#steven tepper

[artsforce]

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[creativethinkingmsu]

Let's Get Serious About Cultivating Creativity

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Steven J. Tepper and George D. Kuh provide a manifesto for the Creative Campus movement:

Simply put, America cannot maintain a competitive position in the world order unless we better understand how to nurture creative talent and put in place policies and practices to do so. Nor can we just leave it to chance that we are adequately training rising generations to assume their roles as creative workers and responsible citizens.

First, we must move beyond the naïvely egalitarian, almost mystical view of creativity advanced by many creativity enthusiasts. This view suggests that to unleash creative capacity, we have only to set up conditions in which creativity will naturally blossom—informal workspaces, nonhierarchical organizations, flexible jobs, opportunities for cross-fertilization, and diverse and hip urban spaces. Such conditions are thought to encourage lateral thinking, brainstorming, and risk taking, all of which set the stage for innovation and entrepreneurship. No wonder creativity is an irresistible solution to our nation's most pressing challenges! It appears to flow like tap water, requiring no significant investment in research or training. To transform our economy, we just have to get out of the way and let creativity grow free, like kudzu.

Existing research suggests otherwise. Creativity is not a mysterious quality, nor can one simply try on one of Edward de Bono's six thinking hats to start the creative juices flowing. Rather, creativity is cultivated through rigorous training and by deliberately practicing certain core abilities and skills over an extended period of time. These include:

1. the ability to approach problems in nonroutine ways using analogy and metaphor;

2. conditional or abductive reasoning (posing "what if" propositions and reframing problems);

3. keen observation and the ability to see new and unexpected patterns;

4. the ability to risk failure by taking initiative in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty;

5. the ability to heed critical feedback to revise and improve an idea;

6. a capacity to bring people, power, and resources together to implement novel ideas; and

7. the expressive agility required to draw on multiple means (visual, oral, written, media-related) to communicate novel ideas to others.

Read the whole thing here.

Tepper (along with his Vanderbilt colleague Elizabeth Long Lingo) mapped a path toward the "sea change" of the Creative Campus movement in a 2010 article, also a must-read.