Michele Root-Bernstein

Imaginary worldplay in childhood and maturity and its impact on adult creativity

ABSTRACT: The childhood invention of imaginary worlds or paracosms may prepare for creative endeavor in adulthood. To test hypotheses concerning the incidence of childhood worldplay and its connection to mature work, this study queried MacArthur Fellows, selected for their creativity, and compared them to Michigan State University (MSU) students. Whereas previous research declared paracosm play to be uncommon and associated with the arts, this study found it reasonably common among MSU students (3%–12%), about twice as frequent among MacArthur Fellows (5%–26%), and prevalent in the backgrounds of scientists and social scientists as well as artists. A majority of Fellows with assessed worldplay in childhood reported connections between early paracosm play and mature endeavor. Childhood worldplay deserves further study as early apprenticeship in creative imagination.

Intuitive Tools for Innovative Thinking

Abstract: In this chapter we examine the fundamental role of intuitive thinking skills in creative endeavor across the arts and sciences. The imagination manifests itself in a set of 13 non-verbal, non-mathematical, non-logical thinking tools that innovative individuals in all disciplines say they use: observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing and forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming and synthesizing. Private, unarticulated insights generated by means of these tools are then translated in an explicitly secondary step into verbal, mathematical and other modes of public communication. Any educational effort to promote creative thinking must therefore recognize and exercise intuitional thinking skills and directly address the process of translating idiosyncratic subjetive thought into objectified public forms of discourse.

Arts and Crafts Critical to Economic Innovation

Governments, schools, and other nonprofit organizations are engaged in critical budget decisions that may affect our economic development success. The assumption is that arts and crafts are dispensable extras. Research suggests, however, that disposing of arts and crafts may have negative consequences for the country’s ability to produce innovative scientists and engineers who invent patentable products and found new companies. A study of Michigan State University Honors College science and technology graduates (1990-1995) yielded four striking results: (a) graduates majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects are far more likely to have extensive arts and crafts skills than the average American; (b) arts and crafts experiences are significantly correlated with producing patentable inventions and founding new companies; (c) the majority believe that their innovative ability is stimulated by their arts and crafts knowledge; and (d) lifelong participation and exposure in the arts and crafts yields the most significant impacts for innovators and entrepreneurs.

Martha Graham, Dance, and the Polymathic Imagination: A Case for Multiple Intelligences or Universal Thinking Tools?

Summary The imaginative and compositional processes of Martha Graham and other dancer-choreographers are explored in order to test the relative merits of Gardners Theory of Multiple Intelligences and the Root-Bernsteins tools-for-thinking approach to creativity. Gardners focus on bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as both a means of communication and cognitive mode for Graham falls short of explaining Grahams polymathy. Rather, Graham exercised a wide range of imaginative tools commonly used by successful individuals across the arts and sciences and indicative of general creative skills that cut across cognitive domains. In the effort to place dance firmly within a transdisciplinary education, the tools-for-thinking approach provides dance educators with more powerful support than Gardners multiple intelligences.

People, Passions, Problems: The Role of Creative Exemplars in Teaching for Creativity

The goal of educating for creativity must be active understanding rather than passive knowing. To understand is to have the capability to re-create, which trains the ability also to create. The ability to create requires problem-finding as well as problem-solving. It requires practice. Best practice involves the emulation of creative people and the variety of strategies they use to discover challenges and solve them. Certain contradictions, however, divide the classroom from “real-world” creativity: the emphasis on problem-solving rather than problem-raising, on objective expertise rather than subjective synthesis of skill and knowledge, on finding the solution rather than paths to multiple solutions. These contradictions may be overcome when curricula center on exemplary people who make a difference, on their passion for challenging problems, on the practices and processes with which they focus learning and invention. The more and more diverse models students learn to emulate, the greater their probability of making the leap from re-creating to creating for themselves.

Imaginary Worldplay as an Indicator of Creative Giftedness

Creative potential in childhood, of a kind bearing fruit in maturity, reveals itself in imaginative play, the most complex of which is the invention of imaginary worlds (paracosms). Worldplay often includes the generation of stories, drawings, etc., that provide evidence of little c creative behavior. Historical examples (e.g., the Brontes) suggest that productive worldplay may thus serve as a “learning laboratory” for adult achievement. Early research explored ties between worldplay and later artistic endeavor. Recent study of gifted adults finds strong links, too, between worldplay and mature creative accomplishment in the sciences and social sciences. As many as 1 in 30 children may invent worlds in solitary, secret play that is hidden from ready view. Worldplay nevertheless figured tangentially in early studies of intellectual precocity. Improved understanding of the phenomenon, its nature and its potential for nurture, should bring childhood worldplay to the foreground as an indicator of creative giftedness.

Science Museums and the Arts of Imaginative Thinking

ing or modeling. Altering the visitors point of view, the museum is made refreshingly new. Some visitors will enjoy coming again and again for the variety (older family members, z 0 5 u :I Q w :I! :I w Ill :I :I! ... 0 ... c z a: :I 0 ..,