Understanding And Recognizing Creativity

This volume addresses key issues and assumptions about creativity as a potential discipline, making the progress of creativity studies more explicit and communicable to those within and outside of the field.

This volume addresses key issues and assumptions about creativity as a potential discipline, making the progress of creativity studies more explicit and communicable to those within and outside of the field.

Winner of the 2018 Outstanding Book by the Michigan Council Teachers of English Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2018 Winner of the 2017 AERA Division K (Teaching and Teacher Education) Exemplary Research Award This book draws upon a queer literacy framework to map out examples for teaching literacy across pre-K-12 schooling. To date, there are no comprehensive Pre-K-12 texts for literacy teacher educators and theorists to use to show successful models of how practicing classroom teachers affirm differential (a)gender bodied realities across curriculum and schooling practices. This book aims to highlight how these enactments can be made readily conscious to teachers as a reminder that gender normativity has established violent and unstable social and educational climates for the millennial generation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, (a)gender/(a)sexual, gender creative, and questioning youth.

This edited volume provides a venue for scholars whose work challenges the typical, static conceptions, and methods of studying creativity. More specifically, the book will serve as an effort to introduce more dynamic definitions, conceptions, and approaches for studying creativity in the context of educational practice. By doing so, it feeds the strong contemporary need for more dynamic conceptions of creativity in educational settings. This is particularly important given the fast evolution of modern society and the widespread consensus that efforts to develop creative potential should be democratized -- extending well beyond the boundaries of the gifted subset and the walls of the classroom. This work recognizes that more dynamic perspectives on creativity are necessary for understanding its complexity, value, and meaning in educational contexts.

How cognitive psychology explains human creativity Conventional wisdom holds that creativity is a mysterious quality present in a select few individuals. The rest of us, the common view goes, can only stand in awe of great creative achievements: we could never paint Guernica or devise the structure of the DNA molecule because we lack access to the rarified thoughts and inspirations that bless geniuses like Picasso or Watson and Crick. Presented with this view, today's cognitive psychologists largely differ finding instead that "ordinary" people employ the same creative thought processes as the greats. Though used and developed differently by different people, creativity can and should be studied as a positive psychological feature shared by all humans. Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts presents the major psychological theories of creativity and illustrates important concepts with vibrant and detailed case studies that exemplify how to study creative acts with scientific rigor. Creativity includes: * Two in-depth case studies--Watson and Crick's modeling of the DNA structure and Picasso's painting of Guernica-- serve as examples throughout the text * Methods used by psychologists to study the multiple facets of creativity * The "ordinary thinking" or cognitive view of creativity and its challengers * How problem-solving and experience relate to creative thinking * Genius and madness and the relationship between creativity and psychopathology * The possible role of the unconscious in creativity * Psychometrics--testing for creativity and how personality factors affect creativity * Confluence theories that use cognitive, personality, environmental, and other components to describe creativity Clearly and engagingly written by noted creativity expert Robert Weisberg, Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts takes both students and lay readers on an in-depth journey through contemporary cognitive psychology, showing how the discipline understands one of the most fundamental and fascinating human abilities. "This book will be a hit. It fills a large gap in the literature. It is a well-written, scholarly, balanced, and engaging book that will be enjoyed by students and faculty alike." --David Goldstein, University of Toronto

In Perspectives in Creativity experts in the psychology of creativity take stock of the field by examining their own experiences. The contributors relate how they embarked on their work, how their ideas developed, what in their thinking remained the same, what had changed, and how they evaluate their successes and failures. The introductory chapter provides a historical context for subsequent contributions. J. P. Guilford then describes the development of the field of creativity from the perspective of the Structure of Intellect model. Donald W. MacKinnon describes his work at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research. J. W. Getzels and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi recount in the following chapter how, though starting with a conception of creativity as a problem-solving process, they were driven through their work with artists to a conception of creativity as also a problem-finding process. In the fifth chapter, Frank M. Andrews describes his investigations of the social and psychological factors in scientific laboratories. Frank Barron examines the problem of creativity and alienation. Anne Roe analyzes the sources and development of paintings as reported by twenty artists. In the following chapter, Salvatore Maddi examines the widely held belief that social integration and a permissive environment are conducive to creative endeavor. In chapter 9, Calvin Taylor and Richard Ellison describe the development of the Utah program of assessment and intervention with regard to the creativity of children in the classroom. Next, Sidney Parnes discusses his work on "brainstorming" and its emphasis on a balance between imagination and judgment, freedom, and discipline. George Prince tells of the development of "synectics" since its early formulation and recounts its application to creative production in industry. E. Paul Torrance then examines recent creativity in the schools and describes his own efforts in devising diagnostic tests and educati

In Understanding Creativity, authors John S. Dacey and Kathleen H. Lennon offer a thorough examination of the three factors - biological, psychological, and social - that contribute to the creative process. In clear and lively language, this book explores a breadth of topics on creativity including: how creative people operate as successful and imaginative problem solvers, the essential role self-control plays in realizing creative potential, and the most current discoveries about how the brain works on the neuronal and chemical levels. Most important, the book presents an innovative model that integrates the biological, psychological, and social elements and reflects the most significant advances in current creativity research.