{"id":7498,"date":"2018-03-20T12:52:10","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T12:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/cel\/?p=7498"},"modified":"2018-03-20T12:52:11","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T12:52:11","slug":"thinking-critically-about-creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/2018\/03\/20\/thinking-critically-about-creativity\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking critically about ‘creativity’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A few weeks ago I was invited to give a talk at the UCL Knowledge Lab on \u2018creativity\u2019, which is one of my favourite subjects but not, perhaps, for reasons you might expect.<\/p>\n

My title was \u201cThinking Critically about Creativity\u201d and it gave me the opportunity to reflect further upon how this noun is invested with so much hope, excitement and idealism \u2013 everyone wants a piece of creativity, from the Department of International Trade with its \u2018Creativity Is Great (Britain)\u2019 campaign, to mathematicians such as Eugenia Cheng who got quite indignant on a recent episode of The Life Scientific<\/em> at the suggestion that maths was not \u2018creative\u2019.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the research into creativity tends to begin with the idea that it is a \u2018thing\u2019 to be discovered, elicited and realised, but the \u2018nature\u2019 of this thing is always defined culturally, so scientific studies tend to find what they\u2019re looking for. Creativity is a term which has been more or less arbitrarily applied to such diverse phenomena as \u2018divergent thinking\u2019, the arts, the sciences, a rarefied aspect of human behaviour, a common and everyday aspect of human behaviour, the product of \u2018genius\u2019, the manifestation of madness, and so on.<\/p>\n

Ken Robinson seemed to provide a neat and transferrable definition in his 2001 All Our Futures<\/em> report, in which he attempted to bridge a morality of education with the exigencies of the \u2018creative economy\u2019; he offered this stipulative definition: \u201cimaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value\u201d. The problem is that every term here is subject to interpretation, which is why Anna Craft, for example, distinguished between \u2018Big C\u2019 and Little c\u2019 creativity, and Margaret Boden between \u2018Personal creativity\u2019 and \u2018Historical creativity\u2019.<\/p>\n

So where does this leave us in education, where we often strive to \u2018be creative\u2019 and to nurture \u2018creativity\u2019 in our students? My suggestion was (and is) that we acknowledge the complex, contradictory nature of this term, that we refuse to use it casually as if it were universal or self-evident, and that we take responsibility for local definitions. Both Andreas Reckwitz and Angela McRobbie point out that \u2018creativity\u2019 is a concept which is increasingly embedded in the contemporary workplace and that it plays a part in generating \u201cobeisance to the regime of novelty\u201d and the \u201cgendered practice of \u2018passionate work\u2019\u201d. Creativity is not a (good) thing. Let\u2019s think about it critically.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/brian.bournemouth.ac.uk\/viewobject.html?cid=3&id=298919<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I was invited to give a talk at the UCL Knowledge Lab on \u2018creativity\u2019, which is one of my favourite subjects but not, perhaps, for reasons you might expect. My title was \u201cThinking Critically about Creativity\u201d and it gave me the opportunity to reflect further upon how this noun is invested… Read more » about Thinking critically about ‘creativity’<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1201,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1201"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7500,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498\/revisions\/7500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}