5 Stages of Creativity

06/04/11

Another reading!  (attached) This one identified 5 types or stages of creativity.

• Expressive creativity: as in the spontaneous drawings of a child. Involves instinct and impulsiveness; does not require any particular skill or originality.
• Technical creativity: as in the performance of a virtuoso musician. Comprises knowledge, skills and expertise. Implements ideas, methods or techniques that are new to the individual but not necessarily to the others.
• Inventive creativity: as in the printing press of Gutenberg. Consists of the use of existing ideas, materials, methods and techniques in new or unusual ways.
• Innovative creativity: as in the work of Copernicus who modified earlier theories and formulated his heliocentric cosmology.
  Involves conceptualizing skills and the extension of existing ideas, methods, principles, and techniques.
• Emergentive creativity: as in the work of Freud. Includes the most abstract theories or assumptions around which new schools of thought, movements and the like can flourish.

Wooooowwwweeee!
Where to start…
My conceptions of creativity before I started this project were firmly in the ‘expressive creativity’ camp. What I was hoping to teach children before I read this article was to reach the stage of ‘technical creativity’, with a vague hope that one child might present ‘Inventive’ or perhaps even ‘Innovative’ creative thought one day.
Some things I need to clear up in my own thinking:
• Creativity is not about being artistic
• Unique thought is subjective
This article makes more sense to me than the ‘genex’ theory, which is absolute in its terms of what is and is not creative thought. That doesn’t mean I’m throwing out the ‘genex’ theory as useful – but that I’d like to try and synthesise these ideas with it.

What this means for my teaching:I think that most of the time in primary school, I will be working in the ‘expressive’ realm, and hoping to help kids into the ‘technical’ realm by the end of their education. However, I believe that children can work in the ‘Inventive’ realm to some extent, with scaffolding – or at least learn tools to help them do this. Maybe even skills for ‘innovative’ creativity can be taught. ‘Emergentive’ creativity seems to me to be out of my grasp in a teaching role. This theory seems to set clear goals to work towards in creative thought.What next?I think the most useful thing for me to do in light of this understanding is to try to design some activities that teach tools for working in each of these stages. These activities should be purposeful, and potentially should work towards some kind of refining and sharing. A big challenge lies ahead.

Teachers conceptions of creativity.pdf