During my tenure with Arts Corps, I dove deep into the research on creativity. Most of it could be found in the psychological research of the 1960s and 1970s when interest in creativity was at a peak. Included below are just four of these sources and representative excerpts that closely align with my understanding of creativity, how it can be cultivated and why it’s so essential in our human development.
“The most salient mark of a creative person is courage. It is not physical courage of the type that might be rewarded by the Congressional Medal of Honor. Rather it is personal courage, courage of the mind and spirit, psychological or spiritual courage that is the radix of a creative person: the courage to question what is generally accepted; the courage to be destructive in order that something better can be constructed; the courage to think thoughts unlike anyone else’s; the courage to be open to experience both from within and from without; the courage to follow one’s intuition rather than logic; the courage to imagine the impossible and try to achieve it; the courage to stand aside from the collective and be in conflict with it if necessary; the courage to become and to be oneself.”
-- MacKinnon, Donald W. In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing Creativity. The Creative Education Foundation, Inc., 1978.
“The essence of creativity is being in love with what one is doing and this makes possible all the other characteristics of the creative person: courage, independence of thought and judgment, honesty, perseverance, curiosity, and willingness to take risks.”
-- Torrance, E.P. “The Nature of Creativity as Manifest in its Testing.” In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Creativity (pp 11-37). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
“Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers a student knows. When we teach for the habits of mind, we are interested in how students behave when they don’t know the answer….We are interested in enhancing the way students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it. We want students to learn how to develop a critical stance with their work: editing, thinking flexibly and learning from another person’s perspective. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information but knowing how to act on it.”
-- Costa, Arthur L. and Kallick, Bena, Editors. Discovering and Exploring Habits of Mind. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2000.
“If I had to express in one word what makes the creative personality different from others, it would be complexity. Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.”
--Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996