Creative education

We tend to associate creativity with artists, often with the assumption that one is born with it.

But now there are universities in Europe and the United States that are offering programs—from short seminars to degrees—to help people become creative. The creativity studies are often transdisciplinary in terms of both faculty and students, meaning engineers will get together with managers, natural scientists, artists, or social scientists.

The reason for this explosion in creativity studies is that we now live in an age where there is massive access to information; yet, that information is useless unless it can be transformed into knowledge, and applied.

The New York Times recently featured a survey of various American universities offering such studies. The article is titled “Learning to Think Outside the Box,” which is what creativity is all about.

Filipinos have generally recognized the need for this creativity. We complain about people who are “de kahon,” literally “of the box,” sticking to old procedures and rules, and therefore unable to come up with solutions to problems that aren’t in the textbooks or manuals, or that aren’t tied to fancy gadgets and technologies.

Let me elaborate on this creativity by using examples cited in the New York Times article. One instructor of a freshman course at Penn State, Jack Matson, has students trying to build the tallest structure possible with 20 popsicle sticks.  The secret is to destroy the sticks and reimagine uses. He doesn’t tell the students, of course, but after they do pick up, he explains that creativity can mean breaking cultural norms.

Which can be a problem in cultures like our own, where we emphasize conformity and blind obedience. Students who are creative may sometimes end up being labeled or scolded as pasaway (defiant).

The result is a massive disconnect between our educational institutions and the world outside the academe. The universities are still generally conservative, tending to stick to old content-oriented curricula, meaning a series of prescribed lessons that must be included.

Verbs

In 1951 an educator named Benjamin Bloom came up with a list of verbs that could be used to describe learning objectives, which are supposed to be part of lesson plans and course syllabi. As an educator, I’ve had endless battles with administrators who insist that our learning objectives be confined to Bloom’s verbs like “explain” or “define,” meaning that at the end of a course, students are expected to regurgitate what was taught to them.

Bloom’s verbs did provide for critical thinking and what is called higher order thinking, “synthesize” and “evaluate” being the primary ones. But I worry that it is not necessarily going to mean critical thinking, the emphasis still on regurgitation-—a repetition of what the teacher said-—as synthesis.

I was elated to read in the New York Times article that over the last 20 years, “creating” has become the most widely used Bloom’s verb, replacing “evaluation.”

I do hear “thinking out of the box” more often now in university meetings, but I’m not quite sure how committed educators are to allowing students to be creative. In fact, I suspect that the more creative among our students actually drop out of school because they’re bored, or have been labeled as pasaway. They go off and become inventors and entrepreneurs and can be quite successful, but I can’t help but think that they would be even more successful, and contribute more to the Philippines, if they had been nurtured in educational institutions that appreciated creativity.

We associate creativity with eccentric genius—people working alone—and forget that creativity blooms with greater vigor and energy when it involves people working together, as you would have in universities.  Many of the problems we face today need diversity in thinking, from people with different academic backgrounds, as well as different personalities. The dean of architecture at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Mary Ann Espina, told me the other day how she tries to get her students to work with their counterparts from engineering, which can lead to a clashing of ideas but, eventually, finding convergence. She’s also hopeful about more engineers and architects ending up as happy (and, I presume, creative) couples.

Drones

For the Philippines, creativity in our academic environments will spell important differences in the way the country develops. Our two most important income-generating sectors—-overseas work and outsourcing (for example, call center agents)—mainly employ what the New York Times calls “drones,” people who can mechanically follow instructions. Not surprisingly, the salaries here are low. The higher-paying jobs, as well as being able to succeed as an independent entrepreneur, requires creativity. What we often see these days, in business, is everyone copying each other for the latest fads.

Dr. Cynthia Bautista of the Commission on Higher Education told me that industry people are now less concerned about technical skills than problem-solving skills, leadership and creativity.

Sadly, the prospects for stronger creativity training in our schools are quite dim. In both private and public schools, we have teachers who are required to teach too many subjects to classes that have too many students. Creativity needs mentoring, and imagination. You can’t expect that from overworked faculty.

Creativity is also nurtured at home, and when you have parents who have to worry about hand-to-mouth existence, traveling two or three hours a day between work and their homes, you can’t expect them to have any more energy to nurture creativity with their children.

But even the most exhausted teachers and parents (and chancellors) should learn new verbs to use when we think of learning objectives. Creativity is learning to ask the right questions, so when we try to impart creativity, we should also learn alternative ways of asking. Instead of a more normative asking, “How do you do this…” (Paanong ginagawa…), we can rephrase and challenge: “How would you do this…” or “Do you think you can do this…” (Paano mo gagawin…).  The younger the children, the more imaginative they are. It is sad that as they grow older, society imposes, and reins in the creativity.

When I first started teaching I would get into trouble with administrators horrified that I was using “to explore” in my learning objectives. It wasn’t among Bloom’s verbs, they’d point out, and it couldn’t be measured. I would take out the verb when proposing a new course, using the more conservative verbs like “to define.” But once the course was approved, “explore” went right back into my syllabi and

explore my students would, with a vengeance.

Sometimes, being pasaway can be a virtue.

(E-mail: [email protected])