Vlad Petre Glaveanu

Distributed creativity: Thinking outside the box of the creative individual

Distributed creativity: What is it?.- Theoretical background.- A proposed framework.- Creativity and sociality.- Creativity and materiality.- Creativity and temporality.- Where we are and where we go from here.

Creativity as action: findings from five creative domains

The present paper outlines an action theory of creativity and substantiates this approach by investigating creative expression in five different domains. We propose an action framework for the analysis of creative acts built on the assumption that creativity is a relational, inter-subjective phenomenon. This framework, drawing extensively from the work of Dewey (1934) on art as experience, is used to derive a coding frame for the analysis of interview material. The article reports findings from the analysis of 60 interviews with recognized French creators in five creative domains: art, design, science, scriptwriting, and music. Results point to complex models of action and inter-action specific for each domain and also to interesting patterns of similarity and differences between domains. These findings highlight the fact that creative action takes place not “inside” individual creators but “in between” actors and their environment. Implications for the field of educational psychology are discussed.

Revisiting the “Art Bias” in Lay Conceptions of Creativity

This article explores the art bias—the pervasive association between creativity and art in implicit theories of creativity. It also attempts to connect creativity research in this area with literature on the theory of social representations. The data comes from an online survey completed by 195 participants mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom. The survey included two main tasks: The first asked respondents to generate as many questions as they can to determine whether an object is creative; the second invited them to rate whether creativity is a key requirement for a list of 16 professions from 4 different domains and recorded the creativity score as well as reaction time. In the end, findings offer partial support for the existence of an art bias. Although artistic professions were scored both the highest and fastest in terms of creativity, participants rarely formulated art-related questions and focused more on aspect, utility, and audience features. This discrepancy is discussed in the end in relation to the polyphasic nature of social knowledge.

The (Street) Art of Resistance

This chapter focuses on the interrelation between resistance, novelty and social change. We will consider resistance as both a social and individual phenomenon, as a constructive process that articulates continuity and change and as an act oriented towards an imagined future of different communities. In this account, resistance is thus a creative act having its own dynamic and, most of all, aesthetic dimension. In fact, it is one such visibly artistic form of resistance that will be considered here, the case of street art as a tool of social protest and revolution in Egypt. Street art is commonly defined in sharp contrast with high or fine art because of its collective nature, anonymity, its different kind of aesthetics and most of all its disruptive, “anti-social” outcomes. With the use of illustrations, we will argue here that street art is prototypical of a creative form of resistance, situated between revolutionary “artists” and their audiences, which includes both authorities and society at large. Furthermore, strategies of resistance will be shown to develop through time, as opposing social actors respond to one another’s tactics. This tension between actors is generative of new actions and strategies of resistance.

The Amusement Park Theoretical Model of Creativity: An Attempt to Bridge the Domain-Specificity/Generality Gap

The question of whether creativity is general or domain-specific is a frequently debated and discussed issue. No theory or model in creativity has attempted to bridge the gap between these differing views of creativity; most theories either implicitly or explicitly take a generalist perspective. The APT model uses the metaphor of an amusement park to explore creativity. There are four stages: Initial requirements, general thematic areas, domains, and micro-domains. This model attempts to integrate both general and domain-specific views of creativity. The first level (initial requirements) is very general, and each subsequent level gets more and more domain-specific. By the final level (micro-domains), the theory is very domain-specific. We also will discuss errors and variations within the model.

Creativity in Teaching

How might researchers think about creativity in the domain of teaching? An important first step is to recognize that creative teaching, like all forms of teaching, is a polymorphous act (Hirst, 1971). Researchers, therefore, need to distinguish between different forms of creative teaching based on differing pedagogical aims. Elsewhere (Beghetto, 2013a), I have outlined three different but interrelated forms of creative teaching: teaching about creativity, teaching for creativity, and teaching with creativity. These different forms of creative teaching have different pedagogical aims. Whereas teaching about creativity is aimed at increasing knowledge about creativity and the field of creativity studies, teaching for creativity is aimed at cultivating creative thinking and creative actions in students. Finally, teaching with creativity is aimed at teaching any subject matter (be it biology, mathematics, or even creativity itself) creatively. In addition to having different aims, each of these forms of

The Psychology of Creating: A Cultural-Developmental Approach to Key Dichotomies Within Creativity Studies

This chapter outlines a general framework for a future psychology of creating. This framework is grounded in a cultural and developmental conception of creativity as action and responds to key dichotomies within the field of creativity studies, namely that between individual and social, potential and achievement, idea generation and idea implementation, creativity beliefs, and creative practice. These dichotomies enhance, on the surface, conceptual clarity but their unreflective use contributes to a partial view of creative action. In order to gain a more holistic understanding of what it means to create, an alternative research agenda is proposed, consisting of perspectives (action orientations), affordances (action potentials), trajectories (action paths), and representations (action meanings). Each of these is discussed in turn and final reflections are offered regarding the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of cultivating a focus on creating rather than creativity.

Widening Our Understanding of Creative Pedagogy: A North-South Dialogue.

The present article offers a reflection on creativity and creative pedagogy emerging out of an ongoing dialogue between three authors placed in two very different sociocultural contexts – Denmark and Colombia. Despite obvious geographical, economic, and cultural differences, similar concerns animate our practice when it comes to the question of creativity and creative pedagogy. The article opens with a brief presentation of the two cultural settings considered here and, based on it, continues with a discussion of paradigmatic foundations of creativity within education in general and within school in particular. These reflections inform our approach to creative pedagogy and suggest a reformulation of this concept in the light of sociocultural and decolonial theoretical perspectives. In the end, we question todays global ethos in formal educational environments of striving towards accountability and standardisation in ways that minimise, if not outright exclude, difference, diversity, and, consequently, creativity itself.

Developing society: Reflections on the notion of societal creativity

Development is a multifaceted phenomenon. It is also the fundamental characteristic of open systems, including human beings, society, and the natural environment. Culture itself is a developmental matter, and so is creativity. But while in psychology we often consider development in individual terms, particularly in relation to infancy and childhood, and rarely within the whole life course, we normally forget to consider this (ontogenetic) developmental scale in the context of sociogenetic, macro development. The latter refers to the emergence and transformation of societal and cultural structures that frame human existence and behaviour. However, as the study of creativity comes to show, individuals respond to such influences and, in turn, shape their context for both self and others. In doing so, they rely on and coordinate their activity with that of others. It is this ‘togetherness’ of creative action aimed at developing new types of society that concerns me in this chapter.

Image Analysis: An Interactive Approach to Compositional Elements

This article proposes an interactive approach to the analysis of compositional elements of still visuals. This approach stems from the argument that the rhetorical efficiency of images is related less to their content per se than to how this content is displayed and organised. As such, we start from the premise that images are “active,” performing the visual equivalent of speech-acts (i.e., “image-acts”) through which they construct the world and its impact upon their viewers. In their turn, the audiences of an image participate in interpreting its meaning and responding to its particular “action.” This leads us to formulate a method based on the active engagement of researchers with the image at hand. We suggest a classification of compositional elements and identify ways in which such elements can be analyzed and interpreted, thus casting light on the range of rhetorical and ideological effects that images so often achieve.