Creativity & Academics & Can They Just Get Along?

Dear Colleagues ATC,

Can you imagine when SACS gets on the Creativity
Bandwagon--the memos and deadlines urged for
compliance?   Just rip the black plastic sheet with
holes in it off  the stawberry patch and voila: creativity
galore.

        Carl Creativity & Annie Academics
               Collide at the Crossroads...
 
    "Creative Thinking: The Kind that Fuels
  Innovation is Now the World’s Most Valued
                    Commodity."

"In this era of a Creativity Economy, one that author
Daniel Pink calls  “The Conceptual Age” and New
York Times columnist David Brooks  calls “The
Cognitive Age,” more and more jobs are beginning
to depend on a complex and creative set of “right-brain”
skills — including  problem solving, communications,
entrepreneurship and collaboration. It is not that the
 “left-brain” capabilities that powered us in the 20th
century are no longer necessary. Rather, these skills
are not enough to power economic growth in the future,
according to Pink." (N.C. State Institute for Emerging
Issues. 1/20/10.)

 
Creativity. The word tickles my gnosis and makes me
sneeze. Links to NC State and other organs of Professional
Education declare Creativity’s Importance, and one wonders
will Creativity soon gain the status given Critical Thinking just
a few years back. a ah AH CHOO.
 
                 Pedagogies of Creativity
             on a  proper collision course with
      Rubric Assessment and Accountability.
 
Separate and polarize these two “hostile” values. Turn up
the opposition. Don’t let either win. Anticipate complementarity.


  
 Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation, describes  the
dynamicongoing rigins of  science, art, and humor as
“the bisociation of two  matrices”—by which wonderful
phrase he means the collision  of 2 incommensurate systems,
values,  perspectives, disciplines, customs, cultures, habits
out of which the emergence of new knowledge, or artistic
expression if not the blow-off  immediate release of laughter:
ha, ha, and ha—nervous  or joyous depending on the nature
of thecrash of the worlds colliding.   .
 
Large chunks of irrationality [are] embedded in the  creative
 process –not only in art, where we take it  for granted, but
in the exact sciences as well.  Creativity in science could be
described as the art of putting two and two together to make five.
 
IN other words, it consists in combining  previously  unrelated
domains of knowledge in such a way that you get more out of
the emergent whole than you have put in.
 
This apparent bit of magic derives from the fact that  the  whole
is not merely the sum of its parts but an expression  of the
[collision &] emergence of new patterns of relations  —more
complex cognitive structures on higher levels of the mental
hierarchy,                                             Bricks of Babel.


          In placid hours well-pleased we dream
          Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
          But form to lend, pulsed life create,
          What unlike things must meet and mate:
          A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
          Sad patience--joyous energies;
          Humility--yet pride and scorn;
I         Instinct and study; love and hate;
          Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
          And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
         To wrestle with the angel--Art.
                                                            Herman Melville

Need we argue?

xxxooo, Sam