Child's Play

Do children lose their creativity as they grow older? Are present formal school systems responsible for suppressing the ‘natural’ creativity of kids?

Several authors in Creativity and Development suggest that these questions are not meaningful because they fundamentally assume that the answer to the question “Are children creative?” is Yes. But perhaps the answer is No.

Here’s a provocative excerpt from David Henry Feldman, currently a professor at Tufts, and one of the contributors.

I suppose it depends on how one defines ‘creativity’. The contributors to Creativity and Development, all major figures in their field who have pondered this issue, differ in specifics but they all acknowledge that context is important. They try to counter the ‘myth’ that creativity is primarily a function of the individual. Instead the environment, society, field and domain play a part in whether some ‘thing’ will be ultimately judged creative (with hindsight, of course). I purposefully kept ‘thing’ vague because while it is common to assess creativity via a product (a work of art, an insightful theory, a nifty device), one could conceive a creative act where the process is by far the crucial piece and not the product. Improv is often cited as an example.

Why do we hearken to the idea of the creative child? Here’s an excerpt of a thoughtful narrative by Seana Moran, currently a professor at Clark University.

There is some correlation between child’s (fantasy) play and standard tests of divergent thinking (one measure of creativity), but the effect is small. Are there developmental precursors to adult creativity? That’s one of the questions explored by the book – relating creativity to a developmental process across time, challenging the popular trope of the eureka moment. If our brains and thought processes develop differently over time, do we need different theories of creativity for different life stages? Are transitions between one stage and the next creative, akin to the emergence of a phase transition on the natural sciences where something novel and impactful is produced?

In Chapter 1 of the book, R. Keith Sawyer (also the volume editor) explores the idea of emergence in the context of creativity and development. Freud and Piaget make their appearance, but so do other thinkers. The broad definition of creativity is introduced. “Creativity is a socially recognized achievement in which there are novel products.” In Chapter 2, Seana Moran and Vera John-Steiner analyze the contributions of Vygotsky to the dialectic of creativity and development. I knew something of Vygotsky’s theories and targeting the ‘zone of proximal development’ has been one of my teaching mantras for many years. However, I learned much more about the context of Vygotsky’s ideas and how they have (developmentally) influenced contemporary theories in the field. I also appreciated Vygotsky’s emphasis on the joy of learning amidst the struggle! I should consider how to incorporate this in my chemistry classroom.

Robert Sternberg, a stalwart in the field, discusses how creativity with a small ‘c’ develops in the process of decision-making in Chapter 3. I’ve read a lot of Sternberg so I didn’t find his chapter as novel-ly interesting as the others but he provides clear theoretical models with practical implications. He also has a nice section titled “Teaching Creativity: 21 Ways to Decide for Creativity” that I might assign my students to read in my classes. I’ve been thinking about how to inject some type of Creativity-in-Chemistry into my classes and experimenting in small doses with particular activities and class projects.

The chapter I found most interesting (and I surprised myself because I typically shy away from reading biographies) was David Henry Feldman’s attempted reconstruction of the Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory developed by Howard Gardner. While I’m familiar with the populist view of MI Theory, I’ve had a knee-jerk reaction against it because of how it has been misused in popularizing Learning Styles (successfully debunked, yet lives on – like a zombie). Reading the context in which Gardner developed his theory gives me a greater appreciation for what he was trying to accomplish as a challenge to the then-dominant and narrow approach of psychometrics. I also enjoyed reading Chapter 5 (“Creativity in Later Life”) by Jeanne Nakamura and Mike Csikszentmihalyi. As someone over-the-hill (i.e. on the other side of age forty), I found it encouraging to ponder the many and varied examples from interviews with folks in their sixties, seventies and eighties. There was the joy of continuing to be creative coupled with a realistic appraisal of additional constraints added by age.

As a book in the Counterpoint series, the authors discuss a range of questions in the final chapter. These include the two quoted screenshots above, but I want to share one more because it got me thinking about my research into origin-of-life chemistry. This one is also by Seana Moran.

I’m interested in proto-metabolism. How does a collection of small molecules emerge into a primitive metabolic cycle that streamlines into a novel energy transducing system that in one instance promotes an explosion of diversity (think about the range of novel life forms!) with strong constraints on the building blocks. In prebiotic chemistry, the problem is an embarrassment of riches. How did nature prune its metabolic pathways to only use a small subset amongst the myriad closely related chemicals? There are many different amino acids, sugars, and pterins that could function similarly. Why did nature lead to such a narrow selection? And yet the diversity of life-forms is fantastic. Moran’s ecological approach gave me an outside-the-box idea of how to attack this problem.

While novelty is often emphasized in creativity, constraints provided by the environment might be equally important. The open-endedness of an overly dilute soup of novelty might just as well be tons of uselessness. While I may disagree with particular curricular choices of formal school systems, the philosophy of having a formal school system may be good for a creative society as a whole. It’s difficult to be creative in a domain and/or field in which one has very little knowledge, and formal systems help to build that knowledge base. On the other hand, as one gains expertise and is acculturated into a community of practice, those constraints could also act as blinkers that hinder subsequent creative acts. Striking the right balance is tricky.

Reading Creativity and Development slowly over the last two weeks has made me think seriously about putting together some broader Creativity-in-Chemistry projects. I now have some vague outlines of how to proceed and I’m looking forward to discussions with colleagues and students about these ideas before launching a pilot program. I should also get back to working on my back-of-the-envelope chemistry card game. I developed it a little farther over Thanksgiving break so I’m looking forward to winter break to refine my ideas!