The Beautiful Risk of Making Creativity Visible in Every Classroom (Reflections on the 6 Cs - Part One)

“Education itself is a creative act… Education as an act of creation, that is, as an act of bringing something new into the world, something that did not exist before” (Gert J. J. Biesta The Beautiful Risk of Education 11).

THE CREATIVE HUMAN

In Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, authors Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman write, “Other animals show signs of creativity, but humans are the standout performers. What makes us so? As we’ve seen, our brains interpose more neurons in areas between sensory input and motor output allowing for more abstract concepts and more pathways through circuitry. What’s more, our exceptional sociability compels humans to constantly interact and share ideas” (51). What a counter-intuitive starting point for us as educators – namely, the idea that creativity is something which all students are already capable of. Sure, we may agree with this in feeling, but examine our daily practices at schools. Creativity, more often than not, is a skill whose practice remains at the periphery of most students’ core curricular experience. It’s something we do when practicing the arts, but it’s not clear how it fits into other “core academic” classes, at least on a daily basis.

However, the quote above reminds us that, because of our neuronal networks, we naturally excel at creativity when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. But what’s more interesting is how our sociability gives us an edge over other forms of intelligence, such as computers. “To achieve a creative artificial intelligence,” writes Brandt and Eagleman, “we would need to build a society of exploratory computers, all striving to surprise and impress each other. That social aspect of computers is totally missing and this is part of what makes computer intelligence so mechanical” (31). Computers are not creative, period. And that’s because they’re not social, but do you know what computers are really good at? Accurately storing and recalling information. Humans, however, "are terrible at retaining precise, detailed information, but we have just the right design to create alternative worlds” (50). Think about that. We’re facing a future where much of the work force could be eliminated by the onslaught of more machines, yet we have something that computers don’t have, which is why creativity matters. It’s a human skill - a natural extension of who we uniquely are. It’s part of our past, present, and future legacy as a species, but school often relegates it to the periphery of a kid’s core experience. Why?

BEYOND BLOOM'S TAXONOMY

Let’s apply all this to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Shouldn’t creativity be at the foundation of Bloom’s pyramid since it’s something all students are naturally able to do well? Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison in Making Thinking Visible stress the following point: “Although Bloom’s categories capture types of mental activity and thus are useful as a starting point for thinking about thinking, the idea that thinking is sequential or hierarchical is problematic” (6). More thoughtful applications of Bloom’s framework operate under this wisdom, for sure, but think about our cultures of assessment on our campuses. We seem to assume in school that recall/remembering (namely, what computers are much better at) is the basic starting point for human learning. All core classes engage students in the mental activity of remembering and recalling, but few academic experiences put creativity at the center. Without a doubt, this is true of standardized testing as well.

THE BEAUTIFUL RISK OF BENDING, BREAKING, AND BLENDING

How might we make creativity a foundational element of every students’ learning experience? Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman offer a conceptual framework for teaching and assessing more transparently the practice of creativity in the classroom. They suggest the threefold framework of bending, breaking, and blending as the “primary means by which all ideas evolve” (47). The three concepts are “a way of capturing the brain operations that underlie innovative thinking” (49). They go on to say, “We bend, break, and blend everything we observe, and these tools allow us to extrapolate far from reality around us” (50). In other words, this is how we as humans create new things – not by some omnipotent act of creating something out of nothing but by taking the materials around us and “calling things to life.”  As Gert J. J. Biesta puts it, “creation is ‘not a movement from non-being to being, but from being to the good’” (The Beautiful Risk of Education 14). Humans do it all the time, but schools assume we need to double down on recall and computational intelligence instead. Why might this be the case? Misreading Bloom’s pyramid has something to do with it, for sure, but it’s also because “creating is a risky business, and one has to be prepared for a lot of noise, dissent, resistance, and a general disturbance of the peace if one is of a mind to engage in [it]” (Biesta 15). Since remembering is Bloom’s baseline, we tend to assume that basic recall is the most equitable thing to test people on. What makes dispelling this notion all the more challenging is the fact that it’s a lot less risky for educators to test student recall (it’s also easier to grade). But as Biesta might say, cultivating creativity in the classroom is a beautiful risk that we simply can’t afford not to take, or else we risk something much greater: making ourselves obsolete in a world run by robots.

One place to start is by introducing students to Brandt’s and Eagleman’s framework of bending, breaking , and blending. Instead of asking students to study, memorize, and store certain content for a given course, invite students to manipulate or play with the content by turning it into something new. Warning: results will be unpredictable.

Works Cited

Biesta, Gert J. J. The Beautiful Risk of Education. Paradigm Publishers, 2013.

Brandt, Anthony and David Eagleman. Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World. Catapult Publishing, 2017.

Ritchhart, Ron, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison. Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners. Jossey-Bass, 2011.