CHARLES C. JAMES

Towards the Possible: The Creative Mindset

CHARLES C. JAMES

There is something uniquely and essentially human in the endeavor to make things novel, new, and better. So why does creativity tend to diminish the older a student gets, and what is my role in teaching the language, practice, and potential of the creative mindset?

Creativity is the science and art of the possible. St. Andrew’s preschool through 12th grade design thinking program embraces the practices that allow students to think past experience and learn to discover beyond the known. For years, researchers believed that the genius of creativity was reserved for a few special individuals like Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Drew, or Vera Rubin. In fact, the opposite is true. Creativity is natural, and everyone can increase their creative ability. 1 It is non-cre- ative behaviors that are often learned and reinforced in so many educational settings.

In the 1970s, Dr. George Land of the New York Academy of Sciences conducted a research study to test the creativity level of more than 1600 students across grade levels. 2 He administered a test given by NASA to help select innovative thinkers and tested the students across their elemen- tary, middle, and high school years. The results were revealing. Youngsters devel- oped from creative creatures (98% tested in the creative range at the lower elementary levels) to cautious learners (12% tested in the creative range at the high school level). “What we have concluded,” wrote Land, “is that non-creative behavior is learned.” But this does not have to be the case — every student retains the potential to be a creative individual, and making this so is part of my mission as a teacher and Director of the D!Lab program at St. Andrew’s.

Teaching creativity is not as much about the instruction of a single process as it is introducing a variety of approaches to learning that prevents the lithification of concepts, ideas, and facts into monolithic obstacles to fresh insights. Historically, some of the darkest days of humanity were those narrowed by years of rigid thought and little invention. At St Andrew’s, our goal is to teach expansive views of problem-solving practice that introduce a consciously creative reflex, a keen ability to question, and an openness to new ideas.

Where does creativity reside? From research, we are beginning to map the brain systems involved in creativity, and know that areas such as the prefrontal cortex and systems such as the default-mode network and executive control network are important. 3,4 But beyond just the brain, we know that creativity is a culmination of our DNA, of our environment, our experiences, our culture, and our personality. The ability to develop novel approaches and ideas, the essence of creativity, is complicated, and re- wiring our brain to be more creative is not simple. The constellation of skills and abili- ties that is creativity is easy to sense, but hard to describe and challenging to teach.

What we do know about creativity is en- lightening. As with other cognitive abilities, our DNA and our environment both con- tribute to our creativity. Yes, some people do have a genetic predisposition to creativity, but there is enough brain plasticity that we can all be creative individuals. Environment means a lot more than just the physical

space, it encompasses all our experiences, all the social, emotional, and physical interactions we have had. Exactly what environmental factors aid and shut down creativity is an area of ongoing research, but it seems that novel insight requires equally novel environments that support non-conventional thinking. 5 For many students, school environments, in our broad definition of the word, may have a huge effect on their ability to be creative. In the absence of an environment designed to support creativity you diminish the power of creativity in the students’ toolbox of skills.

At school, developing intentional practice of the creative mindset is essential. There are many ways to do this, so let’s consider one well-researched path to build an aspect of the creative mind. Asking students to offer multiple new ideas to any open-ended prompt is a creative practice generally referred to as brainstorming or mind storming. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and peace, once said that “to have a good idea, you must first have lots of ideas.” Idea generation and brainstorming are among the most fundamental skills of creativity. 6 Presentation of open-ended prompts across disciplines is easily incorporated into classroom instruction. Idea generation is even observable in scans of the human brain — our brains work differently when they are tasked with being creative. In a study by Fink et al., 7 participants were asked to generate alternative uses of objects while fMRI scans were being made. Differences were observed

in the activation of particular brain regions depending on whether participants were confronted with ideas of others (learned material) or generating novel ideas of their own (creativity). Yes, we need to teach core knowledge and skills, but we also need to teach for creativity too — and by doing so we create opportunities for students to use their recently acquired knowledge and skills in new contexts, which helps store it durably and usably in long term memory.

It is no wonder, then, that when creativity is part of the students’ toolbox of skills, immensely important ideas emerge. For example, each year, my Design, Engineering and Innovation class at St. Andrew’s learns and practices many forms of creativity in order to solve important societal issues like water supply, waste, energy, health, transportation, food security, and technology. The students decide on an important theme and then use their creativity, knowledge, and skill to design or redesign solutions to the problems. Here are just a few of the solutions the students designed:

Food Security

• Test strips for pregnant women that indicate the presence of biomarkers for listeri – a food-borne pathogen that can cause premature labor. • Urban rooftop composting and gardening systems. • Ocean kelp farms for livestock feed. • Community greenhouses for winter crops of greens and fresh vegetables. • Refrigerator UV radiation to keep vegetables and fruits fresher for longer.

Waste Management

• A redesigned lawn mower engine that reduces carbon dioxide emissions. • A biodegradable straw made of corn leaves. • Robotic micro-plastic shoreline filters for preventing the spread of microplastics. • Advanced recycling systems for consumer electronics. • Biodegradable pet waste bags and composting systems. • Redesigned biodegradable six pack soda rings.

Land’s groundbreaking study 2 suggests that while creativity originates in individuals, it is our school culture that embraces or denies creativity’s transformational power. We know from the imaginative world of childhood that children are born inventive, but if school and life do not honor or require that we use our creative reflex, like a muscle, these skills become dulled and diminished. And as they do, the narrative of new and novel ideas gets stripped from our vocabulary, from how we see ourselves as a person, and from the potential solutions to problems our world desperately needs to be solved.

Chuck James (cjames@saes.org; @SAESD!Lab) teaches Science at St. Andrew’s and is the Director of the D!Lab.