The Journal of the National Art Education Association: March 2010 by flavia bastos

ART

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The Journal of the National Art Education Association March 2010 Volume 63, No. 2 $9.00

creativity considering

“Art educators have begun

reconsidering

a range

of art concepts and principles to better support contemporary art education….

the idea of creativity

also needs to be reconsidered for this time.”

INSIDE: • Rethinking Creativity • Outside and On the Box • Digital Creativity • 21-st Century Artroom • Interdisciplinary Design Studio AND MORE…

ART

The Journal of the National Art Education Association March 2010 Volume 63, No. 2

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EDITOR: Flávia Bastos EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Kelli Aquila Instructional Resources Coordinator: Rina Kundu EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD: Christine BallengeeMorris, Melanie Buffington, Kelly Campbell-Busby, Nicole Crane, Sheng Kuan Chung, Melanie Davenport, Mark Graham, Jay Hanes, Suzan Harris, Jay Heuman, Lisa Hochtritt, Olga Hubard, Karen Hutzel, Themina Kader, Sharon Johnson, Marjorie Manifold, Anne Marquette, Elizabeth Reese, Priscilla Roggenkamp, Cathy Smilan, Kryssi Staikidis, Michelle Tillander, and Jessie Whitehead. NAEA BOARD: Barry Shauck, Bonnie Rushlow, F. Robert Sabol, Larry Barnfield, Myrna Clark, Mark Coates, Debbie Greh, Dennis Inhulsen, Mary Miller, Bob Reeker, Diane Scully, Lesley Wellman, John Howell White, and Deborah Reeve. NAEA Design and Production: Lynn Ezell NAEA Staff Editor: Clare Grosgebauer Art Education is the official journal of The National Art Education Association. Manuscripts are welcome at all times and on any aspect of art education. Please send three double spaced copies, prepared in accordance with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association to Dr. Flávia Bastos, Editor Art Education, School of Art, College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning, 6431C Aronoff, PO Box 210016, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0016. To facilitate the process of anonymous review, the author’s name, title, affiliation, mailing address, and phone number should be on a separate sheet. Retain a copy of anything submitted. For guidelines, see Art Education under ‘Writing for NAEA’ at www.arteducators.org. Authors are encouraged to submit photographs with their manuscripts. Art Education is indexed in the Education Index, and available on microfilm from University Microfilms, Inc., 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. For quantity reprints of past articles, please e-mail to lezell@arteducators.org for order forms. © National Art Education Association 2010. Allow up to 8 weeks to process new member and subscription publications. Art Education (ISSN 0004-3125) is published bimonthly: January, March, May, July, September, and November by the National Art Education Association, 1916 Association Drive, Reston, VA 20191-1590. Telephone 703-860-8000; fax 703-860-2960 Website: www.arteducators.org Membership dues include $25.00 for a member’s subscription to Art Education. Non-member subscription rates are: Domestic $50.00 per year; Canadian and Foreign $75.00 per year. Call for single copy prices. Periodicals postage is paid at Herndon, VA, and at additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Art Education, National Art Education Association, 1916 Association Drive, Reston, VA 20191-1590.

Contents

creativity

EDITORIAL

Reconsidering the Role of Creativity in Art Education

Enid Zimmerman, Guest Editor After decades of DBAE, creative thinking and practice in art education is making a comeback.

INSTRUC TIONAL RESOURCES The Art of Storytelling: The Co-Construction of Cultural Knowledge Andrés Peralta N In this lesson resource featuring the works of Post-Chicano artist Juan Ramos, students learn how storytelling enhances self-understanding in cultural contexts.

An Almost Forgotten 1953 Conference on Creativity

Jerome Hausman A groundbreaking interdisciplinary conference at The Ohio State University over 50 years ago set a new direction for examining creativity’s impact on the arts, human behavior, and the social sciences.

Olivia Gude Can creativity be cultivated and enhanced in meaningful art education curricula adaptable to today’s environment of structured testing and assessment?

Rethinking Creativity:

A Definition to Support Contemporary Practice

Kerry Freedman The ‘creative sector’ now comprises one third of the U. S. economy. How can today’s art educators frame and practice creativity in the context of social conditions and new forms of students’ works?

Thinking Outside and On the Box: Creativity and

Inquiry in Art Practice

Julia Marshall A high school art class explores creative problem solving by imagining, researching, designing, and creating new inventions (tools) for helping with everyday tasks.

N denotes New Voice, a first-time author in Art Education

Cover quote from “Rethinking Creativity,” p. 9. Images from left: (1) “An Interdisciplinary Design Studio,” p. 50; (2, 4) ”Thinking Outside and On the Box,” pp. 18, 20; (3) “Playing, Creativity, Possibility,” p. 33; (5) “Mystery Box Swap,” p. 40.

Playing, Creativity, Possibility

Taking Digital Creativity to the Art Classroom: Mystery Box Swap Ryan Shin N An open-ended student creative project using new digital technologies to provoke curiosity, discovery, and surprise.

A 21st-Century Art Room: The Remix of Creativity and Technology Courtney Bryant N An art teacher’s innovative approach to facilitating students’ imaginations and critical thinking through a computer animation project.

An Interdisciplinary Design Studio: How Can Art and Engineering Collaborate to Increase Students’ Creativity?

Tracie Costantino, Nadia Kellam, N Bonnie Cramond N , and Isabelle Crowder N University of Georgia environmental engineering students develop innovative and humanistic designs in collaboration with visual arts students and others.

E DITO R I A L

Reconsidering the Role of in Art Education

creativity I

was pleased when Flávia Bastos, senior editor of Art Education, asked me to guest edit an issue that focused on creativity. I have been writing about creativity in art education for many years, but only very recently does there appear to be an interest in publishing articles focused on creativity in art education (see Zimmerman, 2009). To my astonishment, there were over 40 submissions for this issue about creativity. This resurgence of interest stands in opposition to many Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) tenets that have held sway over art education programs since the 1980s and upon which most state curricula are grounded. This new emphasis on creativity and self-expression as goals for art education should not erase what has been learned from the subject matter-centered past, but should be renewed with a focus on child-centered and society-centered art education placed in a contemporary studio-centered practice. Art teachers cannot anticipate exactly what will be necessary content to be learned in the next decade, but they can teach students skills that will prepare them to find and solve problems that have both local and global import.

Creativity can be approached through a pedagogy that honors students’ often challenging attitudes and beliefs, confronts social norms, and at the same time embraces fun and play as important ingredients of self-expression. I have walked down corridors of schools at all levels and found that visual expressions created by students all too often are predictable and resemble other classmates’ productions and/or teachers’ expectations rather than individual interpretations that carry great import and are based on students’ own lives. With the standards movement being embraced by school administrators, creativity is often trumped by expectations that learning outcomes conform to rubrics in which lesson results are awarded values for conforming to teachers’ preconceived expectations.

find and solve problems and learn skills that help them accomplish their goals. Displaying their works in public venues, where they can engage in a dialogue with multiple audiences, is of prime importance for their own education and that of community members who often need to be educated about the value of creative self-expression in visual art education.

On some occasions, when teaching a specific skill, a predictable outcome is expected, but this is only a remedial step for students who eventually produce artworks that take the form of unexpected surprises for their teachers. Such outcomes should embrace unanticipated products and should be honored as valid expressions based on a body of student work that is creative, authentic, and investigated over a period of time. Such work would have its aegis in students’ passions’ based on their personal lives and influenced by visual and socialpolitical environments that surround them. This, however, is not to discount the importance of having students

One response was by a student, who chose Discover Art, a K-12 series authored by Laura Chapman (1987) (Figure 1). She created a small, pocket-sized book based on aspects of the curriculum presented in this series. She explained, “Combining the creative element of our discipline, art education, and the formal properties of curriculum design in my book, allowed me to explore underlying concepts and complexity of a textbook’s content and design in a way no written assignment could have.” Another student’s interpretation of the assignment took the form of a one-room schoolhouse made from

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For over two decades, I taught a graduate course about the history of art education. I always tried to find a balance between conventional ways of submitting written papers and students presenting their work creatively through visual formats. In one studio-based assignment, they were required to respond to reading an art education textbook from years 1970-1985 and interpreting it visually.

manila folders. According to the student, the textbook she chose, written in the 1970s by two classroom teachers, read like a cookbook with each page presenting a recipe for a new art project. She made miniature replicas of these projects and displayed them on the walls inside the schoolhouse (Figure 2). “These cookbook-like art projects,” she concluded, “do not encourage creativity and continue in contemporary practice in many educational settings today.” Many authors writing about creativity refer to ‘a creative process’ as if there is one means by which students or artists can demonstrate imagination and innovation. As evidenced by the

art education and engineering faculty, Tracie Costantino, Nadia Kellam, Bonnie Cramond, and Isabelle Crowder focus on how interdisciplinary thinking and creative problem solving are important for developing 21st- century skills. In addition, the Instructional Resource by Andrés Peralta focuses on the work of Juan Miguel Ramos, a Post-Chicano artist, who creatively challenges—does not follow—cultural mores and uses symbolic representations to produce new meanings about the world in which he lives. The creativity phoenix, it appears, has risen from the ashes and portends to once again become a vital factor in art education theory and practice.

articles in this issue, there are numerous creative processes and real world applications as befit the nature of creativity itself. In this issue of Art Education, Jerome Hausman discusses antecedents of research and practice in reference to creative processes that were highlighted at a conference that took place in 1953. As a challenge to understanding creativity only as a modernist, romantic notion, Kerry Freedman reconsiders characteristics of creativity in respect to social conditions and contexts of student forms of art production. Four articles then explore different means by which creative processes can propel art inquiry. Julia Marshall describes Wallas’ theory of creative stages, identifies types of creative thinking that occur in these stages, and demonstrates how these theories play out in practice in a high school setting. Focusing on contemporary technologies, part of the curriculum content of the Spiral Workshop art program for teens, described by Olivia Gude, demonstrates possibilities that may emerge from a quality art program that embraces creativy as a necessary component. Ryan Shin offers examples of how art educators can negotiate and explore creative flow in the contemporary, digital world that is part of popular and visual culture. Through a computer animation unit taught to urban high school students, Courtney Bryant explains how creative problemsolving strategies were used to help students consider problems from multiple points of view. Emphasizing creative strategies and ways of thinking developed in a collaboration between university

The articles in this issue of Art Education represent a variety of themes and points of view relevant to creativity and art education; however, there were many articles that could not be included in his issue due to space considerations. In conjunction with the 2011 NAEA National Convention, that will have as its theme creativity, imagination, and innovation, some of these articles will appear in another NAEA publication or at www.arteducators.org. Enid Zimmerman Guest Editor

Figure 1: Visual interpretation of Chapman’s textbook series. Reprinted with permission of Robin Johnson. Figure 2: Miniature projects inside the schoolhouse. Reprinted with permission of Kari Fless. Photos courtesy of Jeanne Nemeth.

References Chapman, L. (1987). Discover art (K-12 series). Worcester, MA: Davis. Zimmerman, E. (2009). Reconceptualizing the role of creativity in art education theory and practice. Studies in Art Education,50(4), 382-399.

Enid Zimmerman is Professor of Art Education and currently Coordinator of Gifted and Talented Programs at Indiana University, Bloomington. E-mail: zimmerm@indiana.edu

March 2010 / Art Education

An Almost Forgotten 1953

ecently, I found myself going through some old documents

and I came upon a mimeographed volume: The Conference on Creativity: A Report the Rockefeller Foundation, edited by Manuel Barkan and Ross L. Mooney, The Ohio State University, 1953. It is over 55 years since this conference and although some references related to this gathering can be found in the art education literature, for the most part the papers included in this report have gone unnoticed.

Some time around 1950, a group of professors from Ohio State University, who represented different areas of study, engaged in informal discussions involving their shared interests about the meaning and nature of creativity. As is stated in the Report’s preface, “their discussions revolved around some of the complex relationships among the social, psychological and aesthetic factors that inhered in the broad problem.” Attention frequently focused on the arts as an area of experience that provided a framework from which creativity might be studied. Marion Quin Dix, an art supervisor of the Elizabeth New Jersey public schools when I was an art teacher, and her husband, Lester Dix (then Professor, Department of Education, Brooklyn College, New York) joined Barkan, Mooney, and Harold Pepinsky (the Ohio State University) in developing and receiving a grant from the Humanities Division of the

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Rockefeller Foundation to convene an interdisciplinary conference centering on research into creative behavior in the arts and its educational significance. Barkan, in introducing the Conference on Creativity, set forth six propositions: (1) “creative experience, although intensified in the arts is present in many other areas of human behavior;” ( 2) creative experience provides “a way of forming experience which is basic to the organic growth of human personality;” ( 3) creative experience “functions to form particular aspects of an individual’s ideas, feelings, and attitudes so that they become an integral part of the whole stream of his living;” (4) the function of art education is to “provide opportunities for creative experience;” (5) the role of the teacher is “to create the kind of circumstances in which youth can come to grips with the ideas and feelings they want and need to embody in an organic form;” and (6) the intensity for feeling and forming which creative experience encourages “ leads to a more generalized outcome, than that related to the arts as such, since it sensitizes the student to a discipline which can be used to form many other experiences in life.” The field of art education was undergoing radical transformation in the 1950s as emphasis had shifted from more limited conceptions of hand-eye coordination and education about the finer things in life to a broader grounding of art in general education and assertions about art as experience. No wonder,

participants representing broad fields in social and psychological inquiry could be attracted to work with art educators in a conference emphasizing understandings needed to further and enhance creative behavior. In addition to Barkan and Mooney, three other faculty members from The Ohio State University, and 15 additional educators from other disciplines and universities, as well as The Ohio Sate University, were invited to attend the conference. In retrospect, it can be said that the group could have been strengthened by inclusion of practicing artists, art historians, and critics; alas, this is said in hindsight. Nevertheless, the assembled group was impressive. Seen from a perspective of over 50 years one cannot help but be impressed with the breadth and depth of studies projected as outcomes of the Conference. Three major directions for an understanding of creativity were identified as Social, Behavioral, and Conceptual fields. The Social Field involved questions such as: Do children become more socially constructive when they are given opportunities for creative expression? Will delinquency decrease in neighborhoods when critical groups of children are involved in creative activity? How do parents view themselves when they are brought into the school for creative activities along with their children? Can creative activities be used as a means for integrating groups and improving their morale?

Conference on Creativity The Behavior Field addressed questions such as: What are observable signs for a creative experience? What are environmental conditions that are most conducive to creative experience? How can the effects of creative experience on the organization of personality be evaluated? The Conceptual Field traced consequences of taking the concept of creativity as central to research on human behavior in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. An attempt would be made to build a descriptive model of a creative student in the visual arts, to evaluate teaching procedures that can reinforce relevant observable behaviors, and test for any generalization of characteristics apparent while working in the arts. The Conference’s transcript contains many summary statements presented by participants. For example: “Creativity involves intrinsic work satisfaction of a high order, independent either of the extrinsic rewards for the performance of the occupation or those satisfactions which derive from social relations with others at the job.” “Creativity is a process by which a person becomes himself, develops his own unique relations to life.” “Creativity is what an individual does with his experience, … transforming experience into meaningful patterns and forms.” What then followed were participant statements regarding conditions, processes, and effects of creative behavior. For instance: “I think another characteristic way

… is to recognize creativity from its opposite, stereotyped regimentation, frustration, oppression, lack of any incentive to aspire.” “One [consideration] is arrangement of circumstances in time and space in which the creative event can occur. The other is the arrangement of attitudes, feelings, etc. within the psychology of the creator.” “There is a sense of fitting into something bigger, loss of ego-centeredness, a giving of oneself into the emergence, a finding of oneself in something beyond the usual.” There are many other examples of proposed studies that grew from exchanges at the conference, such as: “A study of involvement in the arts of parents with their children;” “A study of creative behavior in the visual arts;” “A study of creativity in young children and its relationship to personality development and subsequent creative activity;” In a sense, the purpose of the Conference on Creativity was to serve as a catalyst and “sounding board” for future research. For me, more personally, I credit Ross Mooney, a friend and former colleague at Ohio State University, for having brought thinking about creativity to a higher level of my consciousness. In one of the concluding sections of The Conference on Creativity Report, Mooney listed Implications for the Research Worker. His first three points have always stayed with me: (1) “He accepts himself as creator of his inquiry;” (2) “He develops the relevance of his project to his past (and ongoing) experience,

seeking to integrate the current undertaking into the full stream of his life;” and (3) “He honors his feelings as they enter into the unfolding of his work, seeking to bring them as fully into the open as he can.” On a personal note, Manuel Barkan and I later conducted Two Pilot Studies with the Purpose of Clarifying Hypotheses for Research into Creative Behavior, the results of which were published in 1956 in the NAEA 7th Yearbook of Research in Art Education. Reference Barkan, M., & Hausman, J. (1956). Two pilot studies with the purpose of clarifying hypotheses for research into creative behavior. Research in art education, NAEA 7th yearbook (pp.126141). Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Jerome Hausman is Visiting Professor, School of the Art Institute, Chicago. E-mail: jeromehausman@aol.com

B y J erome H a u sman

March 2010 / Art Education

Rethinking Creativity:

B y K err y F reedman

A Definition to Support Contemporary Practice

onceptions of student creativity have shifted historically as ideas about art and education have changed. At the turn of the 20th century, the idea of children being capable of creating art was new to general education. By the 1920s, modernism in

art and society, and the emergence of psychotherapy as a social science, helped to establish a romantic idea of student creativity that supported arguments for therapeutic art education and dreams of free self-expression in school settings. Creativity is still strongly attached to quixotic and curative ideals, particularly with regard to student art, but times have changed. Recent institutional and state emphases on testing and standards in a climate of skepticism have deflected attention away from creativity as a curriculum aim. Most policy statements concerning education made in the early 21st century do not include the term creativity and few include any terms that suggest the ambiguous and multifarious character of the arts. The neglect of creativity in policy statements is a politically and economically charged attempt to reduce the potency of school subjects not easily conformed to standardized testing. The daily-life influences of national and state policies of neglect are evident in increasingly common efforts of school administrators to appropriate the work of art teachers by using art class time for multiple-choice test practice and other repetitive, discursive tasks. At the same time that educational policy is causing a decline in the benefits of creative practice for individuals, researchers such as Richard Florida (2002) are reconsidering the idea of creativity from a market standpoint. Conservatively estimated, what is called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the

Art Education / March 2010

creative sectorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; now makes up approximately one third of the United States economy. The creative sector depends on the many professions that are connected to creating, viewing, and criticizing visual culture. These include, for example, painting, computer game design, sculpture, comics, cartooning, advertising, television, filmmaking, architecture, toy design, fashion, and landscape design. Many of the jobs that make up this economy are new professions. National and international organizations are just beginning to be aware of the importance that arts education plays in supporting productive economies (Freedman, 2007). This year, the National Governors Association published a report on arts and the economy that documented growing national interest in creative industries and their impact on peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lives. Local governments, large and small, are increasingly knowledgeable about benefits of arts education and other cultural programming to improve the health and well-being of communities.

Figure 1. A digital billboard of culture jamming McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s advertisements by high school student Matthew Schelsky.

Because so much of the U.S. economy, and economies of all advanced capitalist countries, are based on the creative sector, social and financial growth is now dependent on a solid foundation of art education. By refocusing attention on the importance of creative work, art educators can benefit both artistic producers and those who will be influenced by the creative arts and cultural experiences they enable. However, the ways we think about art, including those related to creative practice, require continual reconsideration in times of change. Art educators have begun reconsidering a range of art concepts and principles to better support contemporary art education (e.g. Duncum, 2010; Efland, Freedman & Stuhr, 1996; Freedman, 2003; Gude, 2004). The idea of creativity also needs to be reconsidered for this time.

Creativity and the Critique of Modernism Interestingly, a lack of consideration of creativity (at least the use of the term) in policy has been partnered by art education scholarship. Except, perhaps, for Enid Zimmerman (2009), who has contributed much to work on giftedness and the dispositional factors of creativity, few have addressed the issue in a direct manner. Several reasons exist for the strange partnership between art education scholars and policy makers, such as a re-positioning of the human hand in art as a result of newer technologies and the wide-spread negative appropriation of the term to activities such as accounting practices. The term and its products have been appropriated and re-appropriated so often and by so many social sectors that it has lost meaning (or lost power by having too much meaning). Scholarly skepticism about creativity is reasonable in art education. Concerns exist

about its connection to earlier forms of art education that do not seem to fit this historical moment of postmodern technologies, conceptual arts, and cooperative learning. The term has carried with it some modernist illusions, such as the idea that creativity occurs in a historical vacuum, when in fact, it always refers to some past occurrence being reconsidered in the present. In science and technology, as when artistic processes are used for example in advertising, innovation has proved to be dangerous as well as beneficial. Perhaps most important, a modernistic idea of creativity focusing on a creative process per se, which has become seen as less important and even trite in the face of a new emphasis on anticipated outcomes, has been criticized as romantic self-indulgence. To briefly illustrate the complexity of the challenge to creativity that has been a part of the critique of modernism, I will provide a few examples. Michel Foucault (1977) challenged the notion of an original source or

March 2010 / Art Education

Figure 2. As a result of support from his teacher, high school student Geoff Hannsler, went beyond the expectations of a lesson on social issues with this wall-sized anti-war mural. The work is about the complexities of technology created to protect us while, at the same time, inflicting terrors of war.

origin with the idea of genealogy and argued that originality is a fiction conceived after the fact. From Foucault’s perspective, ideas are a product of subtle distinctions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new.’ He also pointed out that history, as written, omits chance, divergence, and failure, which are a critical part of the emergence of ideas. Even highly creative artists draw on images they have seen before, as in the case of the long history of famous landscapes, portraits, and still life paintings our students learn about. However, students may not be taught that initial reactions to many of these masterpieces were negative. In response to Foucault and other theorists who are considered postmodern, Habermas (1987) charged that these ideas undermine theoretical ideals, such as freedom, subjectivity, and creativity. However, this is not necessarily the case. I would argue, rather, that postmodern theorists have tried to deconstruct the internal conflicts of such concepts, forcing us to rethink these ideals. With regard to creativity in art education, several such internal conflicts exist. For example, we want students to have new ideas and generate thoughtful art products in response to those ideas, but we must have latitude to redirect students’ ideas, whether helping them to improve the quality of

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their work, or protecting them from undue censure. We can say that students must do work that is original; and yet we establish boundaries of that originality, because without such boundaries, students often become disheartened and find it difficult to work at all.

Creativity in Context Although creativity involves biological processes, such processes are interpreted and applied in many ways. Creativity is an open concept, like art, and must be defined as applied in a cultural context. In contrast to Craft (2005), who posits that creativity is a specific method of teaching and learning, “one amongst others to be employed as appropriate” (p.xxi), I would argue that creativity is an aim of democratic curriculum, as is, for example, the concept of freedom. It should always be sought, but can only be achieved to the extent that conditions will allow. It is unlikely that Einstein would have imagined his theories of relativity if he had not lived in a culture enamored with the ideal of space travel. For Picasso to have painted Guernica, he had to know about the art of his time, as well as war-time violence. A contemporary reconsideration of creativity must take into account the contexts

and purposes of its process and outcomes. As a result, creativity should be thought of as including the following: creativity (1) involves critical reflection, (2) is based on interest, (3) is a learning process, (4) is functional, (5) is a social activity, (6) depends on reproduction, and (7) is a form of leadership. I will discuss each of these characteristics.

1. Creativity Depends on Critical Reflection

Many people over the years have theorized about processes of creative action, but fewer have theorized its starting point, which is a critique. John Dewey (1934) understood this point, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., who said in his letter from a Birmingham jail, that we must “create a tension” because conflict makes people act. Creative endeavors often are based on artists’ critiques of social issues, personal concerns, or previous art, which provide a foundation for both avant-garde and edgy popular art. For example, artists’ conceptions of Batman in recent films are based on critiques of previous artists’ renditions of Batman in comics, TV, and earlier films. Creativity is reflexive, involving critical reflection with regard to its own process. For example, making things has, perhaps for the first time in history, become seriously

Figure 3. A painting by high school student Kenrick McFarland from his virtual gallery.

problematic as a tax on the environment. At a time when many people have enough money and leisure time to visit museums, watch television, attend plays, listen to music, see films, and play computer games, all of these forms of production add to a general strain on resources. Environmentally conscious artists, such as Chakaia Booker and Yong Ho Ji who use recycled tires to create sculptural art, critique and respond to these issues through their work. When teaching lessons, setting up a conflict often will be more effective in generating a creative response than just a descriptive introduction. Students’ work can begin with some feeling of discontent and that discontent can stimulate a need to convey a message, express an idea, expose a feeling, or solve a problem.

2. Creativity is Based on Interests

In his well-known book on creativity, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) has illustrated what we should know through common sense: creative people work from their interests. Cognitive research also has demonstrated that viewers construct new knowledge based on previous knowledge and experience. Both of these bodies of research support the idea that art education should be based, at least

in part, on students’ concerns and passions. Without attending to students’ interests in art education, we cannot hope to lead students to creative thought because creativity is fundamentally based on desire. Consider scientist Kevin Warwick’s (2004) work on artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Reading in England. Dr. Warwick implanted chips in his own body and used his own brain to control the robotic mechanisms he developed. In 2002, in an experiment at New York University, he sent a message through the Internet with his brain to control a robotic hand. His desire to develop mind-controlled robotics came, in part, from visual culture. As a youth, Dr. Warwick watched the popular, British, sci-fi television series Dr. Who and became fascinated by the Daleks, a group of part-human, part-machine villains in which each machine was directed by a human brain contained within its metal casing. A contemporary reconsideration of creativity in the visual arts must take into account the great numbers and profound impact of imagery (and the stories attached to them) seen by student creators and their audiences. Discovering and incorporating student interests can drive student learning

It is unlikely that Einstein would have imagined his theories of relativity if he had not lived in a culture enamored with the ideal of space travel. For Picasso to have painted Guernica, he had to know about the art of his time, as well as war-time violence.

March 2010 / Art Education

and stimulate creative practice through, for example, culture jamming that involves a process of transforming advertisements in a way that criticizes an original ad and/or product (Figure 1).

3. Creativity is a Learning Process

Figure 4. Junior high school student’s selfportrait illustrating the influence of fan culture, in this case manga, on student art.

Figure 5. High school student Allese Brown’s photographic solution to the problem of showing evidence of abandonment.

Art Education / March 2010

Creativity is auto-didactic; that is, it involves self-study. By this, I mean, creativity is not only a study of the self (in terms of one’s identity and interests), but study that is self-motivating. This means that we need to help students find some of their own pathways to learning that have not been previously established. Creative self-study can happen where students have extensive knowledge of a topic outside of school, such as a result of passion for a hobby or other obsessive interest. Students who become immersed in such interests become, in a sense, experts and often create as a part of a process of learning about the interest, as in the case of cosplay activities in which students make costumes and act in role play (Freedman, 2006). But, we see the creative influence of such self-study in classrooms as well and we should cultivate it. Many years ago, a junior high school teacher asked me for advice about a student’s work that she planned to give a failing grade. Her lesson objective involved students painting a fairly traditional landscape using primary colors in isolation.

The boy whose work we were considering had laid his colors on top of one another in an imaginative manner so that they blended visually in a fantasy landscape. The advice I gave the teacher was to give the boy a high grade because he had actually gone beyond her objective. He responded to the lesson in a more creative manner than she had anticipated and should have been rewarded. She decided that she could not give him an “A” because he had not followed directions. Of course, following directions with regard to a teacher’s anticipated outcome in an art class can be essential, particularly when safety is involved. However, demonstrating learning beyond expectations should be one of our aims and is evidence of creative thinking (Figure 2).

4. Creativity is Functional

Art education is fundamentally about the usefulness of creative thought and action. Creativity has always been grounded in judgments of use. From a contemporary standpoint, to be creative, an activity must be considered useful in some respect to an individual or a group (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Creative production is useful for many reasons. For example, art that influences people to think differently or allows an audience to see something that has not been seen before has use.

Newer methods of accountability have enabled art education to survive in educational programming environments where students must demonstrate learning. We illustrate a function of creativity by demonstrating that students learn when engaging in creative work. For example, a good art education will promote development of social media knowledge, such as effective visual communication, problem-solving, and reflective thinking, which can aid students both in understanding functions of artistic creativity and in doing creative work in other school subjects. It can also help students communicate outside of school. Students’ creative production, such as videos for YouTube and artwork for online gallery communities like deviantART, function as social networking (Figure 3).

5. Creativity is a Social Activity

understand the social character of creativity, it helps to establish collaborative classroom work groups and undertake creative productions that require disciplinary bordercrossing. Groups that form around types of visual culture, such as graffiti crews or manga groups, teach and learn from each other as they create and re-create (Freedman, 2006). I recently spoke at an anime convention made up of over 15,000 adolescents and young adults in costume and, for many years, I have studied student fan cultures, which are subcultures that have grown up around forms of visual culture with large fan bases. You have but to experience one of these conventions to see that membership in such groups stimulates creative thought in students (Figure 4).

Although the arguments for art in school are usually made on the basis of its psychological benefits that focus educational discussions on students as individuals, most (popular and fine) artists work within some form of professional community. At the same time that we consider individual production, we must acknowledge benefits of a classroom learning community in which students interact, help, and push each other to improve their work. Many contemporary artists, such as Kara Walker, Soraida Martinez, and Banksy and are also socially conscious in a broad sense, challenging audiences to think or act socially. A lack of attention to the social conditions of creativity is rooted in Anglo-American philosophy. In contrast, the people of some countries such as India, have historically defined creativity in terms of a social context and its value to community (Misra, Srivastava, & Misra, 2006). Chinese traditions of creativity, as defined by social value, has long been considered at odds with Western traditions of valuing creativity for its own sake (Niu, 2006). Ideas about the social conditions of creativity are shifting across cultures and disciplines. The complexity of many disciplines has led to contemporary problem-finding and solving processes that require interdisciplinary solutions, demanding increased social interaction in creative contexts. In order for students to

6. Creativity Involves Reproduction as Well as Production

Creativity depends on previous knowledge, and therefore, depends to some extent on reproduction. As a learning process, creativity builds on old ideas, images, and objects in the production of the new. Interpretations of the term creativity in post-industrial, Western cultures emphasize the idea of originality in terms of forwardmoving production. And yet, within any particular culture, creativity reinforces tradition. Examples of creative cultural conservation by first nations have become well-known, as in some Native American, African, and Australian Aboriginal cultures, which depend on, for example, reproducing traditional ceramic or textile forms (although these forms too change in response to social conditions). Even in mainstream American

contexts, by focusing creativity on ‘the new,’ we are reinforcing a cultural tradition; that is, we support the notion of progress on which the European avant-garde was originally based. So, we might think of creativity in terms of levels. Polish philosopher Edward Neçka has hypothesized such levels. He and his colleagues discuss four levels of creativity: (1) fluid—the creativity people use in their everyday life that does not require particular knowledge, (2) crystallized—solution to a problem that requires knowledge, (3) mature—an expert level requiring domainspecific knowledge and valued by a large, mature group, and (4) eminent—creativity that many disciplines value and is valued in many venues (Neçka, Grohman, & Slabosz, 2006). From an educational perspective, these levels illustrate an increase in knowledge. For many students, being creative feels good because it stimulates inherent, biological motivators at the same time that it allows them to focus on something they know very well. Moving students from level 1 to level 2 could be guaranteeing an increase in knowledge as well as improving their creative potential. Think of the didactic importance of copying, and then learning to move away from the copy, as an increase in knowledge (Figure 5). Leading students to desire more of that feeling of resolution and accomplishment could potentially move them to level 3 or level 4 as adults. Accomplishing these levels of knowledge would enable a student to become a professional artist.

A good art education will promote development of social media knowledge, such as effective visual communication, problem-solving, and reflective thinking, which can aid students both in understanding functions of artistic creativity and in doing creative work in other school subjects.

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Figure 6. This image of a bulldozer digging up flowers is part of a series by high school student Brooke Fairbanks intending to lead people to protect countryside from development.

7. Creativity is a Form of Leadership

A contemporary understanding of creativity may not be so much a problem of adapting the static ideal as acknowledging the flexibility of creative opportunities available to students today. For example, creativity that changes a whole profession may be at a more advanced level than that of creative work in a classroom based on an assignment, but at the same time, a student in that class could make something amazing for YouTube that could influence a large group of people. Creativity in education extends beyond the technical processes of making art in school. When considered in the light of its potential for influencing social groups, studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; creativity should be considered a form of leadership by cultural workers who could be showing us something we have not seen before. Creative production in the visual arts

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brings together concepts and skills to convey new meanings, perhaps convincing people to think differently or take innovative actions (Figure 6). It is dependent on risk-taking, which requires the courage to lead.

Conclusion Leading students in the development of creative work requires creative teaching that carries its own risks (Freedman, 2007). Such risks can be managed best when based on an understanding of the cultural, as well as the personal, character of creativity. To talk of creativity in art education now means understanding it in the light of social conditions and contexts of student forms of production. Kerry Freedman is Professor of Art and Education at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. E-mail: kfreedman@niu.edu

References Craft, A. (2005). Creativity in schools: Tensions and dilemmas. New York: Routledge. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Perennial. Dewey, J. (1943). Art as experience. New York: Perigee Books. Duncum, P. (2010). Seven principles for visual culture education. Art Education, 63(1), 6-10. Efland, A. Freedman, K., & Stuhr, P. (!996). Postmodern art education: An approach to curriculum. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: And how itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (Ed. by D. F. Bouchard.)

Freedman, K. (2007). Art making/Trouble making: Creativity, policy, and leadership in art education. Studies in Art Education, 48(2), 204-217. Freedman, K. (2006). Adolescents, identity, and visual community: The formation of student communities based on popular visual culture. Visual Arts Research, 32(2), 26-27. Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics, and the social life or art. Teachers College Press. Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern principles: In search of a 21st century art education. Art Education, 57, 6-14. Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Trans. by F. Lawrence.) Misra, G., Srivastava, A. K., & Misra, I. (2006). Culture and facets of creativity: The Indian experience. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The international handbook of creativity (pp. 421-455). New York: Cambridge University Press. Neçka, E., Grohman, M., & Slabosz, A. (2006). Creativity studies in Poland. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The international handbook of creativity (pp. 270-306). New York: Cambridge University Press. Niu, W. (2006). Development of creativity research in Chinese societies: A comparison of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The international handbook of creativity (pp. 374-394). New York: Cambridge University Press. Warwick, K. (2004). I, cyborg. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Zimmerman, E. (2009). A contemporary consideration of the role of creativity in art education. Studies in Art Education, 50(4), 382-399.

Author’s Notes All of the images in this article were created by students of teachers who are past or present graduate students of the Northern Illinois University Art Education Program. The author wishes to thank teachers Justin Bickus, Gerry James, Robert Hewett, William Higgins, Kathy Odom, and Jamie Peterson for their students’ work.

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Thinking

Outside and On

the Box:

Creativity and Inquiry in Art Practice

any art educators believe that creativity is fundamental to artistic practice and, therefore, the art classroom is one of the best places for its cultivation. Indeed, there is a renewed and growing interest in creativity in art education today (Zimmerman, 2009). Learning that takes place in art practice also is receiving significant attention. The concurrent emphases on creativity and learning in art education challenge teachers to foster the two together. With this in mind, I will examine ways creative thinking fits into and propels artistic inquiry. Specifically, I will describe Wallasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; theory of creative stages, identify types of creative thinking that occur in those stages, and show how these theories play out in practice. My goal is to demonstrate how artmaking and teaching are illuminated and enhanced when guided by understandings that theory imparts. An art project from Lincoln High School in San Francisco will provide a case study of how creativity theory can be implemented in practice.

Learning and Creativity

What makes creativity a critical factor in learning through making art? Gray and Malins (2004) find creative exploration to be the primary investigatory method in art-based inquiry. Following Gray and Malinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; logic, creative processes are a form of learning. Also, Gray and Malins claim that creative processes are a special kind of learning. Creative processes are special because they occur through a cycle of experience and reflection. Experiential learning conforms to a core tenet of constructivist learning theory that defines learning as an active process in which a learner constructs his or her knowledge (Efland, 2002). In the case of artistic inquiry, learning entails active construction of knowledge through hands-on exploration and experimentation, which are interwoven with and shaped by creative thinking. Creative thinking is a key factor. Therefore, understanding creative thinking is critical to grasping how we learn through making art.

Figure 1 (above). Sally Su presents the box for her invention, Sky.

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Creativity Theory

Wallas’ Stages of Creativity

Wallas (1926) delineated four stages of creative process. Wallas’ first stage is preparation. In this stage, information and related ideas are gathered. Stage two is incubation. In incubation, the prepared material is internally elaborated and organized. The third stage is illumination. This is the stage in which an idea emerges. Finally, in stage four, verification, an idea is evaluated and further elaborated into its complete form. Although Wallas’ four stages are long-standing, they still are considered viable today (Sawyer, 2006). It is universally agreed, however, that creative process is not strictly linear; it is also cyclical and repetitive. Therefore, the stages in Wallas’ scheme are understood to overlap and repeat themselves.

Types of Thinking and Conceptual Strategies in Creativity

While Wallas delineated a structure or map of creative process, later theorists contributed to understandings of creativity by identifying specific kinds of creative thinking. These modes of thinking fall into three basic types. The first is analytical thinking, which involves examining something to make sense of it (Kirst & Dickmeyer, 1973) or detecting an abstract concept in the concrete (Necka, 1986). The second type of thinking is connective or associative

thinking, which can be viewed as forming associations between things, finding similarities between them, or constructing metaphors by comparing one thing to another (Necka, 1986). The third type of thinking is transformative thinking. This includes elaborating on something, revising it, constructing it, or translating it into another style, medium, or form (Kirst & Dickmeyer, 1973; Necka, 1986).

The Invention and Packaging Art Project

Here is a description of an art project mapped out according to the Wallas format expanded and modified to incorporate specific types of creative thinking processes. I extended the Wallas format in this way to provide a much more detailed map and description of a creative inquiry process than Wallas’ four-stage plan offers and to highlight the analytical, associative, and transformative thinking that goes on in that process. Not all art projects are as teacherdirected as the project described here; many artmaking activities are student-driven. However, as teacher-directed as this project may seem, the assignments described here acted primarily as a springboards for individual student exploration and initiative. I believe these springboards are helpful, especially for students who are unaccustomed to initiating their own artmaking. There was a structure to the project. However, it was not teacher-imposed; it was the internal organic structure of creative inquiry. To describe that structure in concrete terms, my narrative will follow the work of two students from the class, Eric Chung and Sally Su.

The Project

In the spring of 2009, Mr. Geiser, an art teacher at Lincoln High School and a former student of mine, invited me, as an art educator at the university level, to teach with him in his Art 101 class. This was a class of 23 students: 13 boys and 10 girls. Together, Mr. Geiser and I conducted an art project that went to the core of creative problem finding and solving in which students invented and constructed tools to solve reallife problems in imaginary ways. Students then created packaging for their inventions and wrote instructions for their use. For the project, Eric Chung invented the E-Machine, a helmet-like apparatus with a shredder on top that helps the minds of overwhelmed students absorb information directly from books (Figure 2). Sally Su created two clear plastic globe-shaped creatures, World Savers: Sunny and Sky, who gather and recycle garbage and pollution, and are also collectable works of art (Figure 1).

Phase One: Name

Identifying the problem or the subject of the art investigation is phase one. In a classroom, this is the assignment—the teacherdirected piece that serves as a launching pad for the more student-directed inquiry that follows. This phase begins the preparation stage of the process. To facilitate this stage, it is critical to make the assignment clear. However, it is also important to give learnerartists freedom within the parameters of the assignment to follow their own ideas or interests creatively. In this initial phase, we introduced the central idea behind the project: inventing a tool. We also explained the follow-up

B y J u lia M arshall

Figure 2. The E-Machine by Eric Chung.

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Table 1. Phases in Creative Inquiry Process

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activity: constructing a container for that tool and writing instructions for it. To make the project clear, we showed a prototype of an imaginary tool, a remote control that magically produces parking spaces, and discussed how its design is based on real tools.

Phase Two: Distill

Distillation entails focusing in on the problem and grasping the essence of it. The primary mode of thinking and learning in distillation is analysis. Distillation also calls for exploring many facets of the topic to be addressed. To facilitate distillation, it is crucial to ask questions that challenge learner-artists to think deeply about the topic and the assignment. In our project, this meant brainstorming problems and listing them in categories on the blackboard. Problems suggested by students ranged from social and environmental concerns such as global warming, racism and world hunger, to more personal challenges such as doing homework, improving one’s physical appearance or dealing with parents and peers. To probe further, we asked students to think about problems they were addressing and do some research about them. It was at this time that Eric and Sally began listing and thinking about problems to solve. Eric was particularly interested in the challenge of learning under pressure that all high school students face. Sally looked at social issues such as global warming and pollution. Probing for solutions was the next step in distillation. Here we explored and listed solutions to the problems that had turned up in the brainstorming session. We then introduced the idea of inventing imaginary tools to help us solve those problems. We asked questions such as, “What does it mean to solve a social or personal problem?” “What kind of tools do we need?” At this point, both Sally and Eric began thinking about how their particular problem could be solved. Sally decided that each person needs his/her own personal garbage disposer. Eric figured students need a way to get knowledge in an easy no-hassle way.

Phase Three: Hunt, Gather and Collect

Although every step in a creative art investigation is considered a piece of the inquiry, this stage is the one in which the more conventional notions of research are practiced and highlighted. This stage is where we spread the nets wide; we brainstorm, research on the Web or in books, explore the environment, and/or interview informants. In standard research, this process involves gathering information, facts, and data. In art inquiry, it can also entail collecting imagery to work from and critiquing visual attributes of these images. Personal feelings, memories, thoughts and fantasies are equally legitimate “knowledge” to tap (Cropley, 1992). Thinking that takes place here is both analytical, in judging what avenue to pursue, and associative, in following the trail of an idea or in branching out to related ideas. Facilitating this stage entails encouraging these research strategies. Exploration in our project began with a slide presentation of real, practical inventions that we use everyday to help us with ordinary tasks. These tools ranged from carpentry and repair tools to household appliances and electronic devices such as cell phones, TVs, and computers. Afterward, students perused the Web and explored their homes, their school, and neighborhood stores to locate tool models and ideas. At this stage, Eric looked around for tools that convey something from one container to another such as conveyer belts and pipes. Sally explored different kinds of trash collectors and compactors, paying close attention to their design.

Phase Four: Mine and Extract

In this last preparation phase, the collected ideas and concepts are investigated and analyzed to unearth underlying ideas and potential for the art works. This step calls for analytical thinking in picking apart ideas, and associative thinking in connecting those ideas to related ideas. Facilitating the mining phase requires asking questions that challenge students to look deeply into the ideas and imagery they have collected in the hunting/gathering phase. We asked questions about what tools students researched, what

function the tools have and what physical characteristics those tools need to perform their functions. We also asked about tool design and what designers do to make tools both functional and beautiful. Mining and extracting in this way prepared students for the conceptual play and improvisation that followed. At this stage Sally thought about the way trash compactors are designed and realized they need big openings in order to take in lots of trash. She also decided that in order to make her invention more popular, it must visually resemble something desirable and collectable like a work of art. Likewise, Eric analyzed how pipes and belts convey materials. He surmised that his tool needed to have a pipe that went into the head. It also would need to be strapped on or worn and, therefore, should be cool and masculine with a science fiction-inspired design. For inspiration, he looked at space suit designs from the1950s, which he found on the Internet.

Phase Five: Connect, Synthesize and/or Juxtapose

Phase five is playful and exploratory, and correlates with Wallas’ incubation stage. In it, the ideas culled and analyzed in the mining/extraction stage are combined and recombined to create new ideas or concepts. Facilitating this part of the process entails asking questions that challenge students to think through their ideas and connect them up with other ideas. These are questions such as, “What is this like?” or “If this is like that, then what does that mean?” In our project, students connected processes with similar processes. After looking at many possibilities, Eric connected learning to absorption. He surmised that a material must be the proper consistency in order to be absorbed. To be the right consistency, it must be pulverized. This combination of ideas added pulverizing books to the list of the E-Machine’s functions. Adding this function sent Eric back to the “hunting” phase to look for models of tools that chop things up. For her part, Sally connected trash collecting with hunger and eating. She realized she needed to make a collectable art piece that was a voracious eater.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;How Because creativity includes venturing into the unknown, knowing what one is doing may seem antithetical to creativity. However, knowing that one is venturing and how one is going about it facilitates this process. Therefore, reflection on how one learns through creative processes not only makes an art investigation a true learning experience, but also promotes creativity.

Figure 3. Instructions for the E-Machine by Eric Chung.

Figure 4. Eric Chung works on the helmet of the E-Machine.

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did you learn?” Phase Six: Cast or Frame

Casting/framing is another playful exploratory step that is associated with Wallas’ incubation stage. In this phase, artist-learners manipulate ideas; they cast and recast them as different entities. In art practice, casting and framing often is performed in a concrete way with materials. In the cast/frame stage, an instructor should encourage play with both materials and ideas by providing many supplies and encouraging multiple interpretations. It is also critical to encourage students to think analogously or metaphorically. An instructor can do this by asking students what their idea reminds them of in its form, qualities, characteristics, and/or function. Our students played with materials, which compelled them to substitute one thing for another and translate ideas into different forms. For example, a plastic bottle top became an on/off button, a bottle cap seal turned into a viewfinder, and a funnel became a miniature satellite dish. The cast/ frame phase also entails more conceptual analogies. For instance, Eric thought of the analogy between the chopping function of his E-Machine and that of a paper shredder. He then based the top part of the E-Machine on that model. In looking through the materials, he found a plastic bowl the size of a head. This inspired him to make the bottom of his E-Machine a helmet (Figure 3). In a similar vein, Sally decided her World Saver needed to be a mouth-shaped creature. In looking through the materials in the classroom, she found plastic globes and shiny beads, buttons and stickers. These materials reminded her of plastic figurines and inspired her to cast her trash compactor as a mascot. Mascots are plastic toy-like characters that are a popular, cartoon-inspired form of art (Budnitz, 2006). This sent Sally back to the “hunting” phase to look at the world of mascots. Making her World Saver into a mascot gave Sunny the status of art.

Phase Seven: Project and Extend

Phase seven also falls in the Wallas’ incubation stage and is associated with play. This phase involves taking the ideas from the recasting/reframing process and extending them further to new applications and possibilities. To help learner-artists extend or project their ideas, an instructor can ask questions such as, “How could you expand or extend that?” “How could you vary that or make it more extreme?” Eric, for example, extended his E-Machine by decorating it with plastic buttons and stickers to give it that science fiction look and make it a fashion statement. For inspiration, Eric looked at artwork by Maywa Denki, two Japanese artists who create futuristic contraptions with utopian functions (Yamaguchi, 2007). Also, ideas for expansion can come from existing models. For instance, Sally, inspired by Dunnys, a form of mascot she found in her research, decided to extend her one World Saver (Sunny) into a series of World Savers. Dunnys are small plastic bunny-like figures that come in multiples. Each Dunny, although identical in form to other Dunnys, is a uniquely decorated commissioned artwork (Budnitz, 2006). Sally’s extension of her one World Saver into a series opened up possibilities for new versions of it, each with its own name, identifying color scheme, accoutrements, and package.

Phase Eight: Construct

The construction step brings the ideas into the physical form. For Wallas, this is the illumination stage. This phase is identified here as a separate step. However, like the other phases in the creative process, the construction phase often overlaps or occurs simultaneously with other phases, especially the incubatory stages. Indeed, artists often make associations and extend their ideas as they manually construct an artwork. According to the action theory of creativity (Sawyer, 2006), creative invention requires interaction and crafting with materials. In our project, construction overlapped the other stages. Both Sally and Eric made many adjustments, inquiries, and discoveries as they put their ideas into physical form.

Phase Nine: Reflect

In the ninth phase, the notion of creative process as inquiry and learning is accentuated. In the Wallas’ model, this step fits under verification because, in it, we critique or analyze the work. Because this is an art investigation, our critique addresses three important factors: the physical attributes of the artwork as an aesthetic object, the meaning of the artwork, and the learning that took place in the process of creating it. To access that learning, instructors can simply ask: “What did you learn?” The answers to this question lie not only in learner-artists’ new understandings of the topic or content of the investigation, but also in their new knowledge about materials, techniques, the aesthetics of design, and themselves as artists (Figure 4). “How did you learn?” is the follow-up question. Giving attention to the how of learning generates metacognition, or knowing how one learns, which is essential to ongoing learning and understanding (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000). Because knowing and doing in creativity are inextricable, metacognition in creativity entails knowing what one is doing and is critical to successful creative production (Cropley, 1992). Because creativity includes venturing into the unknown, knowing what one is doing may seem antithetical to creativity. However, knowing that one is venturing and how one is going about it facilitates this process. Therefore, reflection on how one learns through creative processes not only makes an art investigation a true learning experience, but also promotes creativity. We asked students what and how they learned during this project. For the most part, learning through artmaking was not a new prospect for them. Generally, they agreed that they learned about tools, about the problems they researched, and about how to put things together to make an artwork. Students also conveyed a new appreciation for the aesthetics of tool design. They expressed how excited they were about generating and designing their own inventions and playing with materials.

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Phase Ten: Elaborate and Extend Further

Figure 5. The E-Machine in its box by Eric Chun.

This last step involves revisiting the learning and ideas gleaned from the artwork and art making process and extending or elaborating on them. Here, instructors can revisit the project, examine the artworks and then develop a follow-up investigation/lesson that calls attention to the important aspects of the artwork and that either creatively investigates or elaborates on it. In our project, elaboration and extension occurred in the second part of the project: the design and construction of the package and the writing of the instructions for the tools. In this phase, we began with naming the problem again and distilling it down. Students analyzed their inventions in their final forms to prepare for making boxes. For the package distillation, we asked questions such as “What does your tool do?” “How can we tell a potential user what your tool does?” “What kind of package design, symbols, or imagery does your tool inspire?” The package making proceeded with students considering how best to market and explain their inventions. For inspiration, we presented a slide show of package designs and discussed the aesthetics and purposes of them. Students then went into the “hunting/gathering” phase; they looked at packaging in stores. With this preparation, students were ready to design and construct their boxes and embellish them with explanatory texts and images. At this time, Eric thought about his E-Machine and decided that the package should be colorful and dynamic with the inventive, practical aspects of the E-Machine highlighted and explained. He also decided to make the display window in the shape of an “E” to stand for E-Machine and for Eric. With the E-window, the package became Eric’s signature (Figure 5). Sally realized that since she had created Sunny and Sky, a series of two mascots, she should make similar boxes that were colorcoordinated with each tool (Figure 6). Also, the series aspect of World Savers: Sunny and Sky inspired Sally to make portraits on both boxes of all the other mascots in Sally’s proposed series. This, she surmised, would inspire art enthusiasts to collect all of them (Figure 7).

Figure 6. Sally Su draws on Sky’s box.

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Figure 7. Sky and its box by Sally Su.

Conclusion

What was learned from the invention and packaging project at Lincoln High School? I found that the modified Wallasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; model of creative process does describe in general terms the steps learner-artists go through when they make art. I also noticed that the kinds of creative thinking described by creativity theorists make sense and their identification helps explain what happens within the phases of creative inquiry. Moreover, I found that coming to the project with theory in mind and an eye out for its manifestations, helped me to structure the investigation, ask questions, guide conversations, and generally facilitate a creative inquiry process. My conclusion is that creativity theories, from Wallasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; steps of creative process to theories about creative thinking, can supply critical wisdom that should inform practice. Julia Marshall is Professor of Art Education at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California. E-mail: jmarsh@sfsu. edu

References Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience and school. Washington, DC: Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council, National Academy. Budnitz, P. (2006) I am plastic: The designer toy explosion. New York: Abrams. Cropley, A. (1992). More ways than one: Fostering creativity in the classroom. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Efland (2002). Art and cognition. New York: Teachers College. Gray, C., & Malins, J. (2004). Visualizing research: A guide to the research process in art and design. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Kirst, W., & Dickmeyer, U. (1973). Kreativitatstraining. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Necka, E. (1986). On the nature of creative talent, In A.J. Cropley, K.K. Urban, H. Wagner, & W.H. Wieczerkowski (Eds.), Giftedness: A continuing worldwide challenge (pp. 131-140). New York: Trillium. Sawyer, R.K. (2006). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University. Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt Brace. Yamaguchi, Y. (2007). Warriors of art: A guide to contemporary Japanese artists. Tokyo: Kodansha. Zimmerman, E. (2009). Reconceptualizing the role of creativity in art education theory and practice. Studies in Art Education 50(4), 382-399.

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Instructional Resources

“His work speaks to the hybridity of Latino culture in the United States where identities are not essentialized but always in process.” “Like art, stories can create a place where we can begin to understand or make sense of our world.”

The Art of Storytelling: The Co-Construction of Cultural Knowledge B y A n d r é s P e ra lta Recommended for Grades 11-12

ccording to van der Veer and Valsiner (1991), a creative individual is a co-constructor of culture, rather then a mere follower of the efforts of others. This instructional resource discusses the work of Juan Miguel Ramos (b. 1971), a Post-Chicano artist, who makes use of representations to produce new meanings about the world in which he lives. His focus is on the ways in which identity is socially constructed through storytelling, media, culture, and environment. Learning Objectives Through the exploration of the work of Juan Miguel Ramos, students will: • understand that identity can be actively constructed in relationship to lives and experiences living in an environment; • investigate image and composition to construct meanings associated with culture, race, and social class; • discover how storytelling is a way to co-construct histories, empowering people and shaping the world. Furthermore, the lesson will ask students to combine appropriated imagery and their own photographs in order to create a visual story. Appropriation will be understood as a creative act—a beginning for different types of cultural productions used to make meanings about the world. The students will focus on Juan Miguel Ramos’ Mirror Maps Series.

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Art Education / March 2010

Instructional Resources

“The myth of Aztlán has been used to instill pride in those belonging to the Chicano movement, and as a result, it has aided in the region’s fervent defense of language, customs, property, freedom, and rights as citizens.” The Artist and His Work Juan Miguel Ramos holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His work has been exhibited nationally at the Dallas Museum of Art, in Dallas, Texas, the Mexic-Arte Museum, in Austin, Texas; the Sala Diaz, Artpace, the McNay Museum of Art, and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas; the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana; and the Heard Museum in Pheonix, Arizona. As an artist, Ramos develops multimedia projects that utilize video, photography, digital technologies, drawings, and text to question our easy understandings of identity. His multimedia works and images depict the world of Generation X,1 his community, friends, and family—a world made up of mostly youthful MexicanAmericans. However, in The Banner Project (2002), a public artwork using streetlight banners, Ramos began to investigate the storytelling of people from different backgrounds and ages, elevating personal memories to historical constructions that frame place. Furthermore, during his residency at Artpace in 2002, Ramos created a two-screen video projection that included four scenes, four characters, and their narratives. Photographic characters morph into drawn characters, each inhabiting place through their stories. Juan Miguel Ramos’ approach to artmaking stems from a generation of artists and intellectuals that are often referred to as Post-Chicano. These artists recognize the importance of Chicano concepts, such as the use of folk and popular imagery, the appropriation of high and low culture, the emphasis on community, and an engagement with “border” issues, and are aware of the historical context and experiences of the Chicano movement. However, unlike Chicanos, Post-Chicanos choose to define themselves through alternative means, often incorporating or utilizing a wider framework for making contemporary art, such as electronic media, video installations, and performance art and mixing the local with the global. Ramos’ compositions, such as those in the Mirror Maps Series, consist of manipulated photographs of people from his own community. His subjects are oftentimes Latinos living in the United States, portrayed in locales of significance. He manipulates the subject of the photograph, digitally reducing the details of the figure to a highly legible graphic composed of large colored plains and bold black lines resembling a comic book figure. His work speaks to the hybridity of Latino culture in the United States where identities are not essentialized but always in process.

Storytelling, History, and the Construction of Cultural Identity Art is a way of telling stories. Though its purpose may change from culture to culture, a story is a way of conveying a personal truth or perspective. A storyteller uses a story to take the listener to a different place and time, and goes beyond mere entertainment. Stories have within them the ability to relay morality, judgment, history, life lessons, or cultural memories. Like art, stories can create a place where we can begin to understand or make sense of our world. They circulate beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams and are used to explain ourselves to others and in turn help us understand one another. Stories carry with them the capacity to convey emotions and build community. One of the most defining stories for many Chicanos is the story of Aztlán. This is a mythical place that for many symbolizes the return to the ancestral home of those with Aztec ancestry. It symbolizes the idea of paradise. Aztlán can be thought of as the place where one can go despite the setbacks life has to offer. During the Chicano movement, Aztlán was used to identify the lands of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern states of the United States. The belief is that the Aztec ancestors of the Chicanos dwelt in a blissful, happy place called Aztlán, which means “whiteness.” For Chicanos, the southwest United States represented the place where there is a great hill in the midst of the waters, and it is called Colhuacan…on its slopes were caves or grottos where [their] fathers and grandfathers lived for many years. There they lived in leisure, when they were called Mexitin and Azteca. (Chávez, 1984, p. 12) In many ways, this story expressed the belief that Chicanos had a primordial right to this land and its resources. Some involved in the Chicano movement felt that they had been conquered after Anglo-Americans settled the Southwest, and Aztlán represented their wish to regain control of this area as a new nation under Chicano rule. The image of the region began to be viewed as the lost land. Though sometimes evoking defeatism, the myth of Aztlán has been used to instill pride in those belonging to the Chicano movement, and as a result, it has aided in the region’s fervent defense of language, customs, property, freedom, and rights as citizens. The story has helped to ignite the desire of recovery, a belief that preserving cultural, political, and economic self-determination can only be achieved through the control of the spaces Chicanos occupy. The story of the struggle for that environment is central to Chicano history.

Figure 1. Mirror Maps #2, 2001, Juan Miguel Ramos, American, born 1971. Iris print, 47 x 35 inches (119.38 x 88.9 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel D. Boeckman. Reprinted with permission from the Dallas Museum of Art.

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“The images in the Mirror Maps portraits define how people and cultures share their life spaces and experiences through means that are not immediate, but open to rich interpretation.” The Chicano movement rose out of a reaction to incidents of abuse of civil liberties perpetrated by those in power against those of Mexican descent. It was a political movement against the mistreatment many felt during the 1950s and 1960s. Many Chicanos rallied against the idea that they were visitors being mistreated but instead believed that they were citizens being denied full equality. Americans of Mexican descent were now attempting to resolve problems that resulted from inequalities in education, electoral politics, and litigation. Chicanos rejected assimilation and the idea that to belong one must become part of dominant culture and relinquish cultural identity. Returning to Mexico was never an option, but neither was acculturation. “Post-Chicano” can be defined as those who believe the Chicano movement is over and done with as a separate movement. More importantly, Post-Chicano is a reaction to chicanismo, where “being” Chicano becomes a prison in which there are only certain ways of thinking and doing. A Post-Chicano is immersed in the politics of identity. They view hybridity as a way to tap into diverse and complex ways of thinking and understanding that helps enrich a conceptual approach to art, moving it to another level. Post-Chicanos go beyond the idea of community built on the concept of having the same skin color or a Spanish last name to incorporate the Diaspora that exists among Latino cultures. Post-Chicanos address and challenge notions of what it means to be of Mexican heritage, embracing the in-between and a nonessentialist concept of identity. Individuality is recognized; solidarity in difference is accepted. There is a recognition that to be of Mexican heritage means more than speaking Spanish, eating certain foods, and being political. Identity is a sensibility turned outward to view the rest of the world and inward to understand one’s individuality. A person of Mexican heritage can exist without speaking Spanish and still be proud of his or her identity. Modernist philosophies view identity from the perspective that individuals are free agents capable of rationally constructing their place in the world and coming to a complete understanding of self. Plainly put, an individual’s identity is the product of self awareness; an individual chooses to be a specific way. For the Chicano movement, this meant that they were capable of enacting change, of understanding their place in the world, and of circulating their beliefs and culture. In the postmodern, identity is not something that is so easily understood, nor is it viewed as fixed. Identity is much more complex. An individual’s sense of self is no longer viewed as autonomous.

There are outside forces that influence how identity is formed, such as language, the media, the environment, and culture and so is always in process. Exploring identity has become a way of reinterpreting the world. Post-Chicanismo can be understood in this context. There is no longer a fixed place from which one can say one thing is definitely Mexican and another is definitely American. Because Post-Chicano artists embrace their hybridity, their dual heritage, they have now begun to explore their identity not in terms of continuity, but in terms of ebb and flow.

Art, Creativity, and Narrative Storytelling can be difficult for many students, not in the sense of fabrication, as many students by secondary school have learned the fine art of exaggeration. To tell a story that is cohesive and well-structured is, however, difficult for developing minds, but worth the effort. The act of telling a story means building a relationship between the author and the reader, or listener. The messages conveyed or interpreted engage people actively in their understanding of their world— people, events, places, and times. Storytelling also requires that the listener has an entry point for understanding. Though a listener is expected to suspend his or her disbelief to some degree, in order for a story to be a good story, it must still remain somewhat plausible or at least, believable. Juan Miguel Ramos’ work brings an element of storytelling to the creation of identity. In the Mirror Map Series, he places individuals in realistic environments, though the main figures themselves have become cartoon-like representations of themselves. He uses a digital process by which he manipulates the image until it resembles a figure out of a comic book. The figure is then placed in an environment that is the entry point to a story about the figure. The image’s cartoon-like appearance contrasts with the realistic environment, providing a surreal view of the subject. It is understood that the image represents a real person, but because the image has been made into a cartoon, viewers can reinterpret the image, allowing a new narrative to be created. The images in the Mirror Maps portraits define how people and cultures share their life spaces and experiences through means that are not immediate, but open to rich interpretation. Creativity here is then a sociocultural experience involving the artist and everyday people co-constructing narratives by which they shape understandings of each other.

Figure 2. Mirror Maps #3, 2001, Juan Miguel Ramos, American, born 1971. Iris print, 47 x 35 inches (119.38 x 88.9 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel D. Boeckman. Reprinted with permission from the Dallas Museum of Art.

Art Education / March 2010

Instructional Resources

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Activities Looking at the Images Present the two images from Ramos’ Mirror Maps Series and ask students to compare and contract the images and describe how they tell stories about the figures and the places they inhabit. Suggested discussion questions may include the following: • What do you see? • How do the figures differ from the settings? • How do you think the artist made the work? • How are the women in the works similar or different? • What do you know about their lives from the details shared? • What kinds of stories do these works convey about these women? • What kinds of stories do these works relate about cultural identity, race, or class?

Constructing Stories Metaphor2 is often used in storytelling as a way to create meaning for a wide audience. By using metaphor, a storyteller is able to help the audience connect to what is being told without being explicit. Engaging with metaphors also allows the audience to create their own meaning and understanding without having to rely on literal translations. For this project, storytelling will be used to foster creativity among students in their interpretation and exploration of their own community and identity. Students should begin by discussing the questions here. As they explore storytelling and its relationship to constructing histories and cultural memories, provide them with examples of how those involved in the Chicano movement used the myth of Aztlán as story of recovery— reconstructing a sense of themselves. • What is storytelling? • What are differences between a story and a history? • How can a story be a cultural memory or construct a cultural memory? • How do stories address power and belonging? • Does the appropriateness of stories change over time? Between cultures? • What stories do you tell about yourselves and do they have any relationship to empowerment and identity?

Using the information gained from the discussion, students will then begin brainstorming how they will design an image-based story that shares one or more of their most important and influential moments in life. The imagery can be based on a story that the students have heard from a family member or school friend as they grew up, or one from a magazine, book, or film that has had an impact on their life and beliefs. The story they choose should, however, be interwoven with their own life story. Furthermore, the students may choose images from magazines, books, the Internet, and their own photographs that can be used to create a story board of their narrative, making relationships between figures and spaces. This would be a preparatory step to the creation of their visual narratives.

The Photostory The conceptualization of a story captured in the students’ storyboards will then be used to create a digital story using MicroSoft® Photostory or another movie-making media. Photostory is a tool in which a student can mix image, text, and audio in order to create a digital story. The layering of these elements of image, text, and audio should construct metaphoric relationships. Moreover, the use of text should be minimal and refrain from giving contextual information.

Assessment and Conclusion The story is one of the oldest methods of making sense out of experiences, of preserving the past, and constructing a future. When people share stories, others listen raptly, finding connections between the storyteller’s tale and their own perspectives and co-constructing meanings about people. After the students complete their digital stories, have the students discuss the images they have chosen to retell the story, why they chose them, how they represent who they are and who they want to be, and how the images might be interpreted by others. Andrés Peralta is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art Education and Art History at the University of North Texas, in Denton. E-mail: fpera35286@aol.com

References Chávez, J. R. (1984). The lost land: The Chicano image of the Southwest (1st ed.). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky: A quest for synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Endnotes

1 Generation X is a term referring to the generation born after the baby boom. Generation X’ers came of age after the Vietnam War ended and their cultural perspectives were shaped by the end of the Cold War, the computer, the Internet, videogames, and MTV, among other social products and activities. 2 A metaphor is a figure of speech where a word or phrase designating an idea is used in place of another to suggest an analogy.

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Outside of Consciousness. Creativity curriculum creates places for free investigation. By Bridget Reinhard in Outsider: Alternative Media group, Spiral Workshop 2009.

Playing,

Trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur. —André Breton, Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1926

W Creativity,

Possibility B y O l i v ia G u d e

hy is it sometimes so difficult for teachers to create conditions that support the emergence of creative behavior and surprising images? Although virtually all contemporary art teachers list “enhancing creativity” as a key desired outcome of their programs, analysis of lesson plans used in schools suggests that in practice very little curriculum is specifically geared to developing creative abilities. We must question the assumption that any art project will cultivate creative behaviors and then develop projects whose methods support core objectives for quality creativity curriculum such as stimulating free ideation, encouraging experimental approaches to making, and supporting students in identifying and manifesting deeply felt idiosyncratic experiences.

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Act 1:

Anxiety

“I don’t know what to do,” Jane responds when told to get down to work. “It’s easy,” the teacher says for the 27th time today. “Just think of things that don’t go together and put them in your painting.” The student whines, “I can’t think of anything.” The frustrated (and exhausted) teacher offers a plethora of suggestions that are each met with a disconsolate sigh. In my first draft of the above paragraph, I described the student as listless—“showing or having no interest in anything, spiritless” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971). As I re-read my description, I realized that I strongly identified with the experience of the overworked, discouraged teacher and not with the internal experience of the student. The student is not lazy or spiritless, but the student is dispirited, without the spirit of fearless exploration needed to make art. Though she has been told that there is not one right answer to an art project, the student doesn’t know how to judge what kind of solution will be acceptable. She doesn’t even consider that the final product might be personally meaningful because this has not been her experience of schoolwork in art or in other classes. She doesn’t understand the purpose of making such a project and yet she will be judged on how well she completes it.

Act 2:

The teacher is dispirited too. She longs to be the sort of teacher who presides over a classroom of excited and engaged students. She wants to live up to her memories of teachers who inspired her—or she wants to be more supportive than the boring, spiritdestroying art teachers she occasionally encountered. This teacher is frustrated and disappointed—when she was a student and had a chance at this sort of artistic freedom she was exhilarated. The teacher begins to concentrate on the few students who are having a great time and tries not to think too much about those who are dutifully daubing paint on the offhandedly-sketched ideas the teacher has eked out for each of them. Both teacher and student are feeling anxiety— uneasiness, apprehension, psychic tension. A few weeks later, the teacher surveys the few fabulous-looking, realistically rendered Daliesque paintings and the many laconically

Resistance

Several teenagers and a teacher are gathered around a table looking at a multibranched inkblot on a dampened piece of paper. “What do you see?” asks the teacher. “I don’t see nothing in that mess,” a young gentleman snappily responds. The others laugh and concur, “Yeah, that ain’t nothing.” A more subdued young man, too polite to mock the teacher, none the less shakes his head in disbelief and softly murmurs, “I don’t know what you want me to see…” “Let your mind flow, just stare at the image,” the teacher prompts. “Now I see a large lizard carrying a tulip in his mouth.” The boys laugh and assert that the teacher is “just plain crazy.”1 Why do students sometimes prefer almost any activity—staring out the window, chatting, throwing small balls of clay, painting fingernails, doing homework—to artmaking? Why do some students actively resist opportunities for constructive creative play? To engage in making art, one must begin by surrendering to the process of making. Whether playing with colors, inventing dance steps, or jotting down poetry on paper, the artist must paradoxically “lighten up” and “get serious” at the same time. An artist must make a commitment to actively and seriously

finished works that lack visual excitement or psychological depth. It suddenly occurs to the teacher that there is an uncanny similarity between the descriptions of these “not so good” paintings and how she has come to view many of the “not so good” students. The very young people whose passionate emotions and intense energy first drew her to the field of teaching now seem to lack depth and seem not at all excited about making meaning in their lives. The teacher sadly concludes that given such attitudes in “today’s youth” she can’t be the inspiring teacher she had hoped to be. Yet, a teacher’s complaining about the students’ characteristics is like a chemist complaining about the physical properties of elements. The students are who they are now. How do we as teachers meet students in their present psychological state and engage them in transformative experiences? How can a busy public school teacher respond to individual needs for support in developing deeply personal creative behaviors within a collective, common curriculum?

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engaging the materials and forms at hand while simultaneously remaining loose and experimental. It can be difficult to step back and consider the many sources of students’ resistances. In the example above, the young men were good-naturedly united in their unwillingness to engage in creative play, but each of their reasons was quite different. The young man who wants to see what the teacher wants him to see is anxious to be perceived as good. For him being good means not questioning authority, staying within perceived boundaries of appropriate thought and action.

Surrender to an internally generated creative self may mean that he finds himself outside of the comforting constraints of conformity. Other students may have different reasons for resisting creative engagement. One student may be reluctant to jeopardize his status as a good realist artist by making “childish-looking” art; another student, with hip hop-inspired awareness of the political implications of art and music may consider the activities in this art class to be irrelevant to the real issues of his community. Other students may have been shamed by parents or peers for being too dreamy, not focused enough on the practical aspects of surviving in a tough neighborhood or of growing up and making a living. A teacher’s awareness of why students might feel discomfort in engaging in artistic processes can be a powerful tool for allaying hidden anxieties and for then using dialogue to collaboratively construct a safe space for incipient creative urges to be nurtured, rather than being denied and smothered.

Fumage. High school students looked for images on papers that had been smoked with a candle, a Surrealist technique known as fumage. Quality creativity enhancing projects allow for many different kinds of content and styles to emerge. Bad & Beautiful Painting group, Spiral Workshop 2004.

Act Three:

Cultivating Creativity

A co-teacher, sensing group resistance building against the planned project, wanders over, “Oh, you see a lizard? Yes, I guess I see that, but what I really see is this mountain with a house and a man climbing …. I think he’s carrying something heavy …..” The teachers exchange more comments about what they are seeing—enjoying each other’s increasingly detailed and outlandish observations. An attractive girl offers her opinion. Now a few of the boys get interested, “You see that?” the tallest boy asks. “Oh, yeah, I see that too and a warrior…” says a formerly resistant young man. He’s met with good-natured derision from friends, but also with requests to point out the ninja and his accompanying flame-spouting panther. Soon most of the students are offering descriptions of what they each see in the inkblot—sometimes building on each other’s observations, sometimes taking the conversation in a new direction. Now everyone in the classroom is getting interested— if even these “bad boys” are excited about this new, weird game, maybe there is something to it after all.

Footprint Traces. Before class, teachers sprinkled ground up colored chalk in the doorway and covered the classroom floor with black construction paper. Students were asked to look under their feet, pick up a paper, and make an artwork on the footprints—recorded evidence of their entry into a “creative space.” Time Bomb group, Spiral Workshop 2004.

Teachers can readily list many conditions that inhibit the development of creativity in students—self-consciousness in front of peers, over-scheduling that doesn’t leave time for creative daydreaming, hours spent immersed in passively watching TV or actively playing video games, schools that focus on getting the one right answer, and a society that judges success on standardized test scores and the size of bank accounts. Art educators assume that at least a partial corrective to these creativity-inhibiting conditions can be readily found in the curriculum of an average art classroom. Is this actually the case? Do attempts to articulate the components of quality art education often fail to identify and support well-documented conditions that foster creative behavior? Today’s content standards for arts education reinforce a tendency to overlook actual processes associated with creative behavior. These standards are inventories of content (such as media and formalist vocabulary) and sometimes contain mechanisms of instrumental creativity (i.e. methods and activities for finding solutions to problems posed by someone else). The standards do not represent the deep experiences of immersion, wonder, and not knowing that are described by creative individuals. Lists of standards, with their

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Inkblot Portraits by Chicago youth artists. String wet with ink was placed on paper and the paper was then folded in half producing Rorschach-like blots. It is probably biologically coded that humans are inclined to see living creatures in bi-laterally symmetrical forms. The teens were amazed at the wide variety of portraits generated by a similar beginning. Seeing their own startling multiplicity of imagination cultivates students’ awe and respect for each other’s creative capacity. Portrait of a Young Artist group, Spiral Workshop 2001.

Principles of Possibility Playing Forming Self Investigating Community Themes Encountering Difference Attentive Living Empowered Experiencing Empowered Making Deconstructing Culture Reconstructing Social Spaces Not Knowing

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emphasis on conscious intentionality, are at odds with the characteristics of actual quality artworks, which embody a holistic complexity that is not reducible to the sum of the parts (During, 2005; Garoian, 1999; Kant, 1790/1977)2 Thus, standards as currently written do little to foster consideration of the sorts of experiences that can empower students to be aware of and act on internal knowing and experiencing. In his classic book, On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers (1961) summarized circumstances that promote personal growth and self-actualization. Rogers described two major conditions that foster creativity— psychological safety and psychological freedom. He identifies three components that cultivate psychological safety: (1) “Accepting the individual as of unconditional worth;” (2) “Providing a climate in which external evaluation is absent;” and (3) “Understanding empathically” (pp. 357-358). Psychological freedom is rooted in trusting that freedom of expression will result in thoughtful outcomes, a climate in which positive people take seriously the responsibility for what they say and make.

I believe that most art teachers sincerely want to provide a safe place that promotes free artistic exploration. However, there is a general misapprehension that a teacher’s wish to create a safe, creative psychological space will necessarily generate this experience for students. Conditions of psychological safety and freedom that make creativity possible are produced, not merely by the teacher’s wishes, but rather by how his or her attitude manifests itself in the range of choices that affect course content, work styles, class discussions, peer interactions, opportunities for playful engagement with materials and ideas, and assessment or the lack thereof. By carefully re-considering values, priorities, curriculum, and daily practices, it is possible to change the climate of the classroom. Rogers’ description of the psychological safety that allows creativity to emerge emphasizes creating a climate in which the individual’s experience is valued and understood, a climate in which the individual is not judged for how well he/she meets a pre-determined model of process or product.

Exquisite Characters. Fourth-grade students of Medgar Evers Elementary School played the classic Exquisite Corpse collaborative drawing game. Because so many public school students had been killed in Chicago that year, we decided to change the name of the project to Exquisite Characters. 2002.

Accessing the Creativity of

the Unconscious Mind

As we develop the curriculum content for Spiral Workshop, the University of University of Illinois at Chicago Saturday art program for teens, we keep in mind the Principles of Possibility, a list that articulates important components of a comprehensive art education experience—Playing, Forming Self, Investigating Community Themes, Encountering Difference, Attentive Living, Empowered Experiencing, Empowered Making, Deconstructing Culture, Reconstructing Social Spaces, Not Knowing (Gude, 2007). Playing, a necessary component of any creative process, is the first (and foundational) principle of the possibilities that can emerge from a quality art curriculum. Though Spiral curriculum is structured to investigate complex themes3 and to introduce students to sophisticated contemporary art practices, we begin our work with an affirmation of the creative capacity of each participant. The first day in every Spiral Workshop group is designated as a Surrealist Play Day, a day of projects designed to extend students’ capacities for focused and playful engagement. These introductory activities are based on the many games and collaborative activities utilized by the original Surrealist artists and poets to open themselves to new

avenues of thinking and making (Breton, 1934/1997; Brotchie, 1995; Nadeau, 1944/1989). These activities can be thought of as remedial education for all whose creative capacities have been damaged by too much time in dehumanizing and overly regimented educational systems. Surrealist artists sought to catch the unconscious mind unawares and capture the images of the unfettered imagination. As any working artist knows, it is not always easy to summon up a creative spirit on demand. Thus, simply telling students that this is their "creative time" does not necessarily result in focused, creative activity. Creativity curriculum at Spiral continues to evolve, but there are some activities that have become regular favorites. The most versatile exercise is the activity of looking for images in the random stimuli of blots and stains, a process described by Max Ernst as “seeing into” (Bradley, 1997, p. 23).4 André Breton (1997) explained, “What fascinated us was the possibility … of escaping the constraints that weigh on supervised thoughts” (p. 62). This activity cultivates an ability to consciously alter one’s perception in order to access other ways of seeing and knowing. It allows a creative maker to foster awareness of the intertwining of the outer world and inner consciousness.

Surrealist Character Collages in which chance plays a role in image choice lead to more finished works in which oil pastel is layered onto and then scraped off the shiny surface of a magazine collage. By Tia Briticevich in the Imprinted group, Spiral Workshop 2001.

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Spiral Workshop teachers have experimented with many different materials to create the smears and smudges that form the basis of our “Seeing Into” investigations– including coffee, bleach, and smoke. “Seeing Into” can be used to encourage conceptual as well as visual play. Considering a red stain on a paper, the students discuss images that each sees. They are then told that the stain is actually blood (or red earth or raspberry juice) and then discuss whether this knowledge suggests different associations. Students thus also learn to think in metaphor, to play with a range of signifiers and associations. Another favorite Spiral Workshop play activity is collaboratively making visual and verbal Exquisite Corpse5 projects. Writing Poems of Opposites and writing questions for unseen answers are other Surrealist word games that encourage students to be playful in generating texts and images and thoughtful in considering the unexpected outcomes of their own creative process (Brotchie, 1995; Nadeau, 1944/1989). From such activities, students learn to be willing to “jump right in” to creative experimentation and then to slow down and consider what has been made. Students learn that in most creative work a large percentage of initial ideas and images are discarded as the maker searches for the spark that will make a sustained artistic investigation worthwhile.

Internalizing Understanding of the Creative Process

As well as giving students opportunities to engage in creative play—both playful making and playful interpretation—it is important to encourage their capacities to make nuanced observations of inner experiences as they engage in creative work. Carl Rogers described three characteristics of the creative experience (1961). He labels the initial characteristic “Eureka!” the feeling that this is really it. Surprisingly, a second characteristic that often accompanies the surprise and pleasure of the Eureka experience of recognition and acceptance is the experience of “the anxiety of separateness.” (Rogers, 1961, p. 356). Anxiety is a necessary component of a truly creative experience. How do we as teachers recognize and support our students as they struggle with the anxiety of being deeply engaged with a creative pursuit that is becoming increasingly personal and encompassing? As fellow travelers in the creative process we must acknowledge the dilemma, the potential for suffering, and provide a calm witnessing and emotional acceptance that allows students to manage their anxieties and move forward in the process. Discussing and sharing these to-be-expected emotional consequences of creative activity prepares students to accept the complexity of emerging feelings within the self and as manifested by other members of their creative community. A final quality suggested by Rogers is that creative experience results in the “wish to communicate” (1961, p. 356). How can teachers meet this desire for meaningful interpersonal communication? How can we re-think closure activities so that they are not focused on critique or valuation by an authority, but on sharing among peers?6

Ghost of My Friend, a Surrealist Game in which each youth artist wrote his or her name with wet ink. The blot resulting from folding the paper became the basis for creating a spontaneously generated alter-ego character. By Sylwia Stronowicz in the Subversive Identity, Breaking Culture Codes group, Spiral Workshop 2005.

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Considerations for Creating Creative People

Often art educators attempt to sell the importance of art education by emphasizing its role in developing the creative capacities of individuals. Creativity is conceived of as pertaining, not merely to the domain of making art, but also to living a constructive, meaningful life. Rogers described three characteristics of constructively creative people (1961). It’s important for the field of art education to develop goals, specific objectives, and curricula that foster these core characteristics: (1) the ability to play, (2) openness to experience, and (3) an inner locus of evaluation. Although it may seem counterintuitive, a creativity curriculum must be structured to teach methods and practices of playing with elements and concepts. In a typical Surrealist Painting project, students are shown works by artists such as Salvador Dali, René Magritte, or Frida Kahlo—artists who depict unusual combinations of images in a realist style. Activities that promote making many playful juxtapositions and interpretations before settling into making a finished painting are rarely included in art curricula. Paradoxically, rather than promoting well-documented core values of the Surrealist movement (Alexandrian, 1969/1970; Foster, 1993), most of the work time is spent on valuing and practicing skills in realist painting. The primary objective of a creativity curriculum ought to be developing the capacity of students to instinctively respond to situations with playful creative behaviors. This objective should not be undermined by simultaneously attempting to teach other skills that will inhibit the free flow of ideas. Incorporating the learning of disparate skills within such a project may cramp behaviors and qualities that are stated as primary goals for a creativity curriculum because a student’s experience of focused experimentation is interrupted when strictures such as “demonstrate crosshatching in your finished work” or “you must use cool colors in the background and warm colors in the foreground” impinge on a student’s intuitive choice-making.

Another characteristic of creative people suggested by Rogers is their openness to experience. Creative individuals develop a deeply rooted trust in their own capacity to generate surprising solutions. Even as they experience the anxiety of creative exploration, they are grounded in a realistic belief (based in personal experience) that surrender to the creative process may produce surprising, useful, stimulating results. This openness to experience is manifested in the willingness of a creative individual to suspend judgment and to consider emerging images and ideas from various perspectives. As one reads through the many descriptions of the philosophies and activities of the Surrealist artists and poets, one is struck by their passionate belief in the capacity of the human mind to generate tradition-shattering, marvelous imagery and ideas. (Breton, 1952/1993; Nadeau,1944/1989). Rogers

describes this quality as possessing an “internal locus of evaluation,” the strength to trust one’s own process and perceptions, however different from socially accepted norms. As I consider the importance of a creative person’s inner focus and self-trust, I think about the increasing demands for monitoring and assessment in the field of art education. While it is possible to conceive of better assessment models that attempt to capture the quality of the process of artistic engagement, rather than relying on evaluating final products, I remain skeptical. I wonder, is it possible that we art educators may have to recognize that contradictions between cultivating creativity and overly structured approaches to teaching, making, and assessing cannot be meaningfully reconciled while retaining the centrality of enhancing students’ creative capacities?

Olivia Gude is the Director of Spiral Workshop and a Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. E-mail: gude@uic.edu

References

Endnotes

Alexandrian, S. (1970). Surrealist art. (G. Clough, Trans.) New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc. (Original work published 1969) Bradley, F. (1997). Surrealism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Breton, A. (1997). The automatic message in The automatic message: Anti-classics of Surrealism. London: Atlas Press. (First published in Minotaure in 1934) Breton, A. (1993). Conversations: The autobiography of Surrealism. (M. Polizzotti, Trans.) New York: Paragon House. (Original work published 1952) Breton, A. (1972). Manifestoes of Surrealism. (R. Seaver & H. R. Lane, Trans.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1926) Brotchie, A. (1995). A book of Surrealist games. Boston: Shambhala Restone Editions. During, É. (2005). How much truth can art bear? On Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” Polygraph, 17, 143-55. Foster, H. (1993). Compulsive beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Garoian, C. (1999). Performing pedagogy: Toward an art of politics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gude, O. (2007). Principles of possibility: Toward an art and culture curriculum. Art Education, 60(1), 6-17. Kant, E. (1790/1977) A theory of aesthetic judgment: From The critique of judgment. In G. Dickie and R. Sclafani (Eds.), Aesthetics: A critical anthology (pp. 641-687). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nadeau, M. (1989). The history of Surrealism. (R. Howard, Trans.) Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1944) Oxford English Dictionary. (1971). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rogers, Carl R. (1961). Toward a theory of creativity in On becoming a person. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

1 I’m grateful to the teachers of the 1997 Spiral Workshop group—Kate Knudson, Arlette Wasik, and Mike Wierzbicki—for their early work in developing and modeling playful Surrealist-based creativity curriculum. 2 Immanuel Kant described art as having “purposiveness without purpose.” 3 For more information on Spiral Workshop theme curriculum, check out the Spiral Workshop e-portfolio on the National Art Education Association website, http://naea.digication.com/Spiral/ 4 Dali termed this activity the Paranoiac-Critical Method. “The point is to persuade others of the authenticity of the transformations in such a way that the ‘real’ world from which they arise loses its validity” (Brotchie, 1995). 5 According to Surrealist legend the first sentence produced in the Surrealist game of a group of poets writing words in the pattern of adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun without seeing each other’s additions was “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine” (Bradley, 1997). 6 For an example of promoting peer interaction as a closure activity, see the post-project worksheet included with the plan for the Elementary “I” School project on the Spiral Art Education website. http//:spiral.aa.uic.edu

March 2010 / Art Education

Taking Digital Creativity to the Art Classroom:

oday’s students are the first generation to grow up with computers, cell-phones, video games, music and video players, and other digital technologies. As digital natives, a new term coined by Prensky (2001), they spend more time reading text messaging lines than lines from books, and they spend more time on Facebook than putting their energies into reading a book (Pfeiffer, 2008). Digital natives are active in using Web technologies such as Facebook and blogs, participating in creative writing, manipulating, tagging, and communicating. They also create music using online music mixing and songwriting tools, making and sharing their movies as well as commenting on others. They enjoy creating and maintaining social networks to share, support, and feel connected with people they have known.

Figure 1. Objects and photos in the box represent the most memorable experiences of an international student.

Art Education / March 2010

B y R ya n S h i n

Often, even though their talents and creative activities in this digital world are not recognized or respected in school, many students “have something in their lives that’s really engaging—something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it” (Prensky, 2005, p. 62). An example is Web 2.0, which is a new mode for creating and sharing information on the Web (O’Reilly, 2005). Using new tools on the Web, such as wikis, blogs, podcasting, videos, Facebook, Second Life, and flickers, Web 2.0 participants create their spaces to share information, knowledge, and entertainment (http://www.digitalnative. org). By expressing themselves and working with others, they can release unlimited imaginations (Rymaszewski et al, 2006). The purpose of this article is to explore what and how art educators can negotiate with this digital world that is full of creative inventions, energies, and forces, rather than regarding these new technologies as a detrimental part of contemporary pop and visual culture. First, I will explore the concept of digital creativity and share three examples related to it that I have observed on the Web. After that, I will showcase an art project, Mystery Box Swap, providing an example of how art educators might explore the digital world and creativity, from which an art project is drawn, developed, and taught. I will conclude this article by encouraging art educators to explore and experience the creative flow of the digital world and how to take advantage of it for teaching and research purposes.

Figure 2. Roz Dimon. Jet Age. 2004. DIMONscapes®.

Digital Creativity

Artists often say that it is difficult to define creativity. However, they also claim that they recognize it when they see it. Art educators also might agree. To people who are not associated with creative endeavors, creativity may mean different things under different occasions. Creativity generally means making something new, original, or connecting something unexpected or unassociated (Zimmerman, 2009). Contemporary creativity researchers provide three key elements in approaching the concept of creativity, which can also be applied to digital creativity (Loveless, 2002). The three are: the individual person, domain and field, and socio-cultural context. Studies conducted to define creativity focus on what creative individuals have done according to personal qualities by studying shared characteristics of creative persons. An example is the presentation of personal qualities of creative individuals. As an example, Shallcross (1981) lists: openness to experience, independence, self-confidence, willingness to take risks, sense of humor or playfulness, enjoyment of experimentation, sensitivity, lack of a feeling of being threatened, personal courage, unconventionality, flexibility, preference for complexity, goal orientation, internal control, originality, self-reliance, and persistence. This list of creative qualities echoes that of Csikszentmihalyi who has observed that a creative individual takes part in a state of flow as a mental and psychological state in which the person is so fully immersed in an activity that he or she loses all sense of time. Participants in the digital world frequently experience this flow state (Chen, 2006; Pilke, 2004) by creating and sharing information and participating in entertainment (Steins & Stephens, 2008).

In the context of the domain and field, a domain contains the symbolic knowledge of culture, such as visual arts, theatre, art education, music, or mathematics. The domains relative to the digital world are still being defined and split into subdomains, birthing new domains such as Web 2.0. A field is composed of all gatekeepers in a domain. In the field of visual arts, they are artists, museum professionals, art educators, critics, and audiences. The fields of the digital world are not only composed of authorities and professionals formally trained in established domain specific institutions, but also everyday computer users who serve as gatekeepers, such as Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year: YOU— an anonymous individual who has created content on the World Wide Web. The relationship between domain and field, as Csikszentmihalyi (1996) points out, is “If a symbolic domain is necessary for a person to innovate in, a field is necessary to determine whether the innovation is worth making a fuss about” (p. 41). The third element of creativity is the social-cultural context. An image of a lonely scientist or artist with a light bulb floating above his or her head, having a “Eureka!” moment, does not adequately describe today’s creativity in the digital world. Leach (2001) points out that musicians and scholars who have achieved highly regarded creative inventions could not have done so without association and interaction with other creative people, supportive systems, and collaboration. Likewise, any creative inventor in the digital world does not emerge from a vacuum state without having relationships with other influential people. Rather, in a digital world people are connected, supporting and critiquing each other in the social context of Web users using the

aforementioned technologies. Csikszentmihalyi (1996) emphasizes the relationship among creativity elements in his systems model, explaining that creativity results from “the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation (p. 6).”

Examples of Digital Creativity

Where people participate in the digital world, they may not be involved with ‘capital C’ creativity, such as Einstein’s inventions and Leonardo da Vinci’s or Andy Warhol’s artworks, but are engaged with ‘little c’ creativity (Craft, 2000). ‘Little c’ creativity examples include teenagers constructing personal websites through Facebook or Myspace, bloggers creating a cyber group, a teen avatar as a representation of an alter ego, and another teenager text messaging and playing and exploring with images and videos. I describe three examples of creative imagination found on the Web that art educators might introduce in their art classes. Roz Dimon, my first example, is a digital artist who produces digital media art in a creative way and has shared her work online extensively. Whenever I look at Dimon’s works on her website,1 I praise her as being creative with technology. Even though I, as a graphic and web designer, have seen many textbooks and visited numerous Web tutorials, I find Dimon’s approach to be unique and very creative in comparison to her peers. Her work dynamically presents a creative use of combining and connecting digital technologies that most people have not yet considered.

March 2010 / Art Education

Figure 3. Coraline Mystery Box Swap # 11. Wooden box with a label, Made in Oregon, indicating the production location and year.

Figure 4. Coraline Mystery Box Swap # 8. A mystery box by arityzero, Flickr name, that includes a poem, a letter, bugs in the bottles, a wooden key and a dragon fly, and seed packets.

Figure 5. Coraline Mystery Box Swap # 41. This box includes a necklace with a button, keys, and dragon fly and a letter sealed with the evil button as a key element in the movie.

Art Education / March 2010

Her work consists of two main components: digital imagery and a textual story or poem. Typically, her artwork is displayed in one area of the Web window, and a related story is presented below or beside it. The plain and hyperlinked text for the story is differentiated by color. Viewers read the story and as they click on the hyperlinked text they see an image associated with each text. In so doing, they experience interactivity and viewer participation as important characteristics of Web art (Colman, 2005). Each story features 5 to 15 or more multi-layered images. Some of her stories align with collages or collage-making processes, while others build a narrative through a sequence of hand-drawn lines or painterly brush strokes that sync with the meaning of the text. This interactive mode encourages viewers to click whatever text link they like, thus enabling them to construct and deconstruct the story, and the art that relates to it, in whatever sequence they desire. This allows for a new way of looking at digital art in which students can exercise their own inventive linking (Taylor, 2000; Taylor & Carpenter, 2002). Dimon’s art, as an example of digital creativity, can inspire students to think of creative ways to express ideas or concepts and to accept new digital media through a format that traditional art cannot provide (Figure 2). Another example of digital creativity relates to the eBay Mystery Auction. I encountered this Mystery Auction while participating in reviewing the work of MFA student Christiana Caro at my university. Caro has explored this recently developed on-line auction from an artist’s perspective.2 eBay Mystery Auction is a new phenomenon, available through this Internet company, that originates from people’s desires for collection, discovery, and surprise (Harper, 2006). As a rule, a substantial part of the mystery auction listings remain undisclosed. What interests me most about this auction is not selling and buying of unknown stuff, but how sellers creatively describe unseen items in order to provoke curiosity and spur participants’ imaginations and desires to purchase an item. Some people share stories of heartbreak and others entertain with humorous anecdotes (Steiner, 2005).3 Caro associates this Mystery Auction with wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosity or wonder, that is, rooms decorated with objects collected to present a collector’s world view

or experience. She believes that as a contemporary phenomenon of the wunderkammern this Mystery Auction is a result of the age-old desire to collect/be surprised/discover (Caro, personal communication, 2009). When I observe this online activity, as an art educator, I learn that participants focus on materials, around which feelings, ideas, and stories are expressed, including acquisition episodes and personal meanings linked to them. This echoes what some art educators call material culture studies (Bolin, 1995; Bolin & Blandy, 2003), noting the significance of studying all forms and visual expressions in everyday contexts. My third example of the interface of creativity and digital artwork also relates to mystery, and a recently released movie, Coraline (2009) by Laika, a 3-D stop-motion animation adapted from Neil Gaiman’s (2002) novel Coraline. The movie features a story of a heroine’s adventure, courage, and family love, which mainly used real handcrafted miniature puppets, props, and sets. One thing that makes this movie different from others is a recent project of the entertainment division of Laika through the Web as a special pre-release campaign. The project sent out mystery gift boxes to 50 bloggers as surprises. The boxes included handcrafted charms and movie artifacts, such as keys, toys, stones, photos, all of which were used or could be seen in the movie. A group of bloggers who did not receive the mystery boxes—but heard about the project—were inspired by this idea, and they created their own Coraline Mystery Box Swap event in February 2009, organized under the web blogger name, My Little Mochi.4 My Little Mochi announced this project on a blog site, and eventually there were 44 participants who signed up. They were given about one month to make their own mystery box and then were randomly matched for swapping. Participants designed, crafted, painted, sculptured, and wrote about their responses to watching Coraline. Most of their boxes were documented, and their photos are displayed in Flickr dedicated for the Coraline Mystery Box Swap.5 Some examples include crafted keys, dolls, sealed envelopes, letters to partner recipients, necklaces, jewelry, decorated bottles of buttons, paintings, viewing stones, cards, poems, night lights, button boxes, glasses, bowls, mini posters, and other crafted objects. Furthermore, the boxes themselves are decorated with objects

Figure 6. A note outside this box said: “Inside of this box are memories of some of the best experiences of my life since I left my country. The experiences that are always going to be in my heart and that help me to keep going and that include the people I love.”

and paintings. The creators have uploaded photos and written about their creative experiences on the website. Many also are eagerly sharing them in their own blog and personal websites. Some also show photos in which they are receiving, opening, and decorating their homes with objects found in one of the boxes (Figures 3-5).

Mystery Box Swap In this section, I describe an art project inspired by the creative potential of digital creativity on the Web inspired by the examples just provided. The goal of this project was to help pre-service teachers see and value everyday on-line experiences as vital resources in art classrooms in order to develop contemporary art lessons and move beyond teaching only about famous art works and using traditional media. First, my students as digital natives discussed their use of digital technologies, addressing various Web 2.0 technologies as well as cell phones, cameras, iPods, and other digital devices. They recognized that people can participate in writing, creating, designing, videotaping, communicating, and socializing through these technologies. Addressing how we use these technologies in art education, I introduced them to eBay Mystery Auction. They saw the Mystery

Auction as a way to provoke curiosity and interests in objects and as means to understand and share the life and experience of others. The Coraline Mystery Box Swap also was shared as an example of how people came to be involved in creative activities through available on-line communication technologies. Then, I invited the students to create their own mystery boxes for swapping in class, providing a guideline similar to the one for the on-line Coraline Mystery Box Swap project: fill the box with several objects that express their past life experiences, such as a special moment, celebration, a person you want to remember, a life-changing experience, a vision or goal, or anything significant to the student. Some students used shoe boxes, and others used their own special boxes made of paper, plastic, wood, or metal. They were encouraged to decorate the inside and outside of their boxes, carefully choosing objects that represent what they wished to communicate through them. They also were asked to write a short description in the form of a poem, novel, letter, or short story attached to the outside of the box, as seen in the eBay Mystery Auction descriptions. Inside of the box, they were asked to write a letter to their partner to explain directly what the objects in the box were and what ideas they expressed. This was a homework assignment

Figure 7. This box contains the objects to remember a student’s late husband, sharing the painful memory of the day with the sad news of losing him.

that helped keep the contents of the mystery boxes a secret from the other students in the class. When they brought their boxes to class, the students took time to read each description, becoming curious about the contents in each box. Each then swapped their box with a partner and explored the enclosed objects. Students shared various experiences through objects. The topics included: life-changing moments, exploration of unknown places, memories about grandma, having a first baby, a significant college experience, a special ceremony, a stressful moment, and childhood memories. One student created a box that contained objects and images related to her best experiences as a international student (Figure 1 and 6); and another student memorized her late husband, sharing the nightmare evening that changed her whole life (Figure 7).

March 2010 / Art Education

Many students chose to take a fun, meaningful, and useful approach applicable to their future class. Just reading a description outside of a box made them excited about things they had yet to see. A student commented that this would be a good project in the first or second week of an art class because it could help students get to know more about new classmates. We also discussed another possible mystery box exchange project that could involve students from other states or countries sharing something special about their communities and lifestyles. I noticed that this project helped students understand that art is not just about making something with brushes, paints, wood, or clay, but they learned to express important ideas and experience through everyday objects, forms, and expressions through collecting them in a personal and meaningful way. The most important lesson I was hoping for them to learn was that artwork can also can be

inspired from new technologies and created from what appears to be frivolous and playful in our daily context, and that art educators, therefore, can make students excited, expressive, and creative, in this case, in the context of participating in the digital world.

Conclusion To many of us who were born and raised with cassette tapes and CD players, this new digital world provides challenges to us in adapting to and embracing this world into our classrooms. This new digital world often is not viewed as a valuable investment of students’ time and energy. Art educators might assume that our mission is to keep students away from instantly gratifying pop and media culture. However, those who have used these technologies encourage us to become digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001). Even those who were not born with them can learn to take advantage of them as

References Bolin, P. (1995). Investigating artifacts: Material culture studies and art education. NAEA Advisory. Bolin, P., & Blandy, D. (2003). Beyond visual culture: Seven statements of support for material culture studies in art education. Studies in Art Education, 44(3), 246-263. Buffington, M. L. (2008). What is Web 2.0 and how can it further art education? Art Education, 61(3), 36-41. Chen, H. (2006). Flow on the net–detecting Web users’ positive affects and their flow states. Computers in Human Behavior, 22(2), 221-233. Colman, A. (2005). Constructing an aesthetic of Web art from a review of artists’ use of the World Wide Web. Visual Arts Research, 60(1), 13-25. Craft, A (2000). Creativity across the primary curriculum: framing and developing practice. London: Routledge. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Perennial. Gaiman, N. (2002). Coraline. New York: HarperCollins. Harper, A. (2006). eBay and why people bid at mystery auctions. Retrieved July 15, 2009, from http://ezinearticles.com/?eBay-and-Why-People-Bid-atMystery-Auctions&id=371843. Leach, J. (2001). A hundred possibilities: Creativity, community and ICT. In A. Craft, B. Jeffrey, & M. Leibling (Eds.), Creativity in education (pp. 175-194). London: Continuum. Loveless, A. M. (2002). A literature review in creativity, new technologies and learning: A report for NESTA Futurelab. Bristol: NESTA Futurelab. Available online at http://www.nestafuturelab.org.uk. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved July 16, 2009 from http://oreilly. com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. Pfeiffer, A. (2008, November 7). Your observations of digital natives. Message posted to http://digitalarted.blogspot.com/2008/11/your-observations-ofdigital-natives.html Pilke, E. M. (2004). Flow experiences in information technology use. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 61(3), 347-357. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6.

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educational tools (Buffington, 2008), as seen on Craig Roland’s Art Education site.6 As seen in the examples shared in this article, the digital world and new technologies can serve as resources for fostering creative student engagement in open-ended class projects in which creative outcomes are not anticipated by students or their teachers. Even though many of us may never be as fully immersed in digital technologies as the youth of today, we as digital immigrants can draw creative ideas and projects based on what people in the digital world do in everyday contexts in order to create exciting and meaningful educational activities for our students. I encourage art educators to explore, experience, and embrace creative digital world and technologies. Ryan Shin is Assistant Professor, Art and Visual Culture Education, at the University of Arizona, Tucson. E-mail: shin@e-mail. arizona.edu

Prensky, M. (2005). “Engage me or enrage me”: What today’s learners demand. EDUCAUSE, 40(5), 60 - 65. Rymaszewski, M., Au, W. J., Wallace, M., Winters, C., Ondrejka, C., & Batstone-Cunningham, B. (2006). Second life: The official guide. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Interscience. Shallcross, D. (1981). Teaching creative behavior: How to teach creativity to children of all ages. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Steins, C., & Stephens, J. (2008). Building cities in the virtual world. Planning, 74(4), 32-37. Steiner, I. (2005). eBay takes ‘grab bags’ to new level: Mystery box auctions. Retrieved July 20, 2009, from http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/ m12/i30/s02 Taylor, P. G. (2000). Madonna and hypertext: Liberatory learning in art education. Studies in Art Education, 41(4), 376-389. Taylor, P. G., & Carpenter, B. S. (2002). Inventively linking: Teaching and learning with computer hypertext. Art Education, 55(4), 6-12. Zimmerman, E. (2009). Reconceptualizing the role of creativity in art education theory and practice. Studies in Art Education, 50 (4), 382-399.

Endnotes 1 Visit the sites, dimonscapes.com or www.artstory.net, to see her works. 2 Caro’s video artwork about Mystery Auction can be found at http:// christianacaro.blogspot.com/2009/05/ua-graduate-video-screening.html 3 An example of Mystery Auction description: “Everybody who purchases an envelop will receive a gift from me…This is where the fun comes in. I will not be the one who randomly pick the envelope. My cat, Beans, will pick the envelope. This is fun for Beans. She loves picking out things. Pretty weird, but she put her paw on what she wants. All I do is tell her to pick or “give me” while snapping my fingers, and she say “meow” and puts her paw on it and slides it in my direction…Whatever is in the envelop is a gift from me to you.” (e-Bay Mystery Auction Item number 190250769412, September, 2008) 4 http://mylittlemochi.typepad .com/my_little_mochi 5 http://www.flickr.com/groups/coraline-mbs 6 http://digitalarted.blogspot.com

A 21st-Century Art Room:

Creativity

The Remix of Creativity andTechnology Technology

B y C o u rt n e y B r ya n t

he bell rings. Excitedly I barrel through the door to the shiny new Mac lab. I am the first to arrive in the graphic design class and I greet the teacher with a shifty, silent smile—the perfect image of a surly teenager. I turn on the computer and immediately start toying with the tool bar in

one of the programs. The teacher begins by distributing a handout with step-by-step instructions as well as a picture printout of exactly what we will make today. Then she proceeds to bark out instructions. I somehow manage to keep up through the first several steps. She stops to clarify directions for one student and I pass the time by manipulating the image on my screen. The teacher resumes barking, but I am too far past the point of undoing what I have done—I panic and restart at step one. I am able to get back to where I was, but now the group has moved on. Distressed, I ask my neighbor for help, who quickly pulls me back into line. Unfortunately, we soon realize the class has moved on and we are both lost. HELP! My right hand flies up and I wait to be noticed. I noisily spin in my chair, talking with friends—all while intermittently trying random stabs at solving my problem. The bell rings. I save my humiliation for another day. I know tomorrow my anxiety, stress, and unease at re-making the teacher’s vision will begin anew. Flash forward 15 years. I am an art teacher sitting in the front row of my own high school students’ first annual film festival. I watch their movies, once again uncomfortable. I realize that my students’ astute technical work all looks boring. I think back to my classroom of this past year and how students sat, miffed with their hands in the air. I came to the sickening realization that I was teaching the way I had been taught. And it was not working. With this, my qualitative case study was born. I decided on this methodology because a “case study investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context” (Merriam, 1999, p. 27). I wondered if my students could acquire necessary techniques while expressing creativity in their own voices. Consequently, for my case study, I selected my high school Introduction

to Animation class, an elective in the Computer Animation pathway at my school. This course involved instruction of basic technical applications in stop-motion animation and allowed promotion of creative problemsolving strategies. I observed the class of 21 students and reviewed their sketchbooks for insights on implementation of creative problem-solving strategies. Through purposeful sampling, (Merriam, 1999), I selected three students to study in depth based on their personalities, gender, availability, and willingness to participate. These students, Quentina, LaDarrion, and Terique (pseudonyms), became the voices of my study as I explored possibilities of combining technical instruction with creative problem-solving strategies. In this study in a computer animation unit, I explored urban high school students’ use of creative problemsolving strategies, defined as techniques that offer multiple ways and angles of considering a problem from which an optimal solution may be selected. These strategies included open-ended instructional problems, brainstorming and storyboarding, peer checks, utilizing symbolism and metaphor, and critique. The primary goal for the unit of instruction was to teach students how to create a stop-motion film that used computer programs Photobooth, iPhoto, and iMovie. While these strategies are common in traditional artrooms, I examined what happens when these creative problem-solving strategies were combined with a high-school computer animation unit and what results were obtained.

March 2010 / Art Education

Creativity and Technical Skill Acquisition

LaDarrion’s storyboard: he will walk, then ride the bus, and then drive. In the written reflection that accompanies the drawing, he plans to “get a bus” for the movie. Storyboarding helped LaDarrion establish a list of props necessary for production.

Before beginning a discussion about the importance of combining creativity and technical skill acquisition, clear definitions of creativity and technology/technique are crucial. For the purposes of my study, creativity was defined as the individual’s use of knowledge, imagination, and judgment within constraints of an environment and its resources (Slocombe, 2000) in order to solve problems in an innovative, high quality, appropriate manner (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2007). Technology and technique share the same root word techne which means “art, craft, skill” (Merriam-Webster, 1993, p. 1210). The computer is simply the most recent addition to an artist’s tool chest of media necessary for a display of technical skill. Technique and creative expression need not preclude one another. Victor D’Amico (1953) suggests that teachers should give as much instruction as a student needs, satiating curiosity while not overwhelming with too much information that could derail a student’s original intent about his or her artwork. More importantly, D’Amico also believes that “a technique is not taught as an isolated activity, or as an end in itself, but as a means of helping the child to express himself ” (p. 20). In today’s strongest art programs, teaching content and process as well as allowing students to use content for artistic self-expression are of primary importance (Anderson & Milbrandt, 2005). Based on my peers’ anecdotes about their own experiences in the computer-based art room, however, I fear this balance of technique and creative expression, found in many art classrooms, is lost when entering a computer lab. With any media, especially computer technology, it is tempting to assume that students will be motivated to learn a technique as a result of its novelty. All too often, this is only temporary (Gouzouasis, 2006). Eventually the newness factor abates and if substantive knowledge or intrinsic motivation is lacking, artmaking can become rote, purposeless, and, in some cases, ceases completely.

A still from Quentina’s film. Her father, the black bird, is shown being liberated from the cage that represents his jail cell. In her film the father bird’s color shifted from multicolored to black as he sat in the cage. This represented his change and the dark period in Quentina’s life.

Art Education / March 2010

A 21st-Century Artroom

Computers are everywhere: in restaurants, homes, schools, and increasingly in art classrooms. Art teachers must not only master and teach computer technology, but also sustain a focus on creative problem solving. Additionally, art teachers of the 21st century hold responsibility for educating students about the purposeful and artistic use of technology through the study of visual culture (Duncum, 2001). Teaching students to critically examine images made with technology fosters students’ creation of their own complex imagery. Furthermore, it contributes to development of a future work force. Daniel Pink (2006) believes that: We’ll need to supplement our welldeveloped high-tech abilities with abilities that are high concept and high touch… high concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft satisfying narrative and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. (p. 51-52) Recall now my students' first annual film festival. The films may had been technically sound, but lacked ’high concept.’ These issues of creativity and technique in today’s classroom led me to implement the following strategies.

Creative Problem-Solving Strategy 1: Open-Ended Assignments

The open-ended assignment was: Tell of a period of personal transformation in your life using the programs Photobooth, iPhoto, and iMovie to make a stop-motion film of the experience. Students used this prompt to present their own agendas or personal feelings about a topic. This not only liberated, but also motivated them. Quentina very concisely explained why she enjoyed the personal choices innate in open ended problems: “[When I] find something that I like, I—I just like to stick with it because it’s part of me and it’s what I feel.” This motivation carried her through to an elaborate, original outcome that had personal meaning and value. Kay (1998) and Carroll (2007) also believe open-ended assignments, or elegant problems, allow for “flexibility, fluency, elaboration, and originality of responses”

(Kay, p. 281). Integrating an elegant problem into a unit of instruction allows students at all ability levels to make choices and create original works that have personal significance (Carroll, 2007). Art educators may inspire for a plethora of creative solutions by presenting a problem open for interpretation and students benefit by having an opportunity to share their own lived experiences. In addition, Howard Gardner (2006) offers this suggestion to today’s parents: “make sure that … children pursue hobbies or activities that do not feature a single right answer” (p. 86). With this, he implies that development of more than one solution to any problem will serve students better when working for modern companies such as 3M, Google, Ebay, and Amazon (Gardner, 2006). Encouraging multiple solutions does not endorse a total disregard of structure; to the contrary, structure is essential in art and business as it is in education.

Creative Problem-Solving Strategy 2: Pre-Production: Mind-Mapping, Brainstorming, Storyboarding

For some artists and art students, planning before doing is second nature. Once individuals arrive in a technically charged environment, however, preproduction planning may be regarded as a waste of time. In fact, planning may be the most important part of any digital artwork (Mayo, 2007). In this study, students were asked to make mind-maps, graphic organizers that allowed students to record all ideas and begin to see connections or overall themes in their ideas. After choosing an idea they were asked to brainstorm possible storylines. Next I showed them how to complete a storyboard. Finally, they made a list of all the materials needed and where they would acquire these materials. Several students consequently realized they would need materials from home. Most important, they could finally visualize how to complete this momentous task. My students seemed reluctant to plan at first, but after seeing the results of planning, changed their minds. Terique openly discussed how brainstorming affected his product: “It will help me ‘cause I have my

plans already down, so I basically know what to do and I won’t stumble through what I have to do. So I be on a roll. And get my project done quicker.” LaDarrion noted an additional benefit: “If I take all the information of my brainstorm and put it into my project, I get more things out of the project like details.” Extensive brainstorming led to elaboration of the overall concept, netting a quality creative outcome.

Creative Problem-Solving Strategy 3: Inclusion of Symbolism or Metaphor

Creating symbolism for meaning is particular to this study as a creative problem solving strategy, and is supported by the literature. We are in a transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age; individuals who are able to create, empathize, and utilize metaphorical thinking, skills attributed to the right hemisphere of the brain, will take center stage (Pink, 2006). Moreover, analogies can be used in art to create new ideas in one’s imagination (Roukes, 1982). Marshall (2007) provides additional insight with her belief that “the process of constructing a metaphor is partly rational (connecting the dots) but also imaginative (seeing the dots in a new way)” (p. 31). When students create symbolism for meaning, it allows them to conjure up new ideas and make points in more subtle and distinctive ways. My students were asked to incorporate some form of symbolism in their work, attributing symbolic meaning to everything from decisions about music to inclusion of props. Quentina explained the significance of symbolism in her project: “Since my daddy has changed, I decided to turn the father bird black. Because he was a normal person, a normal father. But after a while, he came outta jail, he was different. So black is a bold color, and since it was a black stage in my life, I decided to turn him black” Terique also aimed to convey his idea through props embodying his symbolism: “Like when I say I’m evil, I got this little mask that look like the devil. And I got a little hood, put a little hoodie on, make it seem like I’m even more evil.” Symbolism allowed my students to show their feelings and concepts without having to use conventional, literal terms.

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One of the many times LaDarrion received advice from a peer. This time the two discussed movement for the car in his film. LaDarrion, an avid model car builder, also needed a bus but did not have one in his personal collection. Through peer interactions, he pursued one suggestion from among several alternatives.

Creative Problem-Solving Strategy 4:

Teamwork and peer help were an unexpected windfall of these strategies. Often when students had questions they sought help from one another. These collaborative strategies lead to engagement and ultimately fostered a sense of empowerment never before witnessed in my classroom.

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Peer Conversations

Peer conversation consists of informal student discussions about their work that often leads to greater insights for the students involved. Specifically, this type of group collaboration with adolescents and interactions can prove pivotal and informative for students. A collaborative atmosphere allows creativity to flourish (Moran and John-Steiner, 2003). Damon and Phelps (1989) agree: “Reported studies have shown that peer interaction is conducive, perhaps even essential, to a host of important early achievements: children’s understanding of fairness, their self-esteem, their proclivities toward sharing and kindness, their mastery of symbolic expression, their acquisition of role-taking and communication skills, and their development of creative and critical thinking.” (p. 135, emphasis added) Students learn that they benefit from seeking consultants when faced with important decisions. Solutions arrived at in this manner often prove to be stronger than those derived by an individual working alone (Damon & Phelps, 1989). In my study, I encouraged this type of interaction.

Specifically, I suggested that students seek advice from each other and travel around the room to provide feedback on other students’ work. I modeled this behavior and then observed many students engaged in the process. Students seemed to not only enjoy the practice; they benefited artistically and emotionally from giving and receiving advice. LaDarrion shared: “I talked with one of my friends, who is also in my visual arts class with me…. He gave me some good advice on how to get my props together… So he gave me some advice to work on it—print some pictures out and place them on cardboard. Create a background for it that would make my video look great.”

Creative Problem-Solving Strategy 5: Critique

Formal teacher-directed critique is commonly used in traditional art rooms and, if used effectively, can boost creative production through continued idea generation and concept clarification (Carroll, 2007). Teachers must be supportive and honest when giving feedback so that students will learn and practice this kind of interaction with their peers (Shallcross, 1981). During this study, students were asked on several occasions to consider together the overall meaning of an artwork, the effects used to achieve that meaning, and areas for improvement.

Students benefit from checking the meaning of their work within a supportive whole group context. The overall viewpoint of the audience can be important and influential. When multiple students present the same feedback, the student receiving the feedback is more likely to agree with it (Finken, 2005). Terique explained this phenomenon in terms of his own critique experience: “Well, like we had did this critiquing in da classroom and most folks didn’t understand why, um, I had my uniform on and I was takin’ it off so that’s a big problem so I had went back in and changed it from me takin’ a mask off showing that I’m a be myself this time.”

Flash Forward: Study Results

Motivation proved to be a non-issue with this unit of study once the students became involved in the activity. After school tutorial attendance doubled and sometimes tripled during this lesson, and students even begged for time to work during lunch. Terique explained the difference in his motivation: “Yeah, cause this time I was more into the project and like all the other times I probably just do, um, this part of the project and I be done with it and I’d probably go talk to somebody, but when I was doin’ this project, I noticed that I ain’t had enough time to waste so, I had to do what I had to do to get done.” Engagement also increased during the animation assignment. The blending of creative strategies resulted in powerful combinations in which students valued personal meanings and memories of the past; created concrete paths; envisioned everyday concepts in new ways; acknowledged the perspective of others; and understood possibilities for improvement via new ideas from peers. Furthermore, teamwork and peer help were an unexpected windfall of these strategies. Often when students had questions they sought help from one another. These collaborative strategies lead to engagement and ultimately fostered a sense of empowerment never before witnessed in my classroom. Students were engaged with this project and their individual responses were distinctive so I had good reason to smile when the film festival rolled around again. Each student’s movie was unique and told his or her own story through intense visual imagery and captivating soundtracks. I had even more reason to grin as we competed in the city-wide art show this year. A judge indicated that our entries this year were superior and contributed to our earning the coveted High School Art Program of The Year banner. The grin stretched further as my students claimed first, second, and third places in the film category at the same show—with Terique placing first!

Terique’s film. In this sequence Terique removes the mask from his face so that the audience may finally see his metaphorical true self. These stills are just three images out of the hundreds he used to tell of his transformation. In the stop-motion process small changes of movement are recorded gradually with individual images from a digital camera, organized into proper sequence, edited for dramatic effect, and finally combined to produce a film.

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During the unit, I observed few pauses in work due to confusion or stalling, and no one spun in his or her chair for entertainment. They were too busy working. Students were engaged throughout the classroom and even throughout the school building—on task with movie making. What a difference from my own days as an art student in that computer lab. In the future I plan to instruct my students to utilize creative problem solving strategies as I teach necessary skill sets for animation units. While I acknowledge limitations of my study, conducted in a specific environment from which readers should generalize only with care, I do recommend that teachers

using technology as a tool for artmaking consider these strategies. Creative problemsolving strategies should be promoted by the art/technology instructor in the same way they would in any other art room. Furthermore, I would like to encourage a paradigm shift: learning highly technical computer skills does not have to come at the expense of creativity. Future studies into the successful fusion of these two pursuits would be worthwhile for educating students of future challenges given the increasing emphasis and importance of high-tech artmaking in both educational and business contexts.

Courtney Bryant is Visual Arts and Animation Instructor at South Atlanta Computer Animation and Design, Atlanta, Georgia and she conducted this research to complete her Masters Degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art. E-mail: teacherbryant@gmail.com

References Anderson, T., & Milbrandt, M. (2005). Art for life: Authentic instruction in art. New York: McGraw-Hill. Carroll, K. (2007). Outcome III: Facilitating engagement with the art-making process. In Better practices in visual arts education (pp. 115-138). Baltimore, MD: Maryland State Department of Education. D’Amico, V. (1953). Child as creator. In Creative teaching in art (pp. 1-26). Scranton, PA: International Textbook Company. Damon, W., & Phelps, E. (1989). Strategic uses of peer learning in children’s education. In T. Brendt & G. Ladd (Eds.), Peer relationships in child development (pp. 135-157). New York: Wiley and Sons. Duncum, P. (2001). Visual culture: Developments, definitions, and directions. Studies in Art Education. 42(2), 101-112. Finken, L. (2005). Role of consultants in adolescents’ decision making: A focus on abortion decisions. In J. Jacobs, & P. Klaczynski (Eds.), The development of judgment and decision making in children and adolescents (pp. 255-277 ). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gardner, H. (2006). Five minds for the future. Boston: Harvard University Press. Gouzouasis, P. (2006). Technology as arts-based education: Does the desktop reflect the arts? Arts Education Policy Review. 107(5), 3-9. Kay, S. (1998). Shaping elegant problems for visual thinking. In J. W. Simpson, J. M. Delaney, K. L. Carroll, C. M. Hamilton, S. I. Kay, M. S. Kerlavage, et al. (Eds.), Creating meaning through art: Teacher as choice maker (pp. 259-281). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kaufman, J., & Sternberg, R. (2007). Creativity. Change, 39(4), 55-58. Marshall, J. (2007). Image as insight: Visual images in practice-based research. Studies in Art Education, 49(1), 23-41. Mayo, S. (2007). Implications for art education in the third millennium: Art technology integration. Art Education, 60(3), 45-52. Merriam, S. (1999). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.). (1993). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster. Moran, S., & John-Steiner, V. (2003). Creativity in the making: Vygotsky’s contemporary contributions to the dialectic of development and creativity. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), Creativity and development (pp. 61-90). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Pink, D. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books. Roukes, N. (1982). Art Synectics. Worcester, MA: Davis. Shallcross, D. (1981). Teaching creative behavior: How to teach creativity to children of all ages. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Slocombe, C. C. (2000). The impact of the work environment on technology workers: Understanding creativity through the experiences of software designers. PhD dissertation, The Fielding Institute, United States—California. Retrieved February 8, 2009, from ABI/INFORM Global database. (Publication No. AAT 9963252).

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An Interdisciplinary Design Studio: How Can Art and Engineering Collaborate to Increase B y T r a cie C o sta n ti n o , Nadia Kellam, B o n n ie C r a m o n d , a n d I s a be l l e C r o w d er

Students’ Creativity?

reativity often has been associated with the arts, although creativity also is essential for innovative discoveries and applications in science and engineering.

In this article, a pilot study is presented about an investigation concerning how creativity is fostered in an art education course in conjunction with an undergraduate engineering course, through visual arts experiences and instruction using creative problem solving strategies. Through emphasizing creative strategies and ways of thinking developed through art, such as resistance to closure, tolerance of ambiguity, visualization, and use of metaphor (Eisner, 2002), interdisciplinary collaborations of art with other disciplines, such as engineering, can become very successful. In addition, this project is relevant for art teacher preparation as well as K-12 art education with its focus on creative problem solving, considered an important 21st-century skill, and in regard to increased interest in making engineering a part of high school curricula (see, for example, Katehi, Pearson & Feder, 2009). Overarching questions that guide the project are: How may creative thinking and problemsolving skills used in addressing environmental engineering problems affect visual art students’ learning experiences? Likewise, how may the cognitive capacity of artistic, creative thinking inform development of creative problem finding and solving in environmental engineering, which is increasingly called upon to devise mechanisms for complex human and environmental systems?

Creative Thinking in Art and Science

The commonalities of creative thinking in art and science are clearly expressed in the words of creative scientists and artists featured in the Root-Bernsteins’ 1999 book, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. For example, William Lipscomb, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, explained his thinking when trying to research the chemistry of boron as an aesthetic experience: “Was it science? Our later tests showed it was. But the processes that I used and the responses that I felt were more like those of an artist” (cited in Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 4). Freeman Dyson, indicating the degree to which the scientists, artists, and philosophers at the Sixteenth Nobel Conference in 1980 agreed on the universality of creativity, observed, “The analogies between science and art are very good as long as you are talking about the creation and the performance. The creation is certainly very analogous. The aesthetic pleasure of the craftsmanship

of performance is also very strong in science” (cited in RootBernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 11). In a recent study, Robert Root-Bernstein and his collaborators (2008) found that Nobel Laureates in the sciences were three times as likely to have arts avocations than the average scientist and the general public. They explained, “These data suggest that successful scientists accrue a wider range of skills, often including experiences with a wide range of patterns, manipulative ability, and hand-eye coordination, than the average person or the average scientist” (p. 54). Although the arts often are considered synonymous with creativity, recent research in the cognitive and neurosciences focuses on an increased understanding of the role of emotion in creativity, cognition, learning, and decision-making (Damasio, 1994, 1999; Immordino-Yang, 2008; Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007) that can help art educators further articulate the value of creative learning through the arts for students from other disciplines. The confluence

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Figure 1. Title slide from the introduction to the visual metaphor lesson with work embedded from Barbara Krueger and Diana Shearwood.

Figure 2. Engineering and art students working to prepare their collage of a visual metaphor for food sustainability. Figure 3. Students hanging their collages and preparing for a reflective critique.

of research on the role of emotion in cognition, especially in creative thinking and learning; an increased understanding of the cognitive capacity of artistic practice (e.g., Arnheim, 1969; Eisner, 1994; Efland, 2004; Solso, 1994, 2003; Turner, 2006; Zeki, 1999); and a need for more creative problem-solvers in art and engineering therefore inspired this interdisciplinary project.

The Need for Creativity in Art and Engineering Education

There is a concern in engineering education that engineering students are not fully comfortable thinking creatively and considering their designs for real-world contexts (National Academy of Engineering, 2004; Rugarcia, Felder, Woods, & Stice, 2000). Engineering educators have long recognized the need to prepare engineering students to not simply be analytically and technically capable, but more importantly to be creative thinkers (Conwell, Catalano & Beard, 1993; Katehi & Ross, 2007; National Academy of Engineering, 2004; Rugarcia et al., 2000) as creativity and innovation are central to design and engineering (Petroski, 1992). There are many practical reasons that we should be developing the creativity of all students. As Sawyer (2006) and others have pointed out, in the last several decades the most developed countries are moving away from an industrial economy and toward a knowledge economy (p. 1). A major keystone

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of this knowledge economy is innovation, or in psychological and educational terms, creativity (Council on Competitiveness, 2005; The Task Force, 2005). As pointed out in the recent report from the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE, 2007), curriculum must be changed to include creativity and innovation if we hope to compete in a global economy. Yet, economic superiority is not the only, or even the best, argument for nurturing creativity in engineers and other scientists as well as in art students. One of the best arguments was made by R. Buckminster Fuller (1981), who recalled that during his childhood at the turn of the century, people tried to predict the future and could not begin to conceive of automobiles, electrons, travel to the moon, or even air wars as reality. At that time, only about 1% of the world was literate, and fewer still thought of humanity in world terms (pp. 57-58). How can we be so confident as to think that we can predict the challenges that face us in the future any better than did our ancestors? In fact, the rule of geometric progression shows that any one innovation begets many more, so, if anything, we should expect the rate of change to accelerate and diversify (Rogers, 1995). Such successful adaptation to world change and enrichment of our world depends on creative endeavors. As Hoffer (2006), a self-educated social writer and philosopher once said, “In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the

future. The learned find themselves equipped to live only in a world that no longer exists” (p. 22). Without instilling creativeness as a necessity in all our students, we are merely preparing a group of “learned” students who soon will be ill equipped in this everchanging world.

Curricular Reform

The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Georgia (UGA) is currently designing its curriculum for environmental engineering students to address the issue of preparing engineering graduates to develop innovative and humanistic designs for local complex systems (Flurry, n.d.). Recently, the UGA Engineering Think Tank, with interdisciplinary members from visual arts, cellular biology, pharmacy, geography, and engineering, organized a series of interdisciplinary focus groups with undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty members, and administrators to develop a vision for UGA engineers. The resulting profile of a UGA engineer, similar to that of a practicing artist, consists of technical excellence, humanism, and innovation. This project focuses on the innovation and humanism portions of this triumvirate.1 With funding from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Course, Curriculum, Laboratory and Instruction grant,2 we are developing two semesters from a 4-year course sequence, the Synthesis and Design Studio Series, in which environmental

engineering students and art students attend interdisciplinary courses focused on design; two- and three-dimensional foundations of art, art history, and aesthetics; and creative thinking strategies. The main objective of the Synthesis and Design Studio Series is for students to develop a deep understanding of larger systems in which both art and engineering are situated. Throughout the 4 years, students will develop an understanding of the interrelationships among engineering, the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Our premise is that as a result of participating in the Studio Series, art and engineering students will become creative, systems thinkers who will be prepared to deal with complex issues that they will be facing in their future careers. The Synthesis and Design Studio Series consists of studio sessions throughout every semester that will provide students with an environment that encourages them to establish synergies among their courses, between their major courses and humanities or social science courses, and between their education and their life outside of the university. While the NSF funded interdisciplinary engineering and art synthesis and design studios didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t begin until the fall semester of 2009, we first explored integration of these disciplines in a pilot study of two coinciding art and engineering courses.

Pilot Project

Description of the Pilot Studio

Eager to explore this collaboration before receipt of NSF funding, the research team decided to construct an interdisciplinary opportunity with existing courses that two of the project team members were scheduled to teach in spring semester 2009. The interdisciplinary courses discussed here are an example of making explicit the cultivation of creativity and artistic thinking for both art and engineering students. Tracie Costantino (School of Art) was teaching a graduate art education course on art and cognition (N=11) and Nadia Kellam (Faculty of Engineering) was teaching second year undergraduate engineering students (N=9). In the pilot study, we incorporated art lessons, critique sessions, and creative thinking strategies into the engineering course, which was focused on an open-ended design problem related to sustainability and food within the local community. The first half of the semester focused on problem framing, and for the remaining time, engineering students developed their design plans. The art education graduate students in the art and cognition course taught six one-hour art lessons to the engineering students in a repeating three-part sequence focused on (1) observation in diverse contexts, (2) multiple perspectives and the use of metaphor, and (3) synthesis. For the art

Figure 4. Sample student work depicting the rupture between the value of fresh food and the lure of processed, fast food and over consumption.

education graduate students, collaboration with the engineering students gave them an opportunity for practical application of the theoretical literature read in the art and cognition course, especially in regard to applying creative thinking, metaphoric thinking, and imagination. The sequence of lessons that the art education students taught was informed by identification of thinking tools most used by creative people across the arts and sciences in research by Root-Bernstein and RootBernstein (1999), as well as creative thinking strategies outlined for K-12 classroom applications by Starko (2005). The lessons addressed big ideas related to food sustainability. In these lessons, students engaged in visual analysis and discussions of works of art by exemplar artists (most of them contemporary artists such as Sandy Skoglund, Diana Shearwood, Barbara Krueger, and Andy Goldsworthy). They also created art, usually in collaborative groupings of art and engineering students, using diverse media (ceramics, collage, found objects, watercolor, pencil, and pastels), and experienced a reflective studio critique process at the end of each lesson. Some of the projects included working in small groups to create a visual metaphor for consumption and sustainability using collage, creating found-object sculptures by reusing recycled materials, and working in pairs to create a ceramic sculpture of a creature that combined attributes of two different animals.

Figure 5. Sample student work showing a â&#x20AC;&#x153;junk food treeâ&#x20AC;? in a toxic wasteland.

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Bonnie Cramond (Educational Psychology and Torrance Center for Creativity) gave an introduction to creativity early in the semester and her graduate students taught a session on the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving method (CPS, Treffinger, Isaksen, Stead-Dorval, 2006) to the engineering students.3 Food Sustainability through Visual Metaphors will be described to provide a more in-depth description of one of the art lessons. This lesson was prepared and implemented by Whitney Ward, Winnie Smith, and Lisa Whittington, graduate students in the art and cognition class. The lesson began with a discussion of Shearwood’s and Krueger’s artwork to demonstrate use of visual metaphors in art (Figure 1). After this critical analysis, all the engineering and art students were challenged to work in teams to develop a visual metaphor for food sustainability through a collage (Figure 2). After the collages were created, the students hung their work on a wall in the classroom (Figure 3). Then they participated in a reflective critique interpreting the visual metaphors and their aesthetic presentations in the other groups’ work and discussing the value of representing issues such as food sustainability through visual metaphor (Figures 4 and 5).

Student Impressions of the Pilot Course

The engineering students gave a midterm presentation on their problem framing processes. The carefully designed and executed presentation used multimedia (PowerPoint, video, digital photography, and music) and incorporated visual metaphors to convey the students’ understanding of sustainability within the local food system. After the presentation, the engineering students informally discussed their reactions to the course thus far. They commented first on the open-ended, project-based structure of the engineering class, “If you lose yourself in research, then you’ll find the problem,”

and “It stays with you, coming up with our own problem instead of being given one.” While students acknowledged feeling lost and overwhelmed at first, several students asserted that they were now “not as afraid to be lost” and “more confident” that they can become immersed in the engagement and exploration processes as an essential stage in solving problems creatively. Regarding the role art lessons played in the overall process, the engineering students realized the power of images to convey a concept: “we tried to make the presentation aesthetic as a picture is better than words” and “metaphor teaches more than a sentence.” The collaborative nature of the art lessons were considered important for developing a productive working environment and for team building, “not as high stress, kind of fun, we need to play together, it helps with social development.” Other students discussed the emphasis on multiple perspectives in the art lessons, “different perspectives helped me to look at something differently” Finally, the engineering students stressed the importance of aesthetics, “the arts give us a rich life; you want more than a sustainable life.”

External Evaluation

An evaluator external to the project, Isabelle Crowder, collected data on engineering and art students’ experiences in the course through a survey and focus group with each class. Focus here will be on responses to interdisciplinary collaboration that is necessary for future participation in creative processes for both groups of students in the fields of art and engineering. Nine out of 11 of the art students reported that collaboration between disciplines worked well, with both groups benefitting. One art student summarized feedback from several classmates by suggesting work with the engineering students helped create connections between theories presented in the art and cognition graduate course and the practice of teaching art. Two students responded that they gained the most from the interaction among information,

“I never once thought that art and engineering would go hand in hand … but seeing the problem in a different light led to multiple solutions, whereas, without this perspective there may have only been one solution or no solutions.”

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strategies, and skills. As one student noted, “I think it [the collaboration] added to the course because we had two types of thinkers clearly participating (left-directed and right-directed) so it made the readings and discussions very, very relevant.” Considering that most of the art students were either practicing or preservice K-12 art teachers, these comments point to the relevance of this experience for their future professional development. The majority of the engineering students surveyed (6 out of 9) noted that the course would have been better if the art students participated more directly in the actual design challenge (that was an assignment for the engineering students) in addition to teaching the engineering students creative strategies through art lessons. Nevertheless, a majority of engineering students surveyed (5 out of 9) also responded that the collaboration between disciplines was beneficial. Specific benefits reported included learning to think outside the realm of math and science to solve problems and gaining many helpful pointers on how to make projects more creative and visually appealing for an audience. The art education students, however, expressed some frustration that the engineering students perceived the value of the arts primarily as a marketing tool. Several engineering students, however, recognized the value of multiple perspectives, as demonstrated through the collaboration with the art students. As one engineering student commented, “I never once thought that art and engineering would go hand in hand … but seeing the problem in a different light led to multiple solutions, whereas, without this perspective there may have only been one solution or no solutions.” Through challenges and successes of the pilot study, we learned some important lessons that lead to key curricular changes for the course. Significantly, we learned that there was a great potential in artists and engineers working together creatively to solve complex environmental issues, with students expressing a desire for more

collaboration between disciplines. As one student observed, “Many engineering undergrads are so tightly wound that this class may let them open up their minds; something they’re not really ‘allowed’ to do in other courses. We are used to there being a right or wrong answer … when in art the only wrong answer is not being creative or imaginative.” While there can be wrong answers in art, this engineering student’s concluding quote illustrates the educational value of making the cultivation of creativity, innovation, and imagination an explicit objective in art teacher preparation as well as an organizing conceptual framework for interdisciplinary curricula. Tracie Costantino is Assistant Professor of Art Education at the University of Georgia, Athens. E-mail: tcost@uga.edu Nadia Kellam is Assistant Professor, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Georgia, Athens. E-mail: nkellam@engr.uga.edu Bonnie Cramond is Professor, Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, University of Georgia, Athens. E-mail: bcramond@uga.edu Isabelle Crowder is a doctoral student in Gifted and Creative Education, University of Georgia, Athens. Email: crowderi@uga. edu References Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Conwell, J. C., Catalano, G. D., & Beard, J. E. (1993). A case study in creative problem solving in engineering design. Journal of Engineering Education, 82(4), 227-231. Council on Competitiveness (2005). Innovate America: National innovation initiative summit and report. Washington, DC: Council on Competitiveness. Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam. Efland, A. (2004). Art and cognition: Integrating the visual arts in the curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. Eisner, E. W. (1994). Cognition and curriculum reconsidered (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.

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Endnotes

1This project was originally conceived when two of the authors, Nadia Kellam and Tracie Costantino, met through the Lilly Teaching Fellows program at UGA and recognized their mutual interest in interdisciplinary curriculum. 2 Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program under Award No. 0837173 and the University of Georgia Office of STEM Education. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the University of Georgia. 3 The 13 creative thinking tools outlined by Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein (1999) are: observation, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and synthesizing. The strategies adapted from Starko (2005) are synectics and morphological synthesis. The CPS process includes three main states consisting of understanding the problem, generating ideas, and planning for action. These states are fluid and include divergent and convergent thinking (Treffinger, Isaksen, & Stead-Dorval, 2006).

March 2010 / Art Education