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Creativity and Education: What’s the Connection?

11/13/2013

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By Melinda

As part of my PhD program in psychology / creativity studies, I recently wrote a paper exploring the relationship between creativity, learning, and education. Because education is one of our main areas of interest at Syncreate, I thought I’d share some of my explorations here in the blog. 

My paper explored three main ideas: 1) the educational process consists of a creative, dynamic, and ongoing negotiation between individuals and their worlds, 2) connection, interdependence, and relationship lie at the heart of meaningful learning, and 3) creativity, imagination, and the process of making meaning underlie the most profound learning experiences. In my experience teaching writing and religious studies at the college level, the most powerful educational moments for students (and for me) are those that that foster a process of active meaning making. They are those that ask students to draw upon, but also to investigate and question, their own experiences, and to actively consider how course material relates to their own lives. They are those that invite students to explore real-life situations and events outside of the classroom, such as cultural performances or religious ceremonies, and to write about them in light of course themes and theories. I find that this experiential, embodied, and engaged approach to education not only evokes deep learning and insight, but also can be personally transformative for students, broadening their perspectives and worldviews, and in some cases, forever changing the way they understand and relate to their own lives.

For example, while teaching freshman composition at Tulane University in New Orleans, I developed a course called “Performing New Orleans” that paired performance theory with readings about the rich cultural and performance traditions of the city. I invited students out of the classroom and into an experiential dialogue with those traditions through visits to Preservation Hall, Mardi Gras parades, the Voodoo Spiritual Temple, and The Historic New Orleans Connection. For their final papers, I asked students to synthesize all of this theoretical, academic, and experiential knowledge and to creatively analyze of one of New Orleans’ performance traditions. Similarly, while teaching comparative religion courses at Tulane and Austin Community College, I encouraged students to attend, observe, and participate in various religious events and festivals and write about them in conjunction with the course material we were covering our course readings and discussions. For their final course task, students had the option of completing a creative project relevant to their own belief systems and life journeys, and to present these projects to one another during the final week. I conceived of this assignment as an exercise in meaning making, an opportunity for students to more deeply explore their own passions, and to create a personal shrine or altar, work of art, musical composition, performance, or multimedia presentation that expressed their deepest convictions. When students took this project seriously, they created works of incredible beauty and poignancy, which evidenced deep reflection upon course themes. 

If we, as educators, began to seriously consider the relationship between learning and creativity, we would see that these two processes truly spring from the same source. Both learning and creativity involve an active, experiential, embodied, interconnected, and fully engaged process of meaning making. As this fundamental relationship between learning and creativity becomes more widely understood, I hope that educators and policy makers will begin to embrace creativity as absolutely central to the educational process.

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The Classroom as a Neural Network

8/13/2013

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By Charlotte and Melinda

At Syncreate, we’re interested in what the brain has to teach us about how to grow connections, transform communities, and foster adaptability.  So far our investigations have lead us into discussions and presentations about the neuroscience of creativity, and the ways in which educators and leaders can strategically build creative communities. As community college professors, we are currently exploring the ways neural pathways grow, strengthen, and become pruned.  

We constantly keep these questions in mind:

• Can educators take inspiration from neural networks to create relational links that weave students and content more tightly together?

• If we encourage students to see themselves and their peers as resources, could we create a buzz within learning communities that encourages new and meaningful connections between people, ideas, and real-world challenges?

• How can play, ritual, and community-building exercises create new neural pathways through kinesthetic, embodied learning?

We don’t necessarily have all these answers to these questions, but we believe asking the questions may reveal the path to becoming more effective, engaged, and collaborative in our educational work.

New insights into neural architecture, (also known at the connectome) such as the work of Dr. Van J. Wedeen of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, reveal the deeply interwoven quality of the brain’s structure (see “New Discoveries in Brain Structure and Connectivity”). In addition, current neuroscience research offers exciting insights, such as the brain’s incredible ability to artfully enhance helpful connections or prune away unused pathways.  Every synapse creates a connection and the more times a neuron fires, the stronger a synaptic connection becomes. In other words, the brain changes with every new experience and nothing exists in isolation. We’d like to suggest that with every experience in the classroom (and within the institution itself), the student’s brain, thinking process, and understanding of the world changes. Educators who embrace this idea become empowered to skillfully plan classroom lessons, discussions, and activities to facilitate more powerful and lasting connections.

Each student is part of the classroom “brain,” if you will. It’s not that teachers stand in the front of the classroom and transmit ideas; instead, teachers can facilitate connections and pathways between students. However, in order for this to work well, we first have to acknowledge the creativity, unique perspectives, and resiliency of each student present. If we don’t, we might unwittingly “prune” the student from the necessary pathways he/she needs to connect, comprehend, and succeed. For example, the website Mindfulness Starts Here states, “Neural pruning is the process of removing neurons that are no longer used or useful in the brain.”  For those students who don’t have a positive family history or positive personal experiences with school and/or higher education, the figurative neural connection to the classroom may be shallow or tenuous, and therefore it only takes a few experiences of isolation to “prune” the student from engaging in the classroom.

Educators interested in enhancing connection can welcome a sense of play and associative thinking by conceptualizing the classroom as a type of extra-neural network that fosters meaningful connection, encourages empathy, honors student well-being, implements strategic collaboration, and emphasizes creative problem solving. At the heart of the neural classroom is a faith in creativity to forge new pathways and to connect students in meaningful ways so that each person is woven into the fabric of the learning environment. Many teachers already do this by encouraging students to work together outside of the classroom on collaborative projects. Learning to work with others isn’t just a social skill; it’s essential in both drawing out the strengths of each student and interlacing individuals to ensure the resiliency of the entire classroom.

We suggest that promoting creative/associative thinking can teach students how to value their own ideas and learn to enjoy the process of thinking. How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci author Michael Gelb offers many creativity-enhancing activities, including an exercise of comparing two seemingly unrelated items or concepts. Taking this into the classroom, teachers can ask students to consider what two disparate ideas have in common and write all of their answers on the board. Students thus learn to take risks (for example, a bird is like a typewriter because they both can involve pecking; the array of typebars is similar to a bird’s rib cage) and create connections to other students who resonate with their analogies. If educators can prioritize a portion of teaching time to making creativity a daily exploration, students learn courage, adaptability, and collaboration. Indeed, Linda Smarzik, author of The Mind of Thuse!! Thriving With Effortlessness, observes, “Taking small risks, and doing so consistently, shifts us out of our comfort zones into the process of creativity.”

Additionally, the instructor who emphasizes collaboration, active listening, and dialogue might, in fact, be using neural mimicry to weave together a classroom that breeds student success. Creativity can enhance neuroplasticity (the dynamic process of brain rewiring), which can serve as a classroom strategy for reaching all students and weaving them into the fabric of engagement and success.

If you find this concept worthy of further exploration, please vote for our proposed “The Classroom as a Neural Network” topic at the 2014 SXSW Education Conference (SXSWedu) PanelPicker forum. It will take about two minutes of your time. Voting opens Monday, August 19 and closes Friday, September 6, 2013. Thank you for your support!

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    Authors:
    Charlotte Gullick
    Melinda Rothouse

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