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4 - Creativity: A Look Outside the Box in Classrooms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Alexinia Young Baldwin
Edited by
Ronald A. Beghetto  and
James C. Kaufman
Alexinia Young Baldwin
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, USA
Ronald A. Beghetto
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
James C. Kaufman
Affiliation:
California State University, San Bernardino
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Summary

The concept of creativity is often dependent on the ideas of the person presenting the concept, thereby generating both positive and negative responses that often confuse teachers who try to use creative skills within the classroom to enhance out-of-the-box thinking.

Creativity has become a major buzzword among scholars in the arts, psychology, business, education, and science and in many corporate offices where unique designs are a basic commodity. Although this is the current buzzword, as John Baer (2003, p. 37) has said:

Of all the things that it is hard to understand – and this would be a very long list – creativity is certainly one of the hardest, and most mysterious, even when considered within the confines of a single culture.

DEFINING CREATIVITY: WHAT IT IS AND IS NOT

Three decades ago, Treffinger, Renzulli, and Feldhusen (1971) argued that as a result of the lack of a unified widely accepted theory of creativity, researchers and educators have been confronted with several difficulties: establishing a useful operational definition, understanding the implications of differences among tests and test administration procedures, and understanding the relationship of creativity to other human abilities (p. 107).

Three decades later, there remains uncertainty and lack of reliability and acceptance of the existence of and the value of creative planning in the teaching of various subjects in the classroom.

Amabile (2001), who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, has devoted her research program to the study of creativity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Nurturing Creativity in the Classroom , pp. 73 - 87
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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