Fostering creativity

We know creativity is important, but how do we teach it? Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have a fascinating article in Newsweek that is a superb advertisement for Montessori education. It posits, with extensive citation to back it up, that the increasing use of standardized curricula and testing is leading to decreased creativity in the U.S..

Of course you don’t teach creativity. Indeed, the arts, which are typically thought of as the first avenue for developing creativity, have no monopoly on the ability.

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

Creativity can be developed with practice. When we’re being creative the brain starts by shifting through a whole bunch of different, vaguely relevant ideas at the same time. At some point some these ideas click together as the brain quickly recognizes some pattern and it focuses, focuses, focuses, encapsulating the pattern into some new insights and evaluating its possible effectiveness. It’s this mental shifting of gears from vague to precise, and the ability to focus attention on the specific problem that we improve on with practice. How:

… alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

They outline the steps to a project that practices creative thinking to solve solve a problem:

  • Start with fact-finding – what do we need to know to solve the problem.
  • Next scope out the possible problems.
  • Generate ideas.
  • Identify the best ideas.

Here the steps alternate from divergent thinking to convergent, general idea collection to focused thinking. They generate facts and ideas, then evaluate them rigorously. Creativity requires both types of thinking because either one is ineffective on its own.

In Montessori

The foundation for fostering this type of creativity in the classroom lies in developing a safe community. Clear rules reduce anxiety but leave room for exploration and curiosity. In the language of Montessori, this translates to developing a prepared environment and allowing freedom within boundaries.

Bronson and Merryman say this about the teacher:

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

And they note this about the students:

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

I really like how the authors integrate the cognitive and neuroscience research into the article, to the great benefit of the more detail oriented among us. I always find remarkable how all this new science just continues to demonstrate Maria Montessori’s perceptiveness. The Montessori method is fundamentally designed to foster creativity.

This is a clear argument for the Montessori Method. I’ll certainly use this for my parent presentations and recruiting. As a teacher, however, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the importance of creating space for creativity. I like the way Bronson and Merryman put it:

In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished. – Bronson and Merryman, 2010.

Montessori Science Fiction

Mirable by Janet Kagan

One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.

M. A. Buss' model of the kangaroo-rex. Note the sharp pointy teeth and claws.

Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.

The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.

The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.

I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.

Nuclear explosions

The history of the second half of the 20th century is interlaced with the history nuclear weapons. From ending the Second World War in the Pacific to mutually assured destruction to the conflict between India and Pakistan. It’s fascinating how you can interpret that history from video above showing the relative timing of the nuclear explosions. It also interesting to note just how many nukes were exploded and by whom. Wired magazine has a good article about the video, and I’ve posted previously about tying nuclear weapons into both the Natural and Social sciences.

FreeRice – donate food with your vocabulary skills

Donate rice by answering vocabulary questions.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) has the site FreeRice.com where for each vocabulary question you answer correctly it donates 10 grains of rice to the WFP. The site is quite ingenious, it uses the money generated by the banner adds at the bottom of the page to buy the rice. It was created by John Breen and donated to the WFP.

The site is going beyond vocabulary into other subjects such as geography (identify country capitals and countries), identifying chemical symbols, art, language and math (pre-algebra).

They also have a nice video of the rice being distributed to refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.

Finding meaning in video games

If we can use music videos as a shorter proxy for introducing literature responses, then what about other types of media. On The Media had an interesting interview with the Tom Bissell, the author of “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter“. Bissell argues that there is art worthy of criticism in video games, but there is not nearly as much as there should be.

I tend to like violent games, the same reason that I’ve worked as a war correspondent, the same reason I wrote a book about a war. I’m interested in violence.

That said, there are some games that have interesting stuff to say about violence and some games that just treat it mindlessly. And, you know both can be fun. But the ones that really affect me are the ones that actually try to address the subject. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.

In particular, he highlights “Far Cry 2”:

There’s a game called Far Cry 2 that takes place in a contemporary African civil war. It’s extremely beautiful.

And yet, it is just the most unrelentingly savage game I think I’ve ever played.

Most games that are violent give you the gun, push you in the direction of the bad guys and say hey, go kill all those guys, they’re bad. You’ll be rewarded. Good job.

Far Cry 2 does something really confounding. Going through the game, quote, “getting better at killing,” the game kind of introduces slowly that you’re actually not helping things, that, in fact, you’re kind of the problem.

Everything you’re doing is just making this conflict worse. So by the end of the game you’re just a wreck. You’re progressing through the game because that’s what the game’s asked you to do, but it’s also throwing all of this stuff back at you that’s actually shaming you a little bit for being participant in this virtual slaughter. And I love that about it. – Tom Bissell on On The Media.

Is he reading too much into violent video games trying to justify his own habits? Perhaps, but he does have a point.

When my students were telling me about Call Of Duty:Modern Warfare 2, one of the first things we talked about was the infamous airport mission. The player is an undercover agent with a terrorist organization and has to participate in shooting civilians in an attack on an airport. Jesse Stern, the scriptwriter for the video game says the mission was intended to be provocative:

People want to know. As terrifying as it is, you want to know. And there’s a part of you that wants to know what it’s like to be there because this is a human experience. These are human beings who perpetrate these acts, so you don’t really want to turn a blind eye to it. You want to take it apart and figure out how that happened and what, if anything, can be done to prevent it. Ultimately, our intention was to put you as close as possible to atrocity. As for the effect it has on you, that’s not for us to determine. Hopefully, it does have an emotional impact and it seems to have riled up a lot of people in interesting ways. Some of them good. Some of them bad.
– Jesse Stern in Gaudiosi, 2009.

There is a difference between vicariously becoming a participant in violence when a novelist lets us see the world through the eyes of a killer, and actually having to pull the virtual trigger yourself, but it seems as much one of degree as anything else. While I’ve seen some initial evidence that violent video games are bad, I’m not familiar at all with the evidence that violent novels are also bad.

Perhaps, however, when we start treating video games, particularly violent ones, in as pedantic a way as literature is sometimes treated, maybe they’ll lose some of their appeal. Or maybe, they’ll just become more educational experiences. Stern again:

When we tested the level, it was interesting. …people would get angry or sad or disgusted and immediately wonder what the Hell was going on here. And then after a few moments of having that experience, they would remember that they were in a video game and they would let go. Every single person in testing opened fire on the crowd, which is human nature. It feels so real but at the same time it’s a video game and the response to it has been fascinating. I never really knew you could elicit such a deep feeling from a video game, but it has.