Can Creativity Be Taught?

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein

... creativity has become the sine qua non of a successful America. Nurturing it is seen as an important public good, not only benefiting individuals, but contributing to the economic health and well-being of the country at large. In spite of that, creativity remains an undervalued policy goal for colleges and universities. ...
— Steven J. Tepper, “The Creative Campus: Who’s No. 1?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2004

Considering the high regard Americans have for creativity and the fact that U.S. institutions of higher learning (along with corporations) long have been incubators of innovation for the world, it is interesting that creative thinking is rarely mentioned as an educational goal. Critical thinking is. And so are analytical skills. But many college campuses seem to avoid the word “creativity.”

Perhaps it’s the common use of the term to mean simply “self-expression.” “I suspect what people fear is that what’s done in the name of creativity is sloppy or less rigorous — less disciplined — than what we try to do in academe,” says Williams political science professor Mark Reinhardt.

butterfly Mike Glier ’75, an associate professor of art, offers another explanation: “When I came to mostly male Williams in 1971, creativity was a little suspect. Conventionally, women are to hold emotions and men are the keepers of rationality, so the emotional component of creativity makes some men a little nervous. With coeducation, things have changed somewhat, but I think creativity is a gendered idea at Williams.”

Another reason may be that, in contrast to critical or analytical thinking, which involve identifiable, teachable skill sets, creativity requires imagination, a characteristic that resists parsing. “Everyone would love to be more creative,” says Reinhardt. “But I’m not sure anybody is quite sure how. It’s much less clear what our methodologies are.”

Others maintain that creativity is not a skill that can be acquired: You either have it or you don’t.

Yet creativity — defined for this article as the ability to solve problems or express ideas in new or original ways that advance a branch of human endeavor or add to our fund of knowledge — is clearly flourishing on most liberal arts campuses. And Williams is no exception. A new center for theater and dance, a superb studio art building and excellent music facilities visibly attest to the College’s strong commitment to the creative arts.

But what about creativity inside the classroom — in biology, math and political science as well as in theater and studio art? What is being done to nurture creative thinking to, in the words of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (describing the principal goal of education), “create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done — men who are creative, inventive and discoverers?” (Presumably, Piaget meant women too.)

With the College’s ample opportunities for collaboration and for crosscultural and interdisciplinary exchange, its diverse and talented professors and students and its generous resources for research, performances and experiments, Williams undoubtedly would rank high on any campus creativity scale.

To get a sense of what is being done at Williams to create men and women who are “creative, inventive and discoverers,” the Review asked about a dozen professors representing each academic division these questions: “Can creativity be taught? If so, how?” And, “How do you encourage creative risk-taking in the courses you teach?”

Here is an informal sampling of their responses.

... wherever creativity goes — and, by extension, wherever talent goes — innovation & economic growth are sure to follow.
— Richard Florida, “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis,” Harvard Business Review, October 2004

Joan Edwards, Biology

It was Louis Pasteur who said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I would say the same about creativity. If you can get students’ minds working in the right way, if you can give them the tools, they are more likely to come up with creative ideas.

In botany, it’s really important to train students how to notice patterns: why things are the way they are, how plants are related from an evolutionary standpoint. Most [students] are not used to using their eyes like that. They need to be trained to see.

At that age, you don’t think you can make an original contribution to the world. So at the same time that you’re giving students the tools, you need to let them know all the things we don’t know. Vines, for example, grow toward the dark so they can climb up big trees, but once they reach a tree, they begin to grow toward the light. How do they make that switch? Is it a physical mechanism or physiological? We don’t know. You have to let students know that there’s a great unknown world out there and that they can contribute.

Susan Engel, Psychology

I think it’s a mistake to think that you can give students fact, fact, fact and have them learn what others have said and then, only later, ask them to be creative and critical. By the time they’re supposedly ready to be creative, they’re not. They need to see how these strands are connected in other people’s work, and they need to engage in those aspects of the work themselves right from the beginning. When I assign essays, I’m not interested in whether students can repeat facts from a book; I know they can. In my Pscyhology of Education course, I have them read theories of child development early in the course and then do observations of a real child. For their mid-term, they have to look at that child through the eyes of two of the theorists, a task that encourages them to think both critically and creatively; they may have to account for some behavior they didn’t read about in the theory. The culminating assignment in the class is to design a school. It’s very creative, but they must support it with evidence from all the research they’ve read.

Mark Reinhardt, Political Science

It’s a little like being a parent. You simultaneously recognize the obduracy of people, that they are who they are, and, at the same time, you do everything you can to nudge them in certain ways.

One of our jobs as professors is to model or perform for our students a certain kind of relationship to knowledge. One of the really important things to me as a student was having these slightly over-the-top people being impassioned at the front of the room. There was something almost aberrant about the intensity of their interest in the particular topic that they were teaching. What they were most passionate about was calling into question things you had hitherto taken for granted.

Tolerating failure is a great way to encourage creativity. We could grow a little on that one. Everyone here is so successful that failure is really fraught. I had a conversation with a student last week. I had written a comment on his paper saying, “This is an inspired failure.” It was such an imaginative idea, but it was all over the place. I told him, “Your task over the next two years is to figure out, and have us help you figure out, how to more effectively execute this.” I don’t want him to do something more conventional or safe. I was so much happier reading this paper than one that might be tightly done but less ambitious. His confusion was due to the extent of his reach; he was trying to compare an apparently unrelated problem in economics with a problem in politics, arguing that there are actually parallels between the two due to a common underlying cause. I want him to hang onto the really huge and inspired underlying idea that he couldn’t develop adequately, because he’s still growing, he still doesn’t have all the tools.

As professors, we are supposed to be specialists in one thing. But we also need to be in touch with the freedom of undergraduate life. They are taking physics, politics, music, economics — they’re able to think about all of these things and see how one thing connects to another in a supposedly unrelated area. Staying in touch with that experience can help us teach; it might even help us in our scholarly work.

Mike Glier ’75, Studio Art

Eventually, you want to give a student a problem that doesn’t have a certain outcome. For example, when you’re teaching the essay style, you first want the student to create a simple thesis and then prove it in a very logical way. But then there’s a point, when they get the form down, that you ask them to venture a thesis that is unexpected and unproven. At this moment you want them to use that form to come up with a new idea, a new point of view, a synthesis of information that hasn’t been made before. That’s a real switch. At one moment you’re teaching the form, but then, when they get it, you want them to use the form to be creative in their investigation.

Edward Burger, Mathematics

In every single course I teach, creativity is one of the cornerstones. Take calculus, the most canonical class: 90 percent of the students aren’t going to use it as adults in their everyday lives. Only those going into science or engineering will use it. Then what is the point to my teaching it at college? The answer is creativity and the thinking process involved in cracking open difficult questions and answering them. The process can transcend mathematics and enter their everyday lives.

There are ways of training people to think about things in certain ways and look at things in certain ways that will foster a more creative way of thinking. I offer challenging questions for which the solution is by no means apparent — not just a variation of previous questions I’ve given them, but a completely different type of challenge, so that the students can’t mimic what was done before. They need to bring something of themselves to the question.

In all my courses, I emphasize the power of failure: learning from failed attempts and taking risks. Five percent of students’ final grades are based on their narrative of failure: how they learned from their failed attempts. I judge the quality of their failure by the size of the risk they’ve taken and the amount of insight they have generated from their mistakes. I do that as an invitation to the student to take risks, to try ideas without fear of failure.

Bill Wootters, Physics

If you’re in the habit of asking questions because you’re curious about the way nature works, you’re more likely to hit upon a really interesting question. And, in physics, asking the right question is the hardest part. You have to have a certain amount of knowledge in order to frame the question. In the beginning, therefore, it may not be so important for students to exhibit creativity. At that stage, it’s more important to nurture their curiosity. You can also raise questions that no one knows the answer to, let them know that science is not finished: There is room for new discovery.

Thomas Kohut, History

The way I teach history is to try to get the students to develop historical empathy: to be able to imagine themselves living in a different place and a different time under different circumstances and with a different past. They need to be able to imagine their way, think their way, inside the experience of the people of the past in order to understand why those people thought and acted and felt as they did. Historical understanding requires creativity and imagination.

Often in my classeses I’ll have students engage in debates where they have to take positions that people in the past took, even positions we might find repellent. In order to understand racism you have to think your way, imagine your way, inside the world view of a racist. So imagination and fantasy are an important part of historical thinking. You need imagination and fantasy to be able to understand and come up with your own interpretation of the people of the past. So, for me, imagination and fantasy are at least as important as the ability to think critically. You need to be able to come up with ideas in order to be able to critique them. But even there imagination is required. You have to be able to imagine how others might critique your ideas in order to protect yourself from those critiques.

By asking students to critique others’ ideas, we help them develop the ability to challenge received wisdom and the dominant paradigms. By asking students to imagine themselves inside the experience of people of the past, we develop their ability to come up with their own original ideas about the past.

Steve Gerrard, Philosophy

I think that in high school, students are taught a superficial form of creativity in which it’s good to be creative, to express oneself, to “go with the flow.” What I try to teach is a sophisticated form of creativity that involves knowing what the rules are and then breaking the rules for a reason. There’s nothing wrong with self-expression, but it doesn’t allow students to confront somebody else: Plato, for example, or their roommate. We’re taught to be too selfish; we think our view is the only perspective and our eyes the only ones worth looking through.

In my intro courses, my assignments are precisely defined, down to the last comma. In my more advanced courses, I assign an open-ended project. Some kids come in with marvelous creative projects, but that’s unusual. Many students tell me their ideas and sort of want to write another paper, just as they’ve done 500 times before. They don’t know how to put together what they love to do or are really interested in with what they’ve learned in the course. So I try to talk to each of them individually.

Before we even talk about the topic, it’s a matter of listening. If I have a skill as a teacher, it’s being a listener. I try to find out what they are really interested in — not what I’m assuming they would be interested in or what I want them to be interested in — and then find a way to relate that to the work we’re doing. I try to help them find a project they truly can be excited about.

Encouraging risk-taking is extremely delicate: If you let them know there is no risk to risk-taking, the risk disappears. You have to have standards; otherwise, there is no risk. One way is to give people a second chance. If they turn in a paper and get a bad grade, you give them the option of doing it over. The point is for them to learn, not to fail.

Jim Shepard, Creative Writing

You can’t provide someone with the gift, but you can really accelerate the gift’s development. You can help them understand what they can and can’t do with the gifts they’ve been blessed with and how to maximize what they can do. You might find yourself saying, for example, “If you’re going to attempt multiple points of view, you may find that that diminishes the reader’s ability to maintain the illusion of a strong connection to the main character. Did you want that effect?” You help them examine their decisions, which are almost always made intuitively.

It is a truism about most creative people that they have to develop individually. That would suggest that really talented and determined people will do it anyway whether they get help or not. But probably they wouldn’t do it at the same rate. Nearly all creative people apprentice themselves to mentors of one sort or another.

Sandra Burton, Dance

Everybody has creativity. Some people are more aware of their own ability to tap into it, or they’re more called to activate it. Whatever cultural life there is in their community or in their home life either celebrates that creativity or draws tight parameters around it, imposes social constraints.

At Williams, you get students who’ve always taken ballet or piano because these are the trappings of culture. You get students who haven’t had these opportunities at all, and this is their first chance to jump in the pool. And you get students who have lived in their heads, who are uncomfortable in their bodies and, sometimes, uncomfortable with other people. We get a lot of young people who’ve never danced before who come into the studio because they want to get involved in dance or because they’re working through a barrier. Either way, we strive to help them.

Talent is a wonderful companion to creativity, but sometimes talented people are not creative. Some people may not be the best dancers, but, my God, can they choreograph! The more you learn the more it can help you fire up your own creativity. Learning the dance fundamentals provides a way to learn the potential of your own body. The dance program is a safe place for the novice and the experienced person to learn more, go deeper and to do this in the company of other people looking to challenge themselves and to connect with creativity.

Nothing important can be taught, only learned.
— Dale Dauten

Mike Glier '75, Studio Art

Creativity is about establishing a situation in which you have an unclear outcome; you make a problem and engage it without knowing where it will lead; you are excited about getting lost in the problem even though you know you run the risk of getting truly lost and becoming desperate, but you are willing to take the risk because you love the adventure so muuch. To me, improvisation is a key component of creativity. To improvise, you establish a set of variables and then run through all the permutations to find the best solution to the problem. That’s the experience I have in the studio. I set my variables fairly narrowly — choosing materials, a thesis and an emotional attitude. Then I go through the likely permutations until I find a satisfying solution.

Being creative in the studio requires a kind of mental state that is somethimes referred to as right-brain thinking. Some call it intuition, but I don’t like that word because it makes it sound as if a creative state of mind is mysterious, as if it’s sent to you from above. That’s total baloney. Being creative in the studio is an intellectual process that’s not verbal. It’s a very synthetic process wherein your brain is constantly comparing your sensory awareness of the moment to your memory of similar moments in the past. It’s not a verbal comparison; it’s happening at a nonverbal level. And you’re able to react to the problem of the moment very spontaneously, without a verbal engagement. Then later, you go back to language. You switch back to the left brain and do a critical analysis of what you’ve done.

Edward Burger, Mathematics

Creativity is a means of making new discoveries or creating new ideas or objects — a means to an end, where the end is originality. Mathematicians are both artists and explorers: artists, because they use original thinking and creativity to make new discoveries; explorers, because, unlike artists, what we create is either true or false given the axioms mathematics has as its pillars. Someone might have a result that they deem “beautiful,” but if it’s not true, the mathematics community will not care.

You can hear Mozart and hear his imagination at work, you can look at a painting by da Vinci and see his imagination at work, but in math, one has to remove the symbols and language, and that which remains — that cloudlike structure that leads to the conclusion — that’s where the art is.

There is aesthetics within the notion of creativity. There are beautiful proofs and ugly proofs. Beautiful proofs tend to be ones that are simple; the fit together like a jigsaw puzzle; they’re elegant. And then there’s proof by exhaustion, which is not nearly as elegant. The aesthetically pleasing proof is often wonderfully simple; it’s an idea that makes everything clear and natural. Once you see it, you say, “Of course that’s true.”

By Zelda Stern with illustrations by Michael Hagelberg
Reprinted from the Williams Alumni Review, June 2006

Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA