Elizabeth Paton

The Systems Model of Creativity

The previous chapter demonstrates the importance of a systems approach to understanding creativity and gives a brief overview of the literature. This chapter describes and analyses the systems model of creativity developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1990, 1994, 1997, 2003) and provides context for the analyses of creative systems in Part II. What is clear from the previous chapter is a gradual movement in thinking away from a focus on the individual towards confluence or systems approaches to creativity. With one or two notable exceptions, pre-twentieth-century ideas concentrate on creativity as divinely inspired, as the product of an extraordinary individual or genius or as a symptom of mental illness. These ideas were criticized in the twentieth century within the discipline of psychology, and others, as attempts were made to make creativity the subject of scientific study. Working under many of the same assumptions as those they criticized, this intensive period of research did little to alter the fundamental belief that creativity is located in the individual.

Developing Curriculum and Courses Using Systems Centred Learning (SCL)

This chapter takes these ideas and introduces a model we believe helps in educating higher education students for creativity. This model, given the emphasis that we have placed on it in this narrative, is based, of course, on the systems model of creativity but adapted for the educational setting by Michael Meany. His paper, ‘Creativity and Curriculum Design: An Integrated Model’ (Creativity and curriculum design: An integrated model. In F. Martin (Ed.), Refereed Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference 2017 – Communication worlds: Access, Voice, Diversity, Engagement. ISSN 1448–4331. http://www.anzca.net/conferences/past-conferences/, 2017), which we have drawn on here, sets it out in full. We have used this model as a framework to educate our students for creativity and it has begun to be adapted successfully in a few cross-cultural settings that we believe indicates its more general applicability across other institutional and sociocultural settings around the world. Just as Anna Craft’s work was strongly centred on the UK context and ‘her work always approached the problem with an eye to the global context’ (Harris, Creativity and education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 12), we also feel our work is ‘applicable to diverse contexts’ (ibid.). For us, designing a curriculum based on the systems view of creativity takes account not only of a broad range of pedagogies, but more importantly, focuses on the intersections between creative agents, in this case our students, and the broader social and cultural contexts they intersect with as we ‘create and maintain the conditions in which creativity can thrive’ (Lucas, Creative teaching, teaching creativity and creative learning. In A. Craft, B. Jeffrey, & M. Leibling (Eds.), Creativity in education. London: Continuum, 2001, p. 35) using a Systems Centred Learning (SCL) approach devised from within a particular higher educational setting.

The Undergraduate Experience of SCL: The Core and the Media Production Major

This chapter outlines the undergraduate experience of students in the Bachelor of Communication at the University of Newcastle in Australia where the theories about creative practice are coupled with the teaching, in this case, of media practice and production. While our higher education students, studying media production, are led toward very specific creative projects, ones they develop and work on themselves, this approach to their creative education would not work if they were not, firstly, given some grounding in the ideas that led up to these actions and practices. Our approach of heavily interlinking theory about creativity with creative media practice has produced an iterative set of learning cycles that enable students to frame and inform their practice as they develop as practitioners. In doing so, they acquire a set of tools and a research grounded language they can increasingly apply to their own creative practice. They begin to analyse what they do while they are also learning how to do it. This process is staged across three years, from introduction of the ideas through to consolidation, and by the time they reach the capstone creative production course they are well prepared. They enter this course with a highly relevant set of pragmatically useful skills to engage in and use to think deeply about their own creative practice. This is not just the development of technical skills but a solid and well integrated melding of theory with practice.

Deep Background to the Project

This chapter outlines the deep contextual background to research into creativity arguing that across the globe there have been different ways of conceiving of creativity. Not all cultures see the bringing of novelty into being in the same way that the West does and not all cultures value it the same way. In this chapter, we look closely at the South Asian experience before concentrating on Taoist and Confucian understandings in East Asia. Then we zero in on early thinking in the West around the notions of the muse and inspiration before looking at the development of the ideas on genius and the problems these entail. We argue that, despite the differing cultural discourses about creativity, there are some commonalities in these differences suggesting to us the possibility of finding a view of creativity that could be universal in its application.

Creativity, Education and the Systems Approach

This chapter looks at this research literature on creativity as it is drawn on in the field of education. While there have been quite a number of authors engaged in the pursuit of the relationship between creativity and education, not the least of which is Vygotsky, we have concentrated on a few here to get some sense of what this field has been doing in this regard. Some, such as Feldman and Benjamin in the US, argue that the research into creativity has impacted education only slightly, while others insist there is a strong, dynamic and fluid conversation occurring across these two bodies of research. For example, Pamela Burnard from Cambridge University in the UK suggests there has been a revival of interest in research into the scholarship around creativity in education. She cites eminent creativity researchers like Csikszentmihalyi, Runco and Sternberg as having an interest in education. She also includes the educational work of Anna Craft in this list as one who has both stimulated and taken part in debates on creativity and education. Many in the educational field, including Anne Harris, appreciate the work done by Anna Craft, and others, in pursuing educational scholarship on creativity.

Towards a Sociology of Creativity

This chapter is an appraisal of the work sociology has undertaken as a discipline in terms of their investigations of creativity. Unlike psychology, which sees creativity as an attribute of all areas of human activity, from the arts to the sciences, sociology appears to focus its efforts on the arts and cultural production. We start our appraisal of the social environment by starting at the macro level with Sorokin’s work on civilisations and Kavolis’ concern with periods of artistic efflorescence. We then examine the idea that art is a social product drawing on Marx and a number of others who also claim that art is fundamentally a social construction rather than being produced solely by a single individual. We look at Janet Wolff’s detailed arguments about the social production of art, the relationship between agency and structure, as well as the work coming from the ‘production of culture’ school of thought led by Richard Peterson and his concerns with various constraints on the creative process. Howard Becker’s notion of ‘art worlds’ is a concept that has become, and continues to be, important. There are some similarities between Becker’s idea and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the field although Becker and Bourdieu debated this. French sociologist and anthropologist Bourdieu was deeply concerned with a social agent’s ability to act within systemically structured contexts particularly as this relates to many forms of creativity and cultural production. We then briefly explore what effect poststructuralist thinkers like Roland Barthes and his ideas on the ‘death of the author’ had on thinking about creativity.

Confluence Approaches and the Systems Model of Creativity

This chapter explores ideas on creativity that are pivotal for the argument we are presenting in this book. They are at the heart of our curriculum and pedagogical approach which we present later in this book. It is here, in this chapter, that we look at various confluence approaches, including a reiteration of Bourdieu’s sociological approach, and focus in detail on the systems model of creativity initially put forward by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The idea that creativity needs to be examined and understood as a complete system is increasingly being argued for and evidenced in the literature on creativity. Beth Hennessey and Teresa Amabile, in their 2010 Annual Review of Psychology article reviewing research work into creativity, asserted that ‘deeper understanding of creative behavior will require more interdisciplinary research based on a systems view of creativity that recognises a variety of interrelated forces operating at multiple levels’ (Hennessey and Amabile, Annual Review of Psychology 61:569–598, 2010, p. 591). Later, in 2017, Hennessey wrote in the special issue celebrating fifty years of The Journal of Creative Behavior that ‘seven years have passed since the publication of that paper, and an examination of the most current research suggests that a growing number of publications are now reflecting a systems approach as well as a multidisciplinary perspective’ (Hennessey, The Journal of Creative Behavior 51(4): 341–344, 2017, p. 341).

Creativity and the Postgraduate Experience

This chapter discusses post-graduate research employing these ideas around creativity. Some of those that go on to further study undertake traditional research, often in the form of an ethnography, while many of them at postgraduate level pursue further creative practice as a form of practitioner based enquiry (PBE). They investigate screenwriting, radio journalism, commercial and documentary video productions, sound production and many other creative topics and use the theories about creativity as their intellectual frame. The PBE methodological approach allows them to revisit, refine and develop further what occurred for them in their capstone course and across the life of their postgraduate research as they transition from practitioner to researcher and participant observer and back again. For them, this all-inclusive research approach is the culmination of years of being embedded in the system of creative practice education and research.

The Media Production Project: Integrating Theory with Practice

This chapter details a case study of the University of Newcastle Bachelor of Communication program’s capstone course. This course takes all the prior learning as its jumping off point and is the final year course in the undergraduate program where little distinction is overtly manifest between theory and practice. We believe this course, and all the preceding work that leads to it, helps broaden ‘the range of identities available to students, from those of dutiful pupil or earnest citizen to more powerful and pleasurable identities of producer, director, and creator’ (Bragg quoted in Ashton, Productive passions and everyday pedagogies: Exploring the industry-ready agenda in higher education. Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education 9(1): 41–56. 2010, p. 52). This media production course is where, after all the preparatory work, the theoretical model shows its full potential in relation to practice. This project based course allows final year students to create an individually based or group project in any one of the media forms they have previously engaged with. They are encouraged to link media forms in an innovative way, although this is not mandatory. The choice is theirs. As such the course relies on the student developing an active form of agency allowing for substantial creative, collaborative and technical effort in realising the productions they engage in. They must, by necessity, engage fully with the structures of both the domain and the field pertinent to their project. This development of an idea and carrying it out to fruition within a simulated creative system provides the material they reflect on in a simplified exegetical way. The students have a strong understanding of creativity from a research point of view and are made capable of assessing the success or failure of their own practice in those terms. In this way, a deep learning engagement occurs for them. This learning experience is unique to each student, and they take this knowledge with them into their future creative productions or, in the case of some, to further study.

The Evolution of a Psychology of Creativity

This chapter concentrates on the evolution of a psychology of creativity. In doing so, we track thinking from early attempts at understanding creativity from Sir Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso through to Freud and the psychoanalytic view of creativity. We then turn our attention to the rationalist responses from psychology, addressing Guildford’s early contributions, psychometric testing for creativity and the rise of the behaviourists. Personality approaches are examined before we move on to creative thinking, computational models and simulations of the creative mind. We then explore possible biological and biochemical foundations of creativity before moving outward to motivation and social psychological approaches. We finish this section by looking at processes of group creativity and the effect the environment has on creative people’s work.