“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.
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.
