Blog Archives

Interdisciplinarity

8/19/2012

In my doctoral studies, I found my interdisciplinary coursework to be perhaps the most informative and enjoyable of my educational experiences. Except for the occasional elective, most students tend to focus their educational paths on our major field of study, which is understandable given the relative brevity of degree programs. There is, however, significant benefit to venturing outside of our comfort zones and expanding our experiential repertoire. I was somewhat aware of the links between music and visual art, but theatre was far outside my realm of experience or affinity. Once I was given the opportunity to study this subject, though, and even more to experience theatrical performances as both a participant and an observer, I developed a much deeper understanding and was then able to see the connections between my chosen visual art form and performance-based arts. I’d never been much of a fan of live theatre prior to these courses, but I have to admit that my horizons were vastly expanded by exposure to interdisciplinary instruction in this art form.

Visual art, music, and theatre all share the distinction of being among the Fine Arts and typically share space in a department or college within the larger university. Ongoing research has shown that expanding the idea of interdisciplinary to merge even more dissimilar subjects, especially incorporating the Arts into Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology—turning STEM into STEAM—can provide amazing benefits to students. Students in the STEM disciplines tend towards being left-brained thinkers, proficient in logic, reasoning, language, and analysis. Students of the arts, on the other hand, tend to be strong right-brained thinkers, with strong creative, intuitive, imaginative, and visual/auditory capabilities. When students are provided the opportunity to experience true interdisciplinary coursework, bringing together both kinds of thinkers in collaboration on a project that incorporates both imagination and reason, insight and logic, language and non-verbal communication, it can produce simply amazing results.

I propose that similar benefits would also be found when combining Humanities with the Arts. With this in mind, I propose a sample interdisciplinary course in which students from Mass Communications/Journalism and Theatre would collaborate to produce a present-day edition of the Living Newspaper. By way of a brief historical explanation, The Living Newspaper is a theatrical genre created under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project, a division of the Roosevelt Administration’s Works Progress Administration. In an age before cable news or the Internet, theatre companies produced non-fictional plays about current events such as the housing crisis, rural electrification, or farm subsidies—crucial subjects during the Great Depression. These plays were performed across the country, both as a means of providing meaningful work for thousands of actors, playwrights, directors and other theatre professionals and as a way of providing important news content for American audiences, specifically to utilize the power of the arts to increase public awareness of social issues. Project director Hallie Flanagan organized the offices of the Living Newspaper along the lines of a major metropolitan newspaper office, with an editor-in-chief, city editors, reporters, and copyreaders. Researchers and dramatists collaborated on projects, producing plays of unprecedented creativity and vibrancy.

In this course students would spend the first six weeks of the semester engaged in a combination of lecture, reading, and experiential learning in the historical basis of the Living Newspaper, present-day print and broadcast journalism, and theatre production. The next six weeks would be devoted to weekly skits in which students would collaboratively identify and research a relevant news story and then divide into four task groups: scriptwriting/directing, staging (set, costumes, props), tech (sound, light, multimedia), and acting, concluding the week with the performance of the skit. These task groups would be formed heterogeneously, including students from all disciplines and would rotate on a weekly basis in order to provide students with at least one opportunity to experience the different aspects of performance. The course would culminate with an evening of One-Act plays, developed from the four most successful of the weekly skits.

This course has three primary objectives: 1) Expand students’ knowledge of the human condition through the combination of journalism and theatre. 2) Enhance students’ creative and communicative capacities through production and performance of live theatrical experiences. 3) Empower students in their ability to construct, present, and defend critical and aesthetic judgments of journalistic and theatrical texts/performances. Assessment would be weighted towards class participation, with additional grades given for written assignments occurring throughout the course.

Of course, this is just one example of numerous possible pairings of seeming disparate subjects. My current project is the development of a course combining music and mathematics (specifically, geometry), but an almost unlimited number of opportunities exist in which there might be mutually beneficial combinations of two or more disciplines. Further study and curriculum development are clearly necessary before these innovations can be implemented as actual course offerings. It would also require the participation of adventurous and visionary faculty members who are willing to take on the challenge of stepping outside of their own comfort zones and piloting this groundbreaking educational endeavor.

With all due modesty, I’d like to point out that innovative curriculum design requires a combination of left-brained and right-brained thinking, just as these proposed interdisciplinary courses would also engage both aspects of students’ thinking processes. Of course (barring serious illness or injury) all of us think with both sides of our brains. We do, however, tend to be more dominant in one hemisphere or the other, with the left-brain being the focus of far more courses in higher education. Indeed, but for the College of Visual and Performing Arts, few departments utilize right-brain thinking extensively. Universities that have begun offering such courses, like the University of Michigan and its Smart Surfaces course are making great strides towards greater interdisciplinarity, merging heuristic and logical thinking. It is my fervent hope that this movement will spread to more institutions of higher learning, affording all students the opportunities that can be found by engaging in coursework that develop both sides of their brains.

The Joy of Failure

8/9/2012

The more I research and contemplate creativity, the more I find that this basic concept is just as elusive and complex as the word “art”—an idea which took me several hundred pages to define in my dissertation. One of the essential components of creativity is related to the concept of heuristics—briefly defined as an experimental process of discovery requiring originality and invention. Heuristics can also be explained as a rule of thumb, or an educated guess. Most importantly, in my opinion, heuristics are a process of learning through trial and error. Heuristic, creative problem solving is unconstrained by having to be “right” because that implies that there is a single correct solution to a given question. Using a heuristic method can be incredibly freeing—our errors inform us as much as our successes and all contribute to the formation of knowledge.

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of a heuristic thinker is Thomas Alva Edison. According to the Smithsonian Institution’s web page, his process of inventing the light bulb required testing over 1600 different materials for the filament before finally discovering something that would work—carbonized bamboo. In an interview, when asked how it felt to fail 1000 times, he reportedly said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work.” (To be fair, there are numerous different versions of this quote and the original source is somewhat elusive.) But among the most interesting things I learned about Edison on the Smithsonian’s page was this:

The Menlo Park Laboratory was "equipped with 2,500 bottles of chemicals lining the wall and a pipe organ at the back, which was the focal point for after hours singing and beer drinking". Many times the various scientists and technicians would stay up all night inventing, working and munching on ham, crackers, beer, soda, and cheese. About midnight, Edison himself would sit down at the pipe organ and everyone would join in for a sing along. Many years later his employees would say that these were the happiest years of their lives.

And this from a man with significant hearing loss! We recognize Edison for his inventions—an improved telegraph, a telephone transmitter, the phonograph, motion pictures, batteries, among many other things--but I have to wonder about the connection between his incredible creativity, divergent thinking, and his evident musical talents. I don’t believe this to be coincidence but evidence of what the arts, specifically music in this case, can do to enhance and support creativity.

Sir Ken Robinson, in a 2006 address to the annual TED Conference, emphasized the need for schools to value creativity as much as they value literacy and to stop placing the various subjects in a hierarchical order with math at the top and the arts, especially theatre and dance, at the bottom. Creativity, says Robinson, is something all children are born with, but it is systematically educated out of them in our schools. We stigmatize mistakes, teaching children that they must always find “the” correct answer, they must sit still and listen, they must follow the rules. (It’s a great lecture, which I highly recommend viewing. )

Robinson quoted Pablo Picasso as saying, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as he grows up.” I have to say that I’ve seen this in my own children. When my oldest son was a little boy, he loved nothing better than to turn on the stereo and dance—freely, unselfconsciously, with all the physical joy of childhood. He also loved to draw, and in elementary school he created an amazing pastel drawing on black construction paper, featuring a jungle scene. It had all of the elements you’d want to see in a work of visual art: line, shape, color, form, balance, harmony, rhythm… Really, I was blown away by it. Today, as a young adult, he does not dance. Well, to be completely honest, his bride did make him dance with her—once—but to the best of my knowledge that’s the extent of his dancing for the past 20 years or so. He also does not make artworks. Art-making was an artifact of his public school art classes that he did not choose to pursue further. His educational experiences focused on academic learning over creative thinking and even in his theatre classes in high school, the emphasis on memorization, writing papers, and taking tests overshadowed the opportunities for performing and tarnished what might have been a wonderful creative outlet. The sheer bliss of creative expression he experienced as a preschooler dancing in the living room or creating beautiful drawings in elementary school art class is just not part of his adult life. I don’t honestly know if he ever even doodles any more. Frankly, I’m deeply saddened by that.

I fully agree with Robinson that our educational system vastly under-emphasizes creativity and the intelligences that can be found in the arts. When entire schools and their staffs are judged as either successful or failing based only on the percentage of correct answers their students have produced on standardized tests, we can’t afford any chance that students might answer incorrectly or we risk our livelihoods as educators. Even in the university, where high-stakes testing has not yet pervaded the system, we find ourselves teaching students who are the product of No Child Left Behind, who have had to learn to override their innate capacity for creative expression, and unlocking this submerged ability is sometimes a daunting task both for the student and for the professors. Students want to be told what to do and how to do it, fearing to make a mistake, believing that there is just one right answer or one correct way of doing something.

But, as Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who pioneered Multiple Intelligence theory, similarly wrote:

Individuals who enjoy taking risks, who are not afraid of failure, who are attracted by the unknown, who are uncomfortable with the status quo are the ones who are likely to make creative discoveries.

Edison’s take on trial and error is a perfect example of re-framing the notion of failure. His unsuccessful attempts to find the perfect filament were not failures at all—they were simply steps along the road toward his eventual invention. His inventions, or their successors, surround us today and have enriched our lives beyond imagining. [Without the phonograph, would we have the iPod? Without motion pictures, would we have streaming video or cable television?] Besides Edison’s obvious triumphs, though, he had numerous inventions that were not successful, he lost big money on investments, and he worked on some projects for many years and never saw them to fruition. His was definitely not a life of unmitigated success. I propose that Edison’s ability to see “failure” as a learning experience is one of the most remarkable things about him, just as much as the inventions he created that shaped so much of the 20th century.

Failure is certainly not something to be embraced, but neither should it be feared or demonized. To a creative thinker, seeing each failure as another bit of knowledge building towards a solution--“If that way didn’t work, maybe this way would…” Or, “What if…”—is a mindset that the conventional thinkers of the world would do well to emulate. We do need to bear in mind, however, that it is not enough to take risks or to be willing to fail if you just give up after one or two attempts. The willingness to be wrong must also be linked to a determination to succeed, a drive to keep trying as many times as it takes until the goal is reached, the puzzle is solved, or the question is answered.

We often promote creativity for its instrumental value, judging its worth in terms of the economic impact of its applications. But the personal value found in creativity is just as important, if not more so. In creativity—in creating—there is joy. I found this to be true when I became a photographer and my family noticed a marked upswing in my overall happiness. The employees at Pixar practically have to be forced to go home, they’re so happy at work, and this same attitude of extreme job satisfaction is a hallmark of those who are deeply engaged in creative work of many kinds. If we go back to Edison and his midnight sing-alongs around the pipe organ in his lab, it exemplifies the joyful spontaneity of those who are fully and actively engaged in collaborative creativity.

When we do something easy or routine, there is little sense of accomplishment and similarly little happiness as a result of our activity. But when we’ve been immersed in a creative process that has engaged our whole being—mentally, physically, and emotionally—and have then experienced that intense moment of victory and satisfaction when the project comes to fruition or the problem is solved, it is a delight like none other. In avoiding the possibility of failure, we also deprive ourselves of something very, very sweet—the joy of creativity.

Demystifying Creativity

8/2/2012

In my ongoing research I’ve recently been delving into the idea of creativity by applying Inverse Fractal Concept Analysis and a variation of Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” to the ways in which we typically experience and think about the creative process. Let me explain:

Inverse Fractal Concept Analysis is a theory I employ, developed when I did a study of Multilevel Integrative Cognition. My paper on the subject is available elsewhere on this website, but I’ll quote my own abstract in order to give you an idea of what it says.

The Multilevel Integrative Cognition (MIC) model of conceptual analysis, also known as fractal-concept analysis, is an attempt to bridge the gap between objectivity and subjectivity in epistemology, creating a four-dimensional model by which a more comprehensive method of analysis may be utilized (Wilson and Lowndes, 2003). As fractal-concept analysis, these four dimensions take one specific idea and branch out four ways, each of which may also be divided and sub-divided into the four dimensions: static, dynamic, evaluative, and identity (Wilson, Wasserman, and Lowndes, 2007). When applied to the analysis of works of visual art, this method bears significant similarities to Kendall Walton’s theory of artistic categories (Walton, 1970) and also shares properties with Arthur Danto’s process for identifying works of art as belonging to particular types (Danto, 1964). Walton and Danto both begin with a general concept and examine specific aspects of it, whereas MIC/fractal-concept theory begins with a specific seed idea and works outward towards a general concept.

I propose that the fractal model may be turned upside-down: instead of the trunk of a tree growing from a seed and branching out in multiple directions, I see it as the trunk of a tree supported by a large root system, without which the tree will not stand. The trunk of the tree represents the idea “What is a work of Visual Art?” The tree’s roots are all the various manifestations of the ways in which this idea might be expressed, each root ending in a specific work of art. Within this root system, each work of art can be traced back, through shared conceptual paths, to the overall designation as works of visual art. This method of identifying objects as works of art bears similarities to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Family Resemblance” theory (Warburton, 2003) and also to Noel Carroll’s method of “historical narration” of art works (Carroll, 1999).

So, applying the same methods I used in answering the question, “What is a work of art?”, I’ve been thinking about the question, “What is creativity?” We tend to think of creativity as the domain of genius—da Vinci, Edison, O’Keeffe, Jobs, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and so on. But in my opinion, we overlook the fact that creativity is a basic facet of human nature. It is not only the artistic superstars or technological wunderkinds who possess this quality. Creativity is everywhere and all around us. We’re just not aware that each and every one of us has untapped reserves of this elusive commodity and many of us are similarly oblivious about learning how to access our own creative potential and how it can enrich our lives.

Take a look around you right now. The computer to which the screen you’re reading is connected, the programming that allows you to read this little essay on that very screen, the desk it sits upon, the coffee cup sitting near your hand, the desk lamp illuminating the area, the pens, pencils, cluttered in-box…each and every one of these ubiquitous and nearly invisible objects is the product of applied creativity. Indeed, every single item in your immediate environment was at some point or other the product of someone’s creative impulse. “But wait,” you may say, “These flowers from my garden weren’t the product of anyone’s creativity.” I, however, beg to differ. First, you probably purchased the seeds in a little paper package that was designed by someone. The seeds were probably developed by a grower who applied a great deal of science and creativity to producing ideal seeds that would grow into those beautiful flowers. And you likely planted, tended, and selected them carefully, arranging them just so to lend beauty to your environment—a very creative activity.

So why do we think that creativity is the domain of genius rather than something that all of us possess? Part of the answer might lie in the fact that creativity is often employed instrumentally in a goal-oriented, systematic pursuit of an intended outcome. But because our focus is on the outcome, not the process, we miss the steps that allowed us to arrive at that destination. Another reason is that those creative products that surround us are so very ubiquitous. Who notices the logo designs for every product that’s promoted in those blaring, jangling, annoying (creative!) ads? When a product comes around that has the power to transform our daily lives we do sit up and take notice—but primarily of the ways the product benefits us, not its intrinsic design. (After all, how many items do you have in your house right now with a little apple symbol on them? How often, though, do we think about that little glowing apple itself rather than the product to which it’s attached?)

In my ongoing research I’ve identified a defensible set of elements and principles of creativity. These are not mysterious, elusive, or something only granted to the super-gifted among us. Creativity simply means seeing things differently than you have before. It’s making something new or finding a novel way of doing things. It’s seeing many solutions to one problem, some of which are completely crazy and impractical but eventually finding one that does just what you wanted it to do. It’s looking at the solution from another angle and finding another way that’s even better…again, and again, and again. It’s never being satisfied with “good enough” or the status quo. It’s seeing beyond, “This is the way we’ve always done it” to “Why didn’t we think of this before?”

An important facet of creativity is not just problem-solving, but problem-finding. In the business world, it’s in seeing a need nobody else had noticed and then developing a product that meets the heretofore unidentified need. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have imagined how much I would need an object smaller than a candy bar that could not only make phone calls but take photographs, play games, and keep me from getting lost on the highway, all without any wires at all, from nearly anywhere in the known world. Somebody creative saw that need and—boom!—smart phones were born. The development of these amazing gizmos is rife with creativity, but the truly innovative moment was when someone found the problem, not just the process by which the problem was solved.

I’m certain that others have penned lengthy doctoral dissertations about this very topic, and I freely admit that my research has been undertaken strictly for my own personal edification. But, as an artist, the creative process is dear to my heart, and as an art educator the ways in which students’ creativity can be nurtured and strengthened is among what I believe to be the most essential tasks of those who teach in the arts. So let’s not think of creativity as a mountaintop where only a few may tread. Yes, we should rightfully celebrate and appreciate those who have achieved greatness as innovators. We should also, however, all learn to tap into our own considerable creative powers and stop seeing creativity as a mysterious or exclusive activity. We are all creative, but often differently so. Let’s celebrate that, nurture it, and recognize the greatness that is within and around all of us.

Interdisciplinarity

The Joy of Failure

Demystifying Creativity

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