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Understanding
Creativity was published in 2004. It is the 3rd edition of Understanding Those Who Create,
given a new title.
Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1:
Making
Sense of Creativity
Creativity
is in. Everyone uses the word
nowadays. Yet creativity is
confusing. By late 2002, the term was
used in over 15, 500 references to titles of scholarly books and
articles. The ERIC
Clearinghouse showed 5,281 references on creativity and education from
1966 to
2002. The PsychInfo database had 8,500
references, including 1900 doctoral dissertations in the arts,
psychology,
business, and education, as well as 320 books.
The Modern Language Association database had 1,500 references;
Applied Science and Technology had 450; Art and
Architecture had 1250; Humanities
Abstracts had 850.
Amazon.com listed 1,885 books. There was creativity in
business, creativity
in psychology, creativity for parents, creativity and spirituality,
creativity
and teaching, creativity and aging, creativity and the arts, creativity
and the
sciences, creativity and mathematics, creativity and problem solving,
creativity and problem finding, creativity and – and – and – 100 hints,
200
activities, 400 ideas, 12 steps. How
does one make sense of it all? Everyone
purports to be an expert. The phenomenon
of interest in creativity is a truly postmodern perplexity, for little
is
tangible, all is one, one is many, everything is true and nothing is
true. However, few can get an authoritative and
comprehensive handle on creativity. The
terms chaos, fracture, split, fit the creativity enterprise
well. As musician Matt Callahan said, “Something as
porous as creativity
defies definition, resists quantification and refuses access to those
who seek
to possess it like a Thing.” The purpose
of this book is to help you, the reader, begin to appreciate the
complexity of
it all. Let’s start at the
beginning.
The
Term "Creativity"
The
root of
the words “create” and “creativity” comes from the Latin creâtus
and creâre.
This means, "to make or produce," or literally, "to
grow." The word also comes from the
Old French base kere, and the Latin
crescere, and creber. The Roman goddess of the earth,
Ceres, is an
example, as is the Italian corn goddess, Cereris. Creativity as a
word has roots in the
earth. Other similar words are cereal,
crescent, creature, concrete, crescendo, decrease, increase, and
recruit.
A relatively
new noun, “creativity” came into parlance much as have the words “to
prioritize” and “to network,” and the noun, “infrastructure,” words
invented
because there was a need for them. The
word does not appear in the 1971 Oxford English Dictionary, the
standard for the English
language. It does appear in the 1964 Funk
and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, International Edition, published in
the
United States, but not in the 1964 College Edition of the American
Heritage
Dictionary of the American Language.
By 1988, Webster's stated that
creativity is "creative ability; artistic or intellectual
inventiveness." That creativity is
an ability has been an assumption now made by educators for several
years.
The noun “creativity” seems to have origins in
psychology. The first two mentions I
could find were these. J.P. Guilford
used the word as the title of a speech to the American Psychological
Association in 1950. In 1953, Morris L.
Stein
published an article in the Journal of Psychology called
“Creativity and Culture.”
The
Dictionary of Developmental and Educational Psychology
in 1986 defined creativity as “man’s capacity to produce new ideas,
insights, inventions or artistic objects, which are accepted of being
of
social, spiritual, aesthetic, scientific, or technological
value.” The including of an aspect of social
utility for the product of the creator’s imagination is vital here.
To
be "creative" is to be
"originative." Originative
implies making something new. To be
creative, then, is to make something new, or novel. The word
"novelty" appears and reappears in
various definitions of creativity. . . .
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