Developing Creativity

I'm presently reading a terrific book, Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum. An edited collection of works from all sorts of backgrounds, with insightful opening and closing chapters by one of the editors, Prof Norman Jackson, the Director of the UK's SCEPTrE  (Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education) at the University of Surrey.

I was drawn especially to this chapter by Paul Tosey, cutely entitled Interfering with the interference. Although Tovey is from the Management discipline, he provides thought-provoking analogies from the creative arts and music areas to make excellent points: He suggests that "creativity is triggered by constraining events or circumstances", and that this view of creativity "does not entail a romantic notion of total artistic freedom in which constraints are negative". He says, "Necessity is the mother of emergence as well of invention".

Hmmm . .  provides me with a whole new perspective on all those undergraduates cramming for exams or leaving projects right 'till the last minute.  He also puts forward the metaphor -- "change as drama" . . .  as they say here in Australia, 'I reckon!'

So, obviously I'm recommending this thought provoking book to those of you engaged with teaching in the so-called 'creative' disciplines – or as Erica McWilliam asks more widely – Is creativity teachable? Conceptualising the creativity/pedagogy relationship in higher education.

Tosey leaves us with this wonderful musical anecdote:

"A well-known Congolese drummer, TaTitos, was asked how new compositions are created in that culture. TaTitos replied that there are three methods. In the first, a new piece of music is presented to someone in their dreams; in the second, musicians notice and build on mistakes they make while they are playing and generate new variations from those errors; in the third, someone consciously constructs a new composition. However, TaTitos added, there are no known examples of successful composition using the third method" (pp 29-30).

I'd also like to add, 'Technique, (dare I say) Craft and Experience', a discussion that so often seems to be missing. But that's a story for another day . . . In the meantime, I came across this fascinating presentation by Aniruddh Patel, called 'Music and the Mind':