were very familiar with theirobjects. Others saythat the examination of the objects had no influence on their story.

This experience provides students an opportunity tap the characteristics which areunderstood to be shared by most highly creative people. Amabile's creativity researchfocuses on motivational factors. She lists the following characteristics that highlycreative people possess: a high degree of self-discipline in matters concerning work. anability to delay gratification, perseverance in the face of frustration, independence ofjudgement, tolerance of ambiguity, a high degree or autonomy, an absence of sex-rolestereotyping, an internal locus of control, a willingness to take risks, and a high level ofself·initiated, task-oriented striving forexcellence (Amabile, 1983). The time constraintsof this classroom experience obviate students from tapping the characteristics, listedabove, which are related to long periods oftime, yet, in this concentrated time, they canexperience how they use many of these characteristics of their personalities.

Tardif and Sternberg (1988) compare several researchers' lists of characteristics ofcreative people. Most agree on the following: creative in a particular domain, thinkmetaphorically, flexible and a skilled decision maker, alert to novelty and gaps inknowledge, uses existing knowledge as a base for new ideas (Sternberg, 1~). Thisintroductoryexperience enables students to seehowmanyofthese characteristics theyused during the two activities.

This experience enables students to analyze the steps of their "creative" processesand then critically challenge some ofthe ideas in the traditional creativity literature suchas Walles's (1954) four stages of the creative process. Some students do not incubatetheir story; some say they did not study the objects (prepare) before starting to maketheir story; some have several possible and equally satisfying solutions and, for some,the "verification" stage is, in fact, the same as the "illumination" stage. When thestudents hear several others report their series of steps and note the wide variation of

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detail and emphasis, they gain insight into the limits of self-report as a sole means ofidentifying the steps ofthe process. This part of the experience enables them to seetherelationship between "inspiration", and careful analysis, "reasoning", in making theirstories.

They gain insight into the criteria by which they make the series of choices whendeciding how to arrange the objects to become a narrative. Some recognize that theysimply "know" when they make the "right" choice. They see how Barron andHarrington's (1981) characteristics ofcreative people: impulsive, self-confident, valuingaesthetic experience, trusting their intuition are operative when making the series ofrapid choices.

Some students observe their processes with enough detail to report some of theactivities that David Perkins describes in The Mind's Best Work (1981), especiallyplanning and undoing. Others who report that the story changed in the telling,experience the undoing and redoing process as driven from inside, not "deliberate",autonomous. They feel the heightened level of their performance as "inspired","creative", magical."

This introductory experience has not been carried out in the form of an experimentWere it within that format, the following questions might be addressed: which group ofstudents, those who say they were affected by closely examining the objects or thosewho say they were not, were the ones who incorporated the most fanciful, "make

. believe" ideas into their stories? Would their stories be judged as the most original?What is the relationship between the personality characteristics of the students and thenumber of fanciful and unusual choices they make in both parts of the experience?Perkins (Sternberg, 1988) reports that"measures of ideational fluency and flexibilityapparently do not relate reliably to real world creative achievement within a discipline"(Mansfield & Busse, 1981; Wallach, 1976). A comparison of unusual categories andstories of different groups, such as physicians, architects, businesspeople, etc., mightyield information about domain specific styles of creativity. Are the most creative storymakers the most creative categorizers? Do either of these creative products relate to the.areas in which the groups are required to be creative; that is, do creative story makerschoreograph the most creative dances?

This classroom experience in creating allows students to relate the "creative" aspectsof the categorizing activity to those in the story making and the "reasoned" aspects ofthe story making to those in the categorizing. The experience introduces students tomanypertinent issuesofongoing research in the field ofcreativityand at the same timeenables them to challenge some ofthe traditional and incompletelyunderstood notionsthat remain in the popular literature and pervade daily parlance.

REfERENCES ADAJIIS, J. L Conceptual blockbusting. NYC: Norton, 1979.AMABIl..E, T. M. Thesocial psychology ofcreativity. NYC: Springer·Verlag, 1983.

BARRON, F. & HARRINGTON, D. Creativity, intelligenceand personality. Annual review ofpsychology, 32,439476.

de BONO, E. Lateral thinking: Creativity step by step. NYC: HarperColophon books, 1970.GETZELS,J.W.& CSIKSZENTMIHALVI, M. Thecreative vision, a longitudinalstudyofproblem finding in art

NYC:John Wiley& Sons, 1976.

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PERKINS, D. The mind's best work. Cambridge,WI:. Harvard University Press, 1981.PERKINS, D. The possibility of invention. In Sternberg, R. J. (ed.) 1988. The nature of creativity.

Cambridge,MA: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988.STERNBERG, R. J. (ed.). Thenatureofcreativity, contemporarypsyc:hologkaJperspectives. Cambridge,WI:.

CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988.TARDIF,T. Z.& STERNBERG, R.J. What do we know about creativity? In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), 1988. The

nature ofcreativity. Cambridge,WI:. CambridgeUniversity Press. 1988.WAUAS, G,. Stages of control. from The art of thought NYC: HarcourtBraceJovanovich, Inc., 1954.WEISBERG, R.W. Creativity, genius and other myths. NYC: W. H. Freeman£, Co., 1986.

Judith B.Alter, Ed.D., University of Californiaat LosAngeles, CA 90024.

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