Creativity: World-Affirming and World-Expanding
May 24, 2024
During the month of May at ISF, we have experienced rich examples of creativity in the form of the very public celebration of the visual and performing arts through the ISF MYP Arts Week and the ISF Primary Arts Exhibition. Both events proudly feature visible and audible examples of student creativity at ISF.
In recent times, much has been written about creativity. It is in high demand, yet nearly impossible to teach. It eludes definition, but we know it when we see it. It is an innate and universal attribute, manifest in all human endeavor. It emerges naturally, sometimes spontaneously, or lies dormant, awaiting the right conditions to unlock it. It may gently adjust or shatter completely our perceptions of reality. Creativity both makes and unmakes our world. In essence, creativity is a highly complex cognitive process that links perceptions, ideas, intuition, and experience in a uniquely individual way. It thrives on fluidity of thought, imaginative agility, mastery of recall, novel cognitive connections, piercing originality, and communicative adeptness.
Human thinking, like our lives, and our sensory experience of the world, is essentially linear in nature. Our thinking reflects the nature of life that is typically also present in the narratives we create that help us understand our past, live in the present, and imagine the future. We think within a chronological framework where stories, like life, have a beginning, in which a dire situation needing change is revealed, a middle, in which a physical or metaphysical journey is undertaken to meet the foe, and an end in which the narrator describes overcoming overwhelming odds to secure the victory at the conclusion of the tale. Just like our lives, we have a natural disinclination to rush to the end; we have an innate need to savour the journey with its twists and turns, its highs and lows. In the end, however, we always hope to read the words: ‘And they all lived happily ever after!”
In reflecting on this linear characteristic of the human experience, what might we say about creativity? The common refrain in feedback from the adult world to schools and teachers is that more should be done to encourage and inspire creativity. This challenge is common in the field of education. Parents are also encouraged to do what they can to pursue the balanced and potentially contradictory objectives of nurturing both compliance within the existing social norms and creativity that may threaten those very norms.
There is a compelling logic to this dilemma. Education is often founded on assumptions, principles, and practices that are largely linear. Students are taught, even trained, to stick to the linear narrative, stay within the lines, work within the paradigm, function with safety and confidence within the ‘box’ created by each generation to protect but also to constrain society. There are many ways in which this phenomenon is infused into all systems of education. Students learn to respect values, limits, boundaries, rules, conventions, preconceived notions, precedent, history, tradition, and culture. We deem an educational process to be successful if its products – graduates – work within the contemporary paradigm in a way that respects cultural patterns and norms that have evolved and developed over millennia.
If we are trained to work within the prevailing paradigm of society, what is the role or function of creativity?
Working within this metaphorical ‘box’ of convention and accepted wisdom is to be logical and efficient; it is effective without disruption, reinforcing harmony, and respectful of traditions. The place for creativity in such a setting is what we might term ‘interior creativity’, or world-affirming creativity. It seeks not to challenge, disrupt, or destroy, but seeks incremental tweaks and hacks that allow evolutionary growth within existing matrices, networks, societies and scientific paradigms. This manifestation of creativity is often relatively easy, as the majority of essential paradigmatic features remain intact; only those susceptible to modification are impacted and then only to achieve an incremental improvement for the whole entity. The ‘whole’ of the box is protected by this form of evolutionary creativity, which is characterized by speed of implementation and is measured by the efficiency and effectiveness of its outcomes. It provides a relatively easy way forward, as the ‘before’ and ‘after’ results still invoke the same performance benchmarks and evaluation frameworks for direct comparison. There is always a logic to world-affirming creativity that is compelling in its demonstrated superiority and reassuring in its affirmation of the prevailing model and mode of thinking. World-affirming creativity may present as a single, clear solution, but in fact it does not preclude other incremental enhancements to the contemporary world. Some manifestations of this form of creativity may be mutually exclusive but may also work in parallel or even in complementary fashion with other creative enhancements.
Is this all there is to creativity, might we ask? Clearly not!
The other category of creativity has existed from the beginnings of human history. It is disruptively non-linear and does not take as either an implicit or explicit assumption that preservation of the existing paradigm is a prerequisite outcome. It is inherently divergent from the norms, traditions, conventions, rules, practices, and beliefs of the prevailing paradigm. It is the essence of ‘exterior’ or ‘outside-the-box’ thinking. An essential underlying assumption in this form of creativity is that the box will not survive, if it is successful. It takes as an essential point of departure that the existing paradigm has reached the end of its potential for incremental enhancement and must therefore be broken and replaced. While some may characterize this is a form of ‘world destruction’, others may see it is a necessary step forward and upward in an evolutionary sense. Perhaps another way of looking at this form of creativity is to see it as ‘world-expanding’, in which our lives are similarly expanded. It is inherently change on a world-scale.
This type of ‘tectonic shift’ creativity was described in fairly recent times by Thomas Kuhn in his work on paradigm shifts in scientific thinking. The advent of quantum mechanics is a perfect example of this phenomenon, where centuries of thinking about the nature of the universe were overcome in a few short years by a breathtaking and disruptive change in theoretical physics. We have looked at the world differently ever since. Other examples, equally disruptive, may come to mind when we ponder the potential impact of artificial intelligence on our linear view of the world.
This model of creativity in the external world also reflects, intriguingly, a key feature of human cognition. Like the world-affirming creativity described above, our knowledge of the world can grow incrementally, within an existing framework of understanding, something Jean Piaget described as ‘assimilation’. This, however, can be truly shattered when we gain knowledge that does not allow our existing model of the world to remain intact. We ‘accommodate’ this new knowledge by breaking down our cognitive algorithm of the world and building a new one. Similarly, a transformative process takes place that changes our world view.
As we admire the examples of student creativity on display this month, we should also be asking about the fundamental nature of creativity. When we seek to nurture creativity in the educational process, we should pause to consider the goal we are seeking to realize. Are we seeking creativity that is world-affirming or world-expanding? As educators, we tend to focus on the world-affirming kind. Would we even recognize the other kind of creativity? And having discovered it, are we ready to nurture creativity that is truly disruptive, paradigm-breaking, and world changing? There is no easy answer to this question, but my belief is that our future depends on both.
Dr. Malcolm Pritchard
Head of School
