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18 - Four Faces of Creativity at School

from PART II - VOICES FROM THE RESEARCH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2016

By
Maciej Karwowski  and
Dorota M. Jankowska
Edited by
Ronald A. Beghetto  and
James C. Kaufman
Maciej Karwowski
Affiliation:
The Maria Grzegorzewska University
Dorota M. Jankowska
Affiliation:
The Maria Grzegorzewska University
Ronald A. Beghetto
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
James C. Kaufman
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

Introduction

Over the decades of the development of creative education, scholars have devoted a great amount of attention to understanding children's and young people's creative potential. This potential was usually defined through cognitive characteristics – mainly divergent thinking (Runco, 2015), creative imagination (Dziedziewicz & Karwowski, 2015; Jankowska & Karwowski, 2015), or problem solving skills (Voss & Means, 1989). However, creativity requires more than just abilities. Certain personality traits – especially openness and independence (Feist, 1998) – as well as intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1993) or creative self-efficacy (Beghetto, 2006) may be perceived as elements of the complex mosaic of creative potential (Karwowski, 2015; Karwowski & Lebuda, 2016; Lubart, Zenasni, & Barbot, 2013).

In this chapter we briefly sketch a new model of creativity, understood as a dynamic interplay between creative abilities and those personality traits that, we believe, are crucial to creative activity, namely openness and independence. This leads us to the typological approach and four distinct types of creativity, briefly described later in the chapter. We explore these characteristics and focus especially on the usefulness of this approach for teaching creativity.

Teachers’ perceptions of creativity are complex, but too often they are not complex enough. When asked what child creativity is, a great majority of teachers would probably define it with reference to at least one aspect of creative thinking. Most frequently, it would probably be originality (“non-schematic thinking,” “creates new solutions”) or fluency (“has lots of ideas”). Sometimes they would probably also refer to creative imagination (“fertile imagination,” “fancy”), as well as openness to experience (“curious about the unknown,” “eager to take up new challenges”). Indeed, decades of research into teachers’ implicit theories of creativity show that the characteristics of creative students they list most frequently mainly refer to students’ cognitive functioning, followed by personality and motivation (Andiliou & Murphy, 2010). Unique or original, imaginative, curious, and open to experience are those characteristics of students that occur in most of these analyses (Andiliou & Murphy, 2010; Chan & Chan, 1999).

Type
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Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom , pp. 337 - 354
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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