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Why Creativity Matters with Ross Anderson
74 Plays3 years ago
On today’s podcast: education researcher and strategist Ross Anderson
Anderson is the co-founder of the Creative Engagement Lab which promotes creativity among educators and students. He’s led large research projects, including numerous collaborations with the Journalistic Learning Initiative, and has published articles on creative development, educational change, and arts integrated teaching and learning in numerous peer-reviewed journals.
In this episode, we discuss creativity in the classroom and why creative development matters.
Topics
- 02:02 How did creativity get left behind in discussions about improving education?
- 07:30 Incorporating creativity across different subjects
- 12:58 What does promoting creativity in the classroom look like?
- 18:54 Risk taking in journalistic learning
- 22:30 How can parents support their child’s freedom and creativity
Recommended
Transcript
Overlooked Creativity in Education
00:00:10
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The role of creativity in a flourishing educational environment has been understudied, has been underappreciated, has been in some ways stymied by these policies.
00:00:23
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And I do feel like we're in a bit of a turning point.
Podcast Introduction with Ed Madison
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Welcome to How to Have Kids Love Learning, where we explore ideas and strategies for parents and educators that help students thrive.
00:00:50
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I'm your host, Ed Madison.
00:00:51
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I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and serve as executive director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes,
00:01:05
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and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
00:01:10
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Teaching students to become effective communicators is at the heart of JLI's work.
Interview with Dr. Ross Anderson
00:01:28
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Well, I'm pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Ross Anderson, who's an educational researcher and strategist.
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He's the co-founder of the Creative Engagement Lab, which promotes creativity and agency among educators and students.
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His research specifically looks at how factors create equitable, engaging, and aspirational learning environments.
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Ross and I have known each other for years and have collaborated on some of the work that we do through our journalistic learning initiative.
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And also we've coauthored peer reviewed journal articles.
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And I'm just so glad to have you here today.
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Ross, welcome.
00:02:00
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Thank you.
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Yeah, it's great to be here.
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I think a place to start this conversation in terms of just the whole notion of creativity.
Impact of No Child Left Behind on Arts
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I think it's fair to say that, you know, during the sort of 90s era of No Child Left Behind, you know, things like music and art
00:02:18
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kind of just got set aside with more emphasis on traditional ways of thinking about how, you know, what counts academically.
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What's your sense of that and narrative and also what called you to kind of really focus in on creativity?
Shift Towards Well-rounded Education
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Yeah, great questions.
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Yeah, I think the No Child Left Behind era,
00:02:45
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I mean, I feel like we're still in it.
00:02:47
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You know, we've got a new accountability policy that does ask for a well-rounded education as a stipulation for states to be fulfilling their obligations and that inside of a well-rounded education, you know, there is space in there for the arts, for other creative endeavors like inside of career and technical education.
00:03:15
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But that is new.
00:03:16
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And so there was a nice, you know, almost 20 year period there, 15 year period where we were, I think, collectively responding to a narrowing in on literacy skills and numeracy skills that are testable, that can be developed through
00:03:37
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you know, theoretically wrote memorization and skill building and, you know, just double dosing on these kind of isolated skills.
00:03:51
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And the tricky thing is that a lot of that policy, as is often the case, is not theory-based.
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It's not theory-driven.
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So if we are going to develop these skills the way that that,
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that plays out, that policy plays out and that approach plays out is that we have to hold teachers accountable, give teachers the kind of like step-by-step guidance on how to do it.
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And then assume it's kind of this like, you know, like dosage issue.
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It's like, we just got to give more dosage of this to students and they're going to improve their scores.
00:04:31
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Well, it didn't really play out that way.
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And I do hesitate to like,
00:04:37
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couch all of the problems inside of like test-based accountability because I think it actually does really address, it has addressed and was intended to address really important equity issues.
00:04:48
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You know, we had a lot of schools that were not serving black and brown students or students who were marginalized with other socioeconomic factors and they, we were letting it happen as a system and it wasn't being called out.
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And
00:05:00
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So I think one of the things that's cool is that like when you look at these policies, yes, they did cost us a lot of money and they continue to that has been now removed from things like the arts.
00:05:14
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So all the funding that we put towards testing and this regimen of testing has to be taken from somewhere.
Funding and Creativity in Education
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And that's one of the major issues.
00:05:24
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What I think does exist is a series of constraints like any other system where people can be very creative inside of.
00:05:32
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And the role of creativity in a flourishing educational environment has been understudied, has been underappreciated, has been in some ways stymied by these policies.
00:05:51
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And I do feel like we're in a bit of a turning point.
00:05:54
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So it's exciting to know that, for instance, and I have a few little pieces of hardcore evidence around this, like this huge program of funding called Education Innovation Research, millions of dollars of funding.
Global Demand for Creative Skills
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It's the first time ever in 15 years of grant writing that I have ever seen in a legislative document the word creativity, ever.
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more, you know, that one of the stipulations inside of the goals, inside the aims, inside the priorities that you had to fit inside of was more creative learning.
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And it's the first time I've ever seen that.
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So, you know, maybe I don't know what that's from.
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I think it's a little administration to administration.
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But the other thing is that, you know, these the most recent index of skills that employers across the world want and need in their employees, the most recent index,
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had creativity at the very top.
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And then inside of the rest of those 10 other aspects of being creative, such as cognitive flexibility, being able to think flexibly,
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you know, being able to collaborate and problem solve with people in a successful way, which requires a lot of creativity.
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You know, it's living inside of this index of what we need societally and globally.
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And maybe that's filtering down a little bit into our educational priorities and national sensibility.
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But yeah, that's fine.
Steve Jobs and Arts in Technology
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Yeah.
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When I think about this, it reminds me of the story of Steve Jobs is told so often where we had the introduction of technology that was PCs and it was very kind of almost green blinking icons or whatever.
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And because Steve Jobs wandered into a calligraphy class that he had this notion of
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of being able to have all different kinds of fonts, you know, like what a novel idea, right?
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And that created a whole democratization of digital publishing and allowed for graphic arts and companies like Adobe and companies like that, that had it not, it's not to say that someone else might not have had that vision, but I think it really illustrates in basic terms kind of the difference.
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I mean, if you even look at the ads between the PC guy and the Apple guy,
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and the iconography they used around people like Muhammad Ali and Einstein, everything else compared to the nerdy PC guy, it speaks to this.
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Yeah.
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I think that does speak to the... Steve Jobs did have other disciplines that he was poured a lot of time into, and I think that goes for a lot of our innovators.
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there is this area of research inside of creativity that looks at these people and individuals and their lifestyle, their habits, who become really talented and incredibly creative in different domains, like science and music, for instance.
Creative Empowerment in Nicaragua
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And the truth is that there's just so much possibility and opportunity when people
00:09:28
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these domains are allowed to inhabit the same space, the same educational learning space, so that students can think through science using theater, for instance, or play around with historical
00:09:45
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ideas and stories of our past and of different cultures using like music and sound and different.
00:09:54
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And I think it speaks to, you know, what Steve Jobs is getting out there is like we have a
00:10:00
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aesthetic the aesthetics are really important to humans it's one of the things that separates us you know from uh the rest of animal kingdom it's like this you know from what we know you know like we have this aesthetic taste that is absolutely consequential to how we make decisions how we think how we feel um and you asked what how did i get into this well it was definitely from
00:10:23
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my first entry into education, actually one of the first experiences I had of doing any youth development work was in Nicaragua with a orphanage that was almost like self-run by young people.
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There was like one abuelo and abuelita who like, like, you know, we're from Venezuela and we're kind of like helping to organize, but these kids,
00:10:47
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they came together because their families couldn't afford to feed them and they produced incredible performances for their community and since i worked with them this is back in like 2002 they really taught me uh i i like led them through through some capoeira uh movements and and kind of taught them a little bit about capoeira and they maybe they incorporated some of that but they put on these people who don't know
00:11:15
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Yeah, Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art form that's just this like in dance form that's like a real kind of beautiful cultural artifact of slavery, of like resistance to slavery and of resistance to cultural oppression.
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And it has grown out of all of these mixtures of different cultural aspects of Brazil and the Afro-Brazilian history.
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So there's, anyway, this group is called La Escuela de Locomedia, so the School of Comedy.
00:11:48
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They were so incredibly moving to me because they found joy, even though they were, you know, these were kids who had,
00:11:58
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who were really on their own.
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I mean, and they were from 10 to 16, 17 years old.
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They formed such camaraderie and such tightness as a family through their work in the arts and through their work in the arts that was for their community.
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grew to a place where they then, I think years after I was there, they did their first tour through Europe.
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They raised money.
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They raised money for a whole school that they built.
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In Nicaragua, you may know, is like the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
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So this is a group that was like,
00:12:34
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because of their creative connection and their artistic investment that they were making with each other and themselves, they were flourishing even amongst those, you know, that kind of challenging circumstance.
00:12:48
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So, you know, yes, we can do it inside of education in the United States, you know, like the constraints are so much less.
00:12:55
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Yeah.
Is Creativity Innate or Taught?
00:12:58
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Yeah.
00:12:58
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I mean, as a practical matter, I mean, what does this look like?
00:13:00
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Because I think when people hear the word creativity, it's a word that can sometimes be a little intimidating.
00:13:04
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And we don't know whether it's, quite frankly, innate, you know, sort of the nature or the nurture.
00:13:10
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Can creativity be taught?
00:13:12
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And what does that look like in the classroom?
00:13:14
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I mean, I know, for example, we first started working together on a project called ArtCore.
00:13:20
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And one of your early development projects
00:13:25
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challenges and maybe not so much a challenge, but was to get the teachers to kind of free themselves up to realizing.
00:13:33
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So talk about that a little bit.
00:13:35
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Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:36
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I mean, boy, you know, it has been a huge learning process.
00:13:42
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And of course, what we're doing is has been building off of the work of decades of work around integrating the arts across the curriculum, decades of work on trying to understand the
00:13:54
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What is creativity in education really mean?
Cultivating a Creative Mindset
00:13:57
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So there are different frameworks out there thinking about, you know, creative teaching versus teaching for creativity versus creative learning.
00:14:07
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Like that's one framework that does kind of help to kind of see the difference.
00:14:12
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And what we, I won't overload us with like frameworks here, but one thing that we bring into the initial work of developing
00:14:24
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a creative culture in a school and a creative culture in a classroom, and then a kind of creative mindset for teachers, a creative like a bias towards trying more creative things in the classroom.
00:14:36
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The first step is to displace the mythologies that we carry about creativity, because we all carry them.
00:14:43
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There's some strong cultural and societal messages that have informed how we carry ourselves as either creative individuals
00:14:53
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or as non-creative individuals um and whether we can we believe that creativity is this sort of trait like you know set of um genes you know or or whether you know or whether it's something that actually is more just human that we grow and we can we can develop and cultivate and um and for sure there are talents and gifts that kind of
00:15:18
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make some people maybe more apt to be creative in some domains than others, but the general set of dispositions and skills that go into creativity to making something creative to, you know, and what does creativity really mean?
00:15:33
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Well, it's something that's novel and at the same time also valued.
00:15:38
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And that's within a socio-cultural context, because what might be valued in Oregon is maybe not going to be as valued in Florida or
00:15:47
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Canada or Jamaica.
00:15:51
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The value, the cultural and societal context is what actually defines creativity.
00:15:55
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And so what are the individual or group characteristics?
00:16:00
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Well, it's like becoming more open, taking risks, being willing to, and you first have to believe that when you fail or make a mistake in trying something new and novel,
00:16:13
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that it's worth it and that there might be some insight inside of that failure.
00:16:19
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And that's a very different disposition than being afraid and insecure and holding back.
00:16:25
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And those individuals who hold more of a kind of fixed mindset about
00:16:32
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being either creative or not, you're either born creative or not, certainly are less likely to try something new.
00:16:39
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And when we think about why with teachers we would go kind of unpack all these beliefs and these ideas, well, if they're modeling and messaging for students,
00:16:50
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and we know the power of modeling messaging.
00:16:52
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It's the primary way of learning really in teaching and learning, and yet really kind of often invisible.
00:16:58
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Well, they're setting the tone.
00:17:00
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So whether or not students are gonna develop creatively through a year inside of a course or inside of a school is gonna depend in large part on whether or not these opportunities are being offered, these ways of being are being modeled.
00:17:17
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And in large part,
00:17:19
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The research that I've done that's kind of looked in the research for, well, what opportunities do exist inside education right now?
00:17:27
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And the last 20 years of research has shown very, very few opportunities generally are being offered.
00:17:40
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Which maybe attracts me to it, right?
00:17:41
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Because it means that there's a lot of possibility and potential there.
00:17:46
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And so what does this look like?
00:17:49
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What we do in the MakeSpace project is first offer some basic creative routines that develop different aspects of creative thinking.
00:17:57
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For instance, thinking divergently and expansively and flexibly, you can do through various routines by thinking about, you know,
00:18:09
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how many different uses you could come up with for an object or coming up with stories about an object or looking at an image that is maybe really abstract and finding as many kind of narratives inside of that image.
Fostering Creativity Through Writing
00:18:23
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It's like trying to push yourself to really be flexible and that develops associative thinking as well.
00:18:31
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metaphorical thinking huge one because you're you're thinking you're crossing domains you know to kind of represent and and explain something with something that's completely unrelated so these are all practices you can you can just bring them in and and and then they evolve and then they integrate into the content and then they integrate into your social emotional learning curriculum and
00:18:54
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Yeah, and I wanted to touch on in the time we have left just, you know, what we're finding out about how this plays into the work that the Journalistic Learning Initiative does around writing and reflection and publishing.
00:19:07
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You know, maybe you could speak to kind of some of the things that we're discovering and some of the work that we're doing.
00:19:13
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Yeah, yeah, it's fun.
00:19:14
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I mean, I'm right in the middle of writing up the results from this last pilot last spring with about 100 students or 80, 89 students or something like that, high school students.
00:19:28
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And, you know, the...
00:19:32
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The skill set of writing is so underappreciated really inside of K-12 and then into college too.
00:19:42
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And what we're finding inside of this research that's probably gone more in depth into the development of the skills around writing for journalistic, in a journalistic way than any other study we've done yet.
00:19:56
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And what we're finding is, you know, there are, you know,
00:20:01
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So many moments that create these opportunities for students to take risks and try something new while also being really critical about what they're looking at and developing the metacognition to actually
00:20:19
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really understand what kind of attitude they need to bring to the process.
00:20:27
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Certainly if they're getting peer feedback on a revision, being really open, not defensive, that takes metacognition to really say, I know this is the first draft and I know I have improvements to make.
00:20:43
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And then, you know, and scary.
00:20:44
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And then even thinking about the topics and like, you know, it's a really big ideational space to say, all right, what stories out there are worth writing about?
00:20:53
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What stories are important to me?
00:20:57
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What am I curious about?
00:20:59
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I mean, I think the program is like designed to really tap into a lot of aspects of a student's creative potential.
00:21:08
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inside of a discipline that is so important, being able to write, being able to like convey your thinking
00:21:16
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in a way that's compelling and beautiful and tell stories that are, you know, kind of representing the human condition and the issues that we're dealing with.
00:21:27
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And so it's sophisticated stuff, like to do that is sophisticated.
00:21:32
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What we're, you know, I just looked at this quote from a student and it was, you know, it's really fascinating because it's like the experience in even
00:21:45
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just kind of like researching and thinking through this approach to writing was to this 12th grader was unlike any other experience they'd had, they'd had, you know, both in the research, the writing process, the interview completely new.
00:22:02
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Talk about leaning into a new experience.
00:22:05
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I mean, really being able to take those risks.
00:22:07
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I think that this process has a lot of potential to really cultivate some of the aspects of creative attitudes, creative thinking, and inside of, like I said, a discipline that will serve students in every domain that they might go into because writing is so critical.
00:22:28
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Yeah.
00:22:28
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Yeah.
Parental Role in Valuing Creativity
00:22:29
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Final question.
00:22:31
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being parents, how can parents, because we have parents who listen to this podcast as well.
00:22:36
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Yeah.
00:22:37
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How can they support their kids in
00:22:41
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in developing a sense of creativity and freedom often when they, you know, when, when the go-to is what was your grade and, you know, why aren't you doing better?
00:22:51
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Yeah.
00:22:52
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Yeah.
00:22:53
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Yeah.
00:22:53
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I mean, so it's such a good question.
00:22:56
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I mean, I think the, the things that I think about as a parent, certainly after making lots of mistakes, you know, what, one is to just try to be as reflective as you can be.
00:23:05
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Um,
00:23:06
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because our kids give us cues all the time you know whether it's body language uh whether it's like not wanting to talk about something you know if there are areas the fears and the the you know the things that are scary for them to share or to go into those are really important spaces and i think that's as parents if we can be really soft and tender around those and every student's different every kiddo's different um and then the yeah like the i mean just
00:23:39
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acknowledging and valuing the areas of artistic and creative expression and development as much as we do the athletic achievements, the academic achievements, because what is happening inside of these creative and artistic areas is incredibly personal.
00:23:54
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And it's often, it's really vulnerable.
00:23:55
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And sometimes I think a lot of kids hide it from us as parents, they hide it.
00:24:00
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They don't, it's, and they'll hide it from other people too.
00:24:03
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And I think it's gotta be a non-judgment space.
00:24:07
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know it's got to be an area where we're curious about it um you know i think a lot of this comes it comes into like cultivating a love of music for students for young people well like if you force kids into trying to practice or trying to to learn something um well you've stripped all the autonomy away you know and maybe it's not time for that you know um but then there's the question of well how do you develop the discipline
00:24:32
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And I think it's where it's like, you know, young people help them set goals, help them think about their habits.
00:24:42
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Don't tell them what habits to develop, help them think about habits, help them see and reflect on when really good habits, like create that joy of growth and, you know,
00:24:59
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Yeah, it's really hard.
00:25:00
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I think being so like comes down to like, I mean, this goes for teachers too.
00:25:03
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It's like pull out of needing like kids don't necessarily need critique or want critique first.
00:25:10
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They want you to be curious.
00:25:12
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And then maybe they'll ask you for critique.
00:25:16
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Like my kids sometimes come to me with writing, like, will you help me edit this?
00:25:21
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And when that happens, that is like, I know that that's like precious because that's vulnerable.
00:25:30
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And what we do with that vulnerability can either kind of crush and really, you know,
00:25:37
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like Ron Vigetto says like, mortification of your creativity.
00:25:43
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And that's a sad thing, a sad kind of metaphor to kind of think about, but yes, like there are kids who into their adulthood, like there's a creative mortification that happens and it's because often because of like harsh critique or some, you know, sometimes,
00:25:59
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When we work with teachers, we find that teachers have these art scars that maybe have been living for like 10 years, 20 years, and they haven't touched a paper and pencil to draw for that long because of one thing that one person said.
Resources from Creative Engagement Lab
00:26:12
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know so just being careful mindful and careful that um you know first and foremost non-judgment and modeling like if we're doing creative things and we're practicing and we're being vulnerable like that uh it's it's modeling the right thing and um maybe more powerful than anything else we do yeah so ross where do people find you uh uh their twitter or web or and the engagement lab and twerk
00:26:39
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Yeah, yeah.
00:26:40
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If you go to www.creativeengagementlab.com, we've just put up some new curriculum for integrating creativity into social, emotional, and mental health inside the classroom.
00:26:55
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And we've got a ton of research up there.
00:26:58
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We're updating all the time.
00:26:59
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Go to makespaceproject.org.
00:27:02
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We've got a blog there that really talks about that project.
00:27:05
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If you're curious about taking any of those trainings, you can find us and email us through that.
00:27:12
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And then you can find me.
00:27:12
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I'm on the different medias a bit, but just look up Rossi Anderson for the Twitter handle and Instagram.
00:27:22
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Yeah, and be...
00:27:23
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And reach out, you know, if you have any interest or curiosities, reach out by email.
00:27:28
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Great.
00:27:28
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Thanks.
00:27:28
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Thanks.
00:27:29
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Thank you so much for joining us.
00:27:31
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Total pleasure.
00:27:31
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Thank you, Ed.
00:27:40
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How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
00:27:44
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For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.