Cultivating creativity

I am feeling particularly good about the Art/Library courses I used to teach; especially in light of an article in the Chronicle about efforts to teach creativity at the college level. Art/Library classes concentrated on three skill areas: 1) generating, visualizing and prioritizing project ideas, 2) researching and interviewing sources, 3) and organizing and presenting a multimedia presentation to an invited audience.

That lines up pretty well with several university programs that

"tap into recent research suggesting that creativity is not simply a product of personality or individual psychology, but rather is rooted in a set of teachable competencies, which include idea generation, improvisation, metaphorical and analogical reasoning, divergent thinking that explores many possible solutions, counterfactual reasoning, and synthesis of competing solutions. Creativity also requires an ability to communicate and persuade, and the skills and leadership to apply diverse and specialized expertise."

In that there is "there is a growing consensus that America's economy will be increasingly based on creativity," universities are reorienting college around creativity.

To bad that at the secondary level, creativity is often thought of as the ability to create pleasing bulletin boards and colorful PowerPoints.