Creativity: The Convergence of the Chaotic Artist and Methodized Editor

Creativity is the means by which a person can be bold enough to take a paintbrush and dare to use it in a pixelated screen. It’s daring greatly to stand out and leading the way for more creativeness fo secede. Creativity should be present in all- in the future leaders and in every individual contributing to the world.

As a future educator, I strive to prepare students to be leaders that will eventually see and explore potential in others. What is disappointing, however, is that creativity is not prioritized by many educators and institutions. The current educational system has a tendency of getting in between the creativity of students and their learning potential. To prove the dearth of commitment to creativity, it is salient to note that various educational institutions measure the creativity of students by providing examination assessments. Upon taking these examination assessments, statistics show that children under the age of 10 have a 98% creativity scale. Meanwhile, children ages 10 and up show a decreased 70% with the pass of time , and as they go forward into their education. The significant devaluation comes from the curriculum and practice being taught to students as they journey through their educational years. Contrary to what one might think, creativity is hindered with education. But education isn't exactly the driver of this catastrophe. The institutional systems are in an existential crisis when it comes to fostering effective meaningful learning. The challenge is underlined by the merge and intersection of education and system. To optimize learning, such intersection has to be carefully intensified and modified to be more aligned with recent scientific findings and practical methods.

Without belaboring the point, let's touch base on what creativity does to learning, wellbeing, and lifestyle, and why fostering it should be at the top of the priority list for educators.

Where Creativity Emerges

Most people would agree that creativeness comes in moments of exploration. Creativeness comes in those eureka freestyle moments; opportunities of converging passions and talents. Creativity takes many shapes, but what it’s important to account for is the depth that comes with the shape of creativity. The depth that comes from creativity radicalizes what can afterwards become a learning experience. The depth parts from strengthening innovative thinking and gist reasoning. In order to create depth in learning and provide creative experiences to students, it is imperative that educators provide students a level of balanced autonomy and mentorship. By providing an extension of autonomy, learners can take responsibility for their own exploration and interests. Meanwhile, good mentorship can serve as a way to potentialize stated interests and passions.

What is important is saving room for creativity- the rest will follow. By providing tangible and spatial room for creativity in the classroom, students will also be able to make room for creativity in their daily lives and even inter sectionalize their interests and practical applications though creative works.

Creativity Works

Being creative drives a person to be the most motivated and incentivizes any learner to want to learn more, perfect a creation, and continue creating. Creativity is the perfect framework where educators should place emphasis. The irony of creativity is that although it is often pursued, it cannot be forced. Therefore, creativity should not be provided in a format, in fact it is not its nature to be structured, but to happen spontaneously and depend on the sculpturing of every individual.

Supporting Research

With scientific investigation and further research pertaining to creativity and learning, the link between creativity and cognition has been clearly delineated to driving different neural mechanisms.

Creative drives have underlying mechanisms that can be explained scientifically. There is no question about the gateways that creativity opens and the different ideation benefits to health. In recent research, it was supported that creativity drives motivation, mood states and reward. As a result, creativity directly shapes the mind and its neuromodulatory systems; including dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin neurotransmitters.

To further discuss how it is that innovative thinking creates emerging breakthroughs contributing to human progress, we will dive into the intrinsics of creativity.

Each individual is creative as an individual with different interests; therefore making creativity a multidimensional domain associated with different fields. Creativity is a construct as much as a cognitive process. Considering the above mentioned, two qualitatively pathways to creative performance have been found by scientists: the flexibility pathway and persistence pathway. The former suggests switching between concepts, approaches, categories. The other leads to creativity through hard work and more systematic and effort-lead exploration in order to create more depth. The flexibility pathway deals more with educational instruction, whereas the persistence pathway concords more with the "methodized editor" approach that will be further explained. It is important to note that both pathways are inversely correlated, but a balance should be kept, and a switch from one to the other is constant. To add to the intersection between educational instruction and the understanding of neurological functioning, its important to note that when creating ideas and problem solving, individuals follow the path of least resistance. This is why educators should formulate creative ideas to maintain students engaged, motivated, and yet challenged.

Applied Neuronal Creativity

Creativity has been linked to associative thinking, with a study finding that participants were able to find creative associations between unrelated words provided. This is relevant because it means that by driving and promoting creativity based activities, students can learn and train to associate certain concepts, or acquisitions of knowledge to create connections in the future.

In addition, creativity also has the potential to change mood states. By simply incorporating a more unorthodox and unconventional way of teaching, students can be more excited, more predisposed to learning and ready to apply what they have learned in the classroom into their daily lives. Different moods influence different creative thoughts, with creativity being enhanced by positive mood states and motivation- activating approaches. The opposite is true, with fear and anxiety correlating with low creativity. Overall, activating moods increase creative fluency while the contrary is true for deactivating moods. This valuable information is transforming, as both mood can enhance creativity and creativity can enhance mood. With the rise in depression cases amongst adolescent students, the lack of motivation, and predisposed negative mentality towards education can hinder creativity. We can also propose, however, that the activation of creativity is a possible combat tool to the aforementioned situations. In this case, educators can design their instruction around fostering and nurturing creativity in learning and teaching.

Where exactly are the "aha" moments produced in the brain?

The prefrontal cortex brain regions are known to be activated areas for problem solving and idea generation. Creativity is dependent on a multifaceted neuronal network according to different creative performances going into different cognitive domains. Such components include musical, verbal and visuospatial domains. Creativity is therefore activator for all four cortical lobes, with higher activation depending on the cognition domain.

So how are the neuromodulatory systems involved in creative performance?

The Dopaminergic (DA) system is involved in reward, addiction, and attention relationships and experimentally has showed cognitive thinking impairment when levels of antagonistic DA are high. Individual creativity is positively correlated with substancia negra and DA, with DA agonists stimulating creativity. Meanwhile, the Noradrenaline (NE) system , and its up-regulation by increased stress weakens cognitive flexibility and thus creativity. Further research about how reward could shape the creative mind through the associated neuromodulatory systems is still, however being formulated to explain creative ideation.

Bold statement: School Kills Creativity

To pivot on the idea by Sir Ken Robinson in his TED Talk about creativity, no one knows what will happen five years from now, yet students are being educated for that future. To part from this statement, poses the idea that unpredictability is extraordinary. Students are being educated but kept away from creativity, from receiving synthesized and reduced information which can unfold meaningful learning.

Educational systems keep on replicating the hierarchal order of subjects- with mathematics and the sciences being up top, leaving the arts and humanities in the bottom. The problem is that public education has not progressed from what was once established two centuries ago. Educational institutions are adhering to the idea that academic ability is the most useful way of educating. Students are being prepared for further institutional education but not to apply what they are interested in and to get the most out of these interests and passions. Education and creativity are so bluntly being separated, where they should be merged. To create a creativity and educational fusion, the methodized editor can be introduced. The methodized editor puts creativity into good use. Creativity is organized and relevance is attributed. Methodological editing makes chaotic creativity make sense and creates a space for teaching.

By merging the methodized editor and chaotic artist internalized in each student, education will succeed at preparing future leaders. Intelligence is diverse and dynamic, because of the many interactive characteristics of the brain. Part of the human condition is the consistency for change, and creativity brings upon that change, which in itself brings richness to human capacity. In order to reach higher human capacity, educators must rethink the fundamental principles of teaching and learning.

Budgeting for Creativity

Schools need to take action and design for creativity in the classroom. The value of creativity should be reflective in school initiatives, curriculum, and schedule. Institutions should therefore demonstrate the value of creativity in the way they carry on instruction to students.

Allocating space and time for creativity and unlocking it comes from doing less- simplifying and shifting from the rigor of prescribing constant methodical curriculum. Schools should refocus on formulating responsive systems that listen to students in order to help then get to where they want. Schools should be designed based on needs, based on empathizing, on listening.

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Alan Watts once said that the secret to life is engaging in the moment. He said that we must realize that work is actually play.

To highlight Watts' thoughts, WORK IS PLAY.

Through play, we can put our chaotic artist and our methodized editor to work by the hand of creativity.

---Lets wonder into creativity---

Thanks for reading!

Resources

Khalil, Radwa, et al. “The Link between Creativity, Cognition, and Creative Drives and Underlying Neural Mechanisms.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 1 Jan. 1AD, https://internal-journal.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2019.00018/full.

How Creativity Works in the Brain. https://blog.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/how-creativity-works-in-the-brain-report.pdf.