Creativity, creativity, creativity, etc. etc. etc.

Last week I attended a meeting of the publications board of the International Journal of Art and Design Education. It’s the sort of thing we academics do, particularly now that the football season’s finished and the World Cup hasn’t really got going yet.

One of the items up for discussion was a list of articles published by the journal in recent years, sequenced in order of the frequency with which each article had been downloaded by art-education-lovers around the globe. It would have been immature of me to quickly scan the list to see whether my Attitudes to Making Art made the Top 20, but I couldn’t help but notice that it was a new entry at No. 16, right there below From Obstacle to Growth: Dewey’s Legacy of Experience-Based Art Education and just above Pedagogy Against the State. I checked the number of downloads and quickly estimated what proportion I had actually downloaded myself on the numerous times I had needed to check the article but was unable to locate it on my hard drive or one of those little memory thingies. Less than half, I think.

Top of the list was an article entitled Creativity: What is it? Can You Assess It? Can It Be Taught? Seventh was Creativity: Delusions, Realities, Opportunities and Challenges; ninth was A Consideration of the Relationship Between Creativity and Approaches to Learning in Art and Design while 5+5+5 = Creativity in the Early Years was, appropriately, fifth. A colleague quickly and accurately surmised that young hopefuls intent on breaking in to the Top 10 would be well advised to insert the word creativity into the title of their article, regardless of its actual content.

Presumably, these articles had been downloaded by art education students who had tapped the word ‘creativity’ into some search field or other before sitting back and watching the results roll in. Why are so many people (at least 1,309, according to the number of downloads) interested in creativity? It may be a popular choice of essay theme for art ed students, but it’s an odd concept: everyone agrees that it’s a good thing, but no-one can agree on what it means. Picture creativity in your head. What does it look like? Personally, I visualise a young child, probably four years old, working on a huge painting, paintbrushes abandoned, hands smearing multicoloured stripes across the paper.

You might have a less clichéd, more practical vision. Yesterday, for example: a friend of mine, midway through rebuilding her house, was showing me the latest developments. There was a problem, the builders had told her, with the trap door down to the cellar: once the skirting board was added to the wall, the door would no longer open. Why not, my friend suggested, attach the skirting board to the trap door? Perfect. An original, creative solution. Job done.

Alternatively, you might consider the efforts of a boy I saw on a beach last week. He was working alone, carving out a complex network of roads in the wet sand, across which his collection of toy cars was distributed. There was even a car park with dozens of individual spaces. This boy was industrious, focused, motivated, systematic and resourceful – the sort of person who gets things done, the sort you really need on your side. But I’m not sure he was being creative – and I don’t think that’s a problem.

How much room is there for creative people? I don’t think there’s enough room for us all to be creative, and there’s certainly not enough sand or finger-paint. Most of us eventually stop being creative. But hopefully we carry on taking an interest in the efforts of those who don’t stop. We don’t encourage children to study literature in school because we expect them to become poets: we want them to develop a lifelong love of books that will enrich their lives. Similarly, I believe that as teachers we should be encouraging children to spending a little less time making and a little more time looking. Which, in case you were wondering, is where beauty comes in.