Creative "I": Defining Creativity
I chose to interview my children’s art teacher, Beverley McCarthy. She began her career as a fabric designer in New York, before reinventing herself in her mid-thirties as an art teacher. For McCarthy, creativity is the “act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality.” The action piece is central to her definition, as she considers original or novel ideas to simply be imagination. For her, it is the follow through, the application and action upon the idea that moves from imagination to creativity.
Problem solving is a central piece of McCarthy’s concept of creativity. Struggling to solve a problem in a new way is central to her creative process. She embraces the struggle to bring an idea to life, and looks upon failure as an opportunity to reimagine and try again. In the classroom, she tries to foster this idea among her students by giving them the skills and confidence that they need to attempt to solve problems in a way that hasn’t been laid out. She provides them the time and space to struggle and fail and try again. She believes that struggle and exploration can lead to creative solutions, and can foster thought processes that can be applied to future creative endeavors.
Another key part of McCarthy’s concept of creativity is the idea of connections. She spoke at length about the creative brain making connections between concepts and schema where the connection was not previously considered possible. The influence for her own art work is found in diverse experiences and inspiration is drawn from things as disparate as watching her children play to attending a concert, with the natural world providing the most constant stream of inspiration. Her creative process involves the same time that she tries to provide her students. She plays with the problem before her, and works on developing it through journaling and sketching before making choices regarding mediums and structure.
When I think about myself as a creative person, I generally think about myself as a writer and a teacher. The Mishra article and my interview stressed the idea that creativity is about finding solutions to a problem. Mishra’s criteria for judging whether something is creative centered on novelty, wholeness, and effectiveness.
As a teacher, I think that I am constantly working to find new ways to present a concept. I become bored if I teach the same thing over and over, and I need the energy of student engagement to drive my teaching.
As a writer, I fear that my work is frequently derivative. I read constantly, and the well-turned phrase is something I relish. I write because when I see the world around me, I react. The speech of a political leader can make me angry. A story on NPR can move me to tears. A silly aside from my seven-year-old can make my heart contract and my breath catch. With writing I can capture these moments, these reactions, and who I am in them. I generally write well; my work could be deemed effective and whole. I can communicate what I want to say. But, I worry that my writing is not novel.
Time and space, the same qualities that McCarthy is trying to provide her students, are what I need in order to develop my creativity as a writer. The greatest change I could make in order to feed my creativity is to carve out time that I can devote to writing.
