Creativity; noun – the use of imagination or original ideas to create something. Inventiveness. Source; Oxford English Dictionary

There is a general agreement among scholars that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products,” (Mumford, 2003, p. 110) however hundreds of definitions of creativity exist.

In 2009 Kaufman and Bhegetto introduced a four c model of creativity; mini-c (“transformative learning” involving “personally meaningful interpretations of experiences, actions, and insights”), little-c (everyday problem solving and creative expression), Pro-C (exhibited by people who are professionally or vocationally creative though not necessarily eminent) and Big-C (creativity considered great in the given field.)

In general though, the terms “Big C” and “Little c” Are widely used to review major theories of creativity, where little c creative acts are processes which generate ideas that have value to the individual, and big c creative acts are those that transform the domain in which they are made.

So the difference between high level and low-level creativity is originality and their effect or meaning to the domain to which they belong. Low-level creativity is the act of creating things that are original to the self. Large-scale Creativity acts are the development of novel acts that make effective change.

I agree that knowledge is an essential component of any effective, new, creative acts. My point is that we can study how this change occurs, we can know, understand & develop the processes and mechanisms of creative change in order to do it more effectively in the future.

Moravcsik: “Even if one believes that creativity is to a large extent a matter of innate ability, one can acknowledge there are many ways education can encourage, practice & enhance traits & skills so that whatever creativity the student has, it is more effectively converted”

David Didau has responded to my article in Schools Week entitled; ‘we cannot leave creativity to chance, it must be taught’. That’s why I wanted to be absolutely certain that what I’m advocating; teaching creativity as a series of knowable and understandable processes isn’t just plucked from my imagination, but rather has a high degree of validity to it.

I’ve said before that creativity is a spectrum from low-level, self-indulgent acts of invention to high-level, original acts that alter the domain in which they operate. I agree with David, you cannot make high-level Creative acts without expert knowledge, but we can and are creative at a low-level with very little.

We can easily teach people to be low-level creative, but it is extremely difficult to transform this into high-level Creative acts, even when you have expert domain knowledge

Creativity isn’t the property of a genius, nor is it some special skill that mere mortals can only dream of achieving; we are all creative at low-levels every day, every time we write a blog or plant a seed in the garden or even work out a new route to get to work that avoids traffic. We can easily teach people to be low-level creative, but it is extremely difficult to transform this into high-level Creative acts, even when you have expert domain knowledge, because creativity only become Creative when it is so important that it changes the structure of the domain to which it relates and even then only as long as it does so.

Large-scale Creativity is the successful product or end results of what we know; it comes from us actioning what we have learned in the form of low-level creativity that then affects larger change. Therefore creativity can be seen as knowledge in action. It isn’t separate from domain knowledge – it is the application of domain knowledge, in whatever form, whether original or not, good or bad; low-level creativity is oblivious to failure or ability and it is why it is both easily teachable and virtually impossible to do so at the same time.

“Creativity can be seen as knowledge in action.”

We need to understand how creativity uniquely operates in every domain.

In some domains such as popular music, change is rapid, bursting into life then fading just as quickly because the demand is for constant, innovative, fashionable product rather than rigour or certainty. In mathematics, knowledge is more stable and more difficult to change. Axioms are axioms after all and we need to absorb the fundamentals of this domain to a much higher level before we can affect change. But change can and does occur; constantly.

Knowledge isn’t static, it ebbs and flows and changes over time as more and more is added to it, or altered.

Serendipity

So if Creativity (high-level) is the development of knowledge and the process of domain knowledge changing, we can study how and why it occurs. We can learn that in certain domains some creative processes outweigh others. There are rarely any serendipitous acquisitions of knowledge in the field of mathematics for example, because that domain has a high degree of expertise in order to affect change. In art however, people can and do happen across a new idea, a new method or approach and so serendipity plays an important role in this domain, often regardless of expertise.

Science is constantly switching between high levels of rigid domain knowledge at one end and loose, creative, inventive, intuitive speculation at the other. Now whilst this is, as David says, all knowledge in the end, they are very distinct and different types of knowledge and I believe, must be taught in rather different ways.

Observation

For example, the process of observation has led to an enormous number of Creative acts. It always has and it always will and I don’t just mean observation with the eyes but rather in all scientific senses of the word too. A study of a scientific curriculum sees observational techniques firmly entrenched in the syllabus; science teachers of course teach students how to observe, but my point is that this process needs to be signposted, explained and developed much more clearly than it is at present because it is so important to Creativity. We instruct students to observe, we ask them to collect data, we point them to errors they have made, but we don’t specifically teach them how to improve their sensory observational skills. And we should. Because we can. We can give students regular sensory observational exercises that have a good chance of improving their ability to observe more thoroughly and accurately. We can’t say they definitely will improve their observational skills, but we can’t be that certain about any transmission of knowledge. I’d rather try than not bother.

Visualisation

Visualisation is another point. Visualisation is a type of knowledge that seems to be partly inherited and partly developed. It is enormously important in most if not all subjects. It is not only about transforming internal information into external visual forms (or vice-versa) but it can be. It also involves constructing complex information and predicting the outcomes of those actions entirely internally. Again, it is so important to Creativity, yet I don’t see us specifically signpost it or directly teach it. We do it indirectly of course, when we ask pupils to predict sequences in maths for example, or even visualising literary characters in English, but my point again is that we can do this so much better than we do. There is room for improvement. Some will always have more natural ability to do this than others, but then again, this is true of all knowledge. We can provide regular, subject specific visualisation exercises that can and do affect our ability to perform this important skill; but we rarely do. I’ll show you the ones I’ve developed upon request.

Other creative processes

I could say the same about playfulness, or trial and error, or seeing things from alternative viewpoints or a number of different creative processes that are all regular used to affect domain knowledge change (Creativity). All are relevant to a greater or lesser degree, depending on which domain you’re working in.