Creativity and Intelligence in Applied Educational Psychology - Reflection 1

Module 1 – Creativity Introduction

1. Aristotle’s Four causes: Efficient, Material, Formal, Final
2. Approaches to studying creativity: mystical, pragmatic, psychodynamic, psychometric, cognitive, social-personality, confluence
3. Edward deBono’s Six Hats exercise (pragmatic approach to creativity) What is it; how to apply?

Because Creativity and Intelligence have been primary benchmarks that I have used to hire and develop the managers needed to deliver on my responsibilities at work for the last decade, I chose this class.  In addition to core competencies for the job, we hired for “talent” with the rule of thumb being a “software developer who is also a spelling bee champion” (Bezos, 1998, #3).  Despite relying on it to hire, I have never studied Creativity beyond reflecting on my experiences.  With many preconceived ideas about Creativity to test and disconfirm, I hope to build a foundation that will be useful as I transition to teach high school English, Technology, and Gifted programs in the future. 

As a poet, I have many other ideas about Creativity that do not align to what I needed to accomplish in the business world.  The chiasmus of both concepts of Creativity – the artistic vs. the pragmatic, utilitarian, corporate – overlap in my belief that consistent effort applied to problems, inspiration, and ambiguity leads to individual experiences of creativity that lead to solutions, artistic objects, and mechanisms that minimize or eliminate ambiguity; big-C and little-c “C/creativity” in the text.

My first finding was that an historical definition of creativity aligned with my intuitions and experiences described above.  “In the 18th century, the term genius was first used to describe creative individuals… associated with rational, conscious processes (Gerard, 1774/1966; Tonelli, 1973)” (Sawyer, 2012, p. 23).  Gerard’s pragmatic definition of creativity was overwhelmingly influenced by the Enlightenment concept of imagination.  To his simple, “rational” definition of creativity the element of “generating novelty” (Sawyer, 2012, p. 23) was added by imagination.  In my opinion, despite the intent of many of tests for creativity detailed in chapter three, “novelty” may be a red herring.  Evidence for this was provided by Sawyer’s example of photography.

Photography existed for decades before it was recognized as a creative art form.  Even though photography did not change, the social “valuation of originality… the system of galleries… supporting network of experts” elevated the media to creative art form status.  Prior to that recognition, photography had been perceived as the equivalent of a legal process, like birth records and property deeds. “[P]hotographers themselves did not change at all; rather, the sociocultural system around them changed” (Sawyer, 2012, p. 28).  In chapter four, Darwin represents another example of “extended activity” leading to a creative breakthrough (Sawyer, 2012, p. 75) which may have been the result of him being in a flow state, my second finding.

In my final reflection paper for another EPSY class (Learning and Cognition), I wrote that Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development was a paradigm that most aligned to my aspirations for the classroom.  Characteristics of flow state such as “balance between level of ability… sense of personal control” (Sawyer, 2012, p. 78) closely parallel Vygotsky’s methodology of cognitive development.  In the lecture notes, the Geneplore model and Sternberg’s triangulation of analytic effort, synthetic ability and practical contextual awareness, also complement Vygotsky’s model in which teachers present a task then observe an individual’s progress, engaging only when they struggle or are not being challenged.  Self-efficacy is the desired outcome.

Sawyer’s section about self-efficacy ends with Gist & Mitchell’s idea that “self-efficacy can be enhanced through training” and I agree that those findings are interesting and look forward to exploring “the potential role of creative self-efficacy in creative performance” (Sawyer, 2012, p. 82) to apply what I learn here to help my students reach a flow state while doing their schoolwork.