Stereotype Threat & White Teacher Inaction

Ever since I first heard about Claude Steele’s research with college and high school students, I have thought about Stereotype Threat applying to students (Details in Whistling Vivaldi). But in his recent lecture, Steele called out a form of it that gets to the root of the adult choices that lead to neighborhood and school resegregation, and that I believe explains why it is so hard for well-intentioned white adults to work across difference to create equitable schools. Ironically, the more concerned a white person is about seeming racist, the more she will buffer herself from situations in which her conversation might make her seem to reinforce the stereotype.

Remember that there are three conditions that allow stereotype threat to take hold:

1) A negative stereotype exists about one of your identities

2) You are engaged in an activity in which you want to do well and beat the stereotype

3) You encounter a difficult, frustrating level of this activity

"What is the role of Stereotype Threat in interracial interactions?" 

This was the animating question for Steele and his graduate students as they started out this phase of research. They devised a test using white males - a group for whom the stereotype “racist” could apply. Their pool was students at 

Stanford University,where their preliminary research showed most students would not want to be labeled as racists. And they gave these students a task that would probably be more difficult than they were accustomed to - talking about racial profiling with two black strangers. They knew the students would likely be unused to such interactions because an earlier survey had shown that the average Stanford student has less than 1 friend of another race among their 6 closest friends. 

In the experiment individual white male Stanford students were told that they would be discussing either the relatively innocuous topic, "Love and relationships" or the more charged "Racial profiling." The white subjects were then shown photos of two discussion partners. In one case, the discussion partners were also white men; in the other, they were both black men. The actual experiment came when the experimenter stood up, ostensibly to go and get the discussion partners. Before leaving the room he would say, "Would you do me a favor and arrange those three chairs for your group?" 

Perhaps not surprisingly, white men who were told they would be chatting with other white men grouped the chairs closely together - not much difficulty expected here. The same applied when they thought they would be discussing Relationships with either white or black men - no stereotype would apply here. But if they thought they would be discussing racial profiling with blacks, all three conditions were met and they put their own chair farther away from the other two. 

To check for the presence of the stereotype in the men’s minds, Steele and his group added a word-completion task that included words that could be completed with terms related to racial stereotyping or not, for instance, "Rac_ _ t" could be "Racist" or “Racket.” This came directly after the subjects were informed of their 

"What we have here is a failure to communicate"

partners and topics.Participants who expected to talk about profiling with black partners clearly had the white racist stereotype on the brain as they completed significantly more blanks with racism-related words. And, the number of stereotype related words was positively correlated with the distance at which they set their chair from the others - as in, the more I think about racism the less I want to blow it in this discussion. This fear of fulfilling the stereotype - just as with women and math tests, black students and high level verbal tests, and all the other cases - operates subconsciously.

This is, as Steele puts it, "a glum conclusion" for our country. No wonder we choose to live, shop, eat and worship with people who look like us. And no wonder so many white educators will, on a subconscious level, do anything to avoid working across difference, even though this is absolutely necessary in schools of today - let alone those of tomorrow! The fact is that there are many, many white educators in our country for whom the stereotype, the desperate need to break it, and the difficulty and frustration of doing so have presented themselves. This makes for a preponderance of teachers who are susceptible to this type of Stereotype Threat. 

A Dweckian Antidote

So how do we get past that? The researchers - as have many professional developers - tried stating at the outset that they "valued multiple perspectives," or that participants "would not be judged" by their remarks. Neither of these techniques worked, and sometimes they even led to chairs being placed farther apart. But, really, why should people believe these things unless they have already experienced them over time and in community?

Next, Steele and his colleagues tried using the work of Stanford colleague Carol Dweck. They tried to invoke her Growth Mindset by telling participants: 

1) That tension is natural in a discussion of racial profiling

2) That it is difficult for everyone, and 

3) That participants should treat the conversation as a learning experience, both about racial profiling and about how to talk about charged subjects with people who might have different perspectives. 

Voila! The white participants under this condition moved their chairs as close to black partners as to white partners. They were ready to work across difference. Steele and his group had created conditions wherein racially isolated whites could have the subconscious permission to enter into a difficult and potentially frustrating conversation with partners of another race. But, as the children and teachers of Reggio Emilia have been telling us for some time, these tangled and difficult learning conversations are necessary:

Tangled, Difficult, Necessary Conversation

Next time I’ll explore more about how to use this breathtaking finding in coaching our white colleagues to become the allies they want to be. 

Of Wristbands, Collars, and Stereotypes

In my in-box the title read, "Fla High School Uses Wristbands to Encourage Students."

It should really have read, "Fla High School Opts for Extrinsic Motivation, Stereotype Threat."

The gist of the article, printed in the Tampa Bay Times and reposted via ASCD SmartBrief, is that a Tampa high school has instituted an incentive program featuring color-coded wristbands: Yellow says "On Track" and Blue says "Highly On Track." (Whatever that means - in my experience trains are either on or off their track. Is speed being conflated with directionality here?) 

Now, normally I might have been saddened by yet another extrinsic reward system; disturbed by the creepy Orwellian sense of some students being more equal (or on-track) than others; or skeptical that actual teenagers would find these motivating for more than 5 minutes. But last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Stanford professor, Dr. Claude Steele, on Stereotype Threat. So I clicked the "Mad" icon at the end of the article. Here's why:

Steele has described Stereotype Threat in numerous academic papers as well as his highly readable book, Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. It is the mechanism by which otherwise well prepared and skillful people for whom a negative stereotype exists find themselves psyched out of their peak performance. 

The ingredients of this unholy cocktail are: 
1) Wanting to excel at something, 
2) Being aware that your group is stereotyped as less able at this same thing, and 
3) Experiencing frustration in the performance of it. 

When all three of these things happen, it's as though the psychological threat of confirming all those negatives "takes up bandwidth" that could otherwise be used to solve the frustrating problem before you. It explains many types of predictable cognitive performance gaps, be it the Gender-Math & Science imbalance, the Racial-Academic disparity, or even the "White with a Mic" Rap gap (of which Steele showed this Eminem Video Clip - language NSFW). In all of these cases, the more skilled at and passionate about something you are, the less likely you'll be able to demonstrate it when the stakes are high. 

Steele reminded us last night of the classic blue-eyes/brown-eyes study documented by PBS as A Class Divided - you remember, the one where the teacher taught her all-white class a lesson in stereotyping and bigotry by telling them that all the brown eyed children were inferior in every way: ugly, stupid, lazy, smelly, etc. etc. The next day she switched and told them that she'd been wrong, actually the brown eyed kids were superior and the blue-eyes had all those negative traits. A detail I had forgotten was that the teacher made blue or brown collars for the "inferior" group to wear (see the blue one in this photo).

What's amazing is that she creates Stereotype Threat in a single day by issuing an onslaught of social cues! And, though they didn't yet have the term back in 1968, these third graders perfectly describe the concept in just over a minute (13:10 - 14:25 in the documentary).

She asks small groups of the students to do a timed reading task. In each case the students considered "inferior" that day have stunningly low times; on the day they are considered "superior" they breeze through the problems. On day two of the simulation, she confronts the students with their times over the two days and asks them what the difference was. For the group that had come up in social standing there was some giggling as they offered, "We were brown eyes, we had collars!" and, "We just kept thinkin' about those collars!" 

But the heartbreaking responses are those from the children who had done so much better just one day earlier, and who respond from within their low status. One child blurts out, "I knew we weren't going to make it." 
"Neither did I," another chimes in.
"What happened?" the teacher asks. 
Silence. . . 
"What were you thinking of?" she prompts.
"These," says a boy, pointing to the collar in shame.

Fast forward to this week. Students who could be the grandkids of those original 3rd graders with their blue or brown collars are walking down the halls of a Tampa high school, voluntarily sporting blue or yellow wristbands, fitting in with the "on track" kids. Or wishing they could. Really wanting to attain that "On Track" status but perhaps looking around and becoming aware that the kids who share an identity with them don't have those bracelets. And then, perhaps encountering some frustration in upper level coursework or high-stakes testing that triggers Stereotype Threat and renders them unable to keep "On Track."

So, OK, Tampa if you want to go down the shallow and competitive road of extrinsic rewards, fine. If you want to have doublespeak about your "tracking," whatever. But do you really want to create visual castes with your blue and yellow wristbands? Do you need to stack one more self-fulfilling social cue on the tower of ability messages our culture has already built? 

Next time we'll look into white liberal inaction as a function of Stereotype Threat. . .

Mining to Farming: A Paradigm Shift to Close the Gaps

I once attended a workshop with Dr. Pedro Noguera, during which the noted education author and NYU professor of Sociology joked that he still didn't quite have the teaching metaphor that we could all relate to. He tried some sports ones, then moved into gardening, still not quite fully embodying his ideas. I'd like to offer an image used by my former Blake School colleague, Rand Harrington: moving from "mining" to "farming." Rand used this to describe the difference between the hiring process and the staff development process. Hiring is much like mining - you delve into a mountain of resumes, tossing aside anything that's not the element you're looking for. Hopefully you end up with a gem of a teacher. But in the staff development process, you become more like a farmer - watering, feeding, weeding, sometimes pruning, and generally doing what you can to help him or her grow. 


This metaphor seems even more fit to the paradigm shift that must happen in teaching if we are truly to reform an education system that was formulated to create and sustain inequity. After all, wouldn't you call a system in which the goal was to sort and measure, in which the products that don't measure up are discarded, and in which the most resources are allocated to the most productive vein a "mining" system? And isn't a system in which the goal is cultivation to maximize future productivity, and in which resources are allocated according to need more like "farming?" To take the metaphor even further, I believe we need to develop a sustainable farm of education, one that knows that it is part of an ecological community and leverages the relationships within it - as opposed to a monoculture that must apply ever more toxic substances to ensure a harvest of identical and travel-tough, if bland, crops. 

Clues from Language, Links to Mindset
Let's take a look at language that teachers use to see if we can discern the dominant metaphor of their system. Often in conservatory style programs there are discussions about "stealing" students from other programs, leading staff members to "guard" their rosters. Students with latent talent are "diamonds in the rough" who just need "a little polish." All of this implies a mining system where there is ownership of a scarce resource; 
underlying this is a talent mindset - a belief that intelligence and talent are fixed quantities. 

Stanford researcher Dr.Carol Dweck has described this as a "fixed intelligence" mindset. By contrast, her research shows that all the intelligences are able to grow via training and practice. I'm reminded of Kennedy Center Arts Consultant Deb Brzoska's comment, "Show me a 5th grader with 'talent' and I'll show you a 5th grader with private lessons." This became a guiding principle of the admissions process at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (VSAA). Rather than skill, we looked for passion and excitement about the arts. We knew that where there was a will to grow on the part of the student, we as a staff could cultivate that growth. 

Brzoska, who was the founding principal of VSAA, understood the power of language to direct mindset. She actually fined staff for using the term "My" in relationship to the school. We had a "My-jar" into which we had to place a quarter any time we referred to "My students," "My program," etc. They were "Our" students, and time that our shared students spent in another teacher's class was understood to contribute to their "Growth." All classes in any discipline were referred to "Skills" classes, where students could "Develop" artistic or academic competencies. All of these imply a farming system, undergirded by the growth mindset. This, according to Dweck, is necessary for the development of talent and intelligence.  

But What About the Gap?
What Dr. Noguera was trying to metaphorically describe in his workshop (as well as his book) was a way of teaching that could ameliorate the gaps we currently see.

Yes, gaps, plural. Noguera and co-author A.Wade Boykin brilliantly split the achievement gap into several component gaps so that we can understand some of its complexity. Once the parts are untangled, it is easier to understand how to address each one - and easier to see how many well-intentioned reforms that target one dimension may derail another. Think of them each as a former mine site that needs to be replanted and carefully restored into a balanced ecosystem.These sub-gaps include: 

• the Preparation Gap 
• the Opportunity Gap 
• the Discipline Gap 
• the Parent-School Gap
• the Ability-Performance Gap

For now, let's focus on just one: the Ability-Performance Gap, defined as that place from which students check out. Noguera suggests that to combat this we must make learning more active and relevant. In the schools at which I've had the privilege to work, Arts Integration is the strategy we've adopted for this. And it works. We may have drama, but not boredom. We may have teen anxt, but it's meaningful. We may have what looks like chaos, but it's creative chaos and if you look for it, you'll see both the structure undergirding it and the learning students are constructing within it.


Still, there are arts programs that are vibrantly active and clearly relevant to the few, selected (read: Mined) students within them. Here's where promoting closure of one gap can magnify another. These programs may eliminate any Ability-Performance Gap, but open an Opportunity Gap for students whose "talent" is not obvious at the outset.

Even in programs that eschew the conservatory approach in favor of skill development, hence bypassing the Opportunity Gap, there is a corner of the White, Western-European arts culture that can unwittingly contribute to the Ability-Performance Gap. We often have rules, explicit or unwritten, against "poaching" students from our colleagues' programs. These may not be a holdover from the conservatory paradigm, but rather a nod to diminishing FTE in the arts as well as sensitivity to students' crowded schedules. The gist is that teachers are not allowed to recruit students from others' classes or programs. Sometimes this gets generalized to include encouragement to continue the study of a discipline. I once moderated a heated discussion at a school over one teacher's written comment along the lines of, "I hope to see you in Level 2 next year." While it is unhealthy for kids to be placed in a tug-of-war between teachers, there's a big difference between that and encouragement. That difference is a focus on the student, rather than the program or the teacher. Many successful adults tell stories of that teacher who saw their development and encouraged them to keep on, often just when they were doubting themselves. We owe it to kids to do the same - and then to step back and let them decide how and when to act on our encouragement and possibly that of others. Isn't this just farming at its best? Applying a touch of fertilizer, watering a curious root, pulling a weed of self-doubt? (And don't get me started on heaping up the manure of false praise to keep a student in your program . . . it only burns them in the end). 

As we encourage our students to continue in the active programs they find relevant, we'll be helping to close the Ability-Performance Gap.

Teaching Thru the Prism Update

Phillips Collection has uploaded goodies from the summer institute including video of Eric Booth, Rex Jung, and Rachel Goslins (of the President's Commission on Arts and Humanities).
Check it out!
www.phillipscollection.org/prism

Teaching as Designing

Today I took part along with FAIR Downtown teacher Paul Hannan in a small Cultural Collaborative class with Dr. Jabari Mahiri. Essentially he tested a prototype of his new seminar, Designing Learning: Integrating Digital & Traditional Texts & Tools in Schools, in advance of his new book. Fellow Arts Integrators - this guy is right up our alley, if you don't know him, you should!

His premise is that the design process is a viable model for technology integration and curriculum development in general. What he's getting to is the same idea Eric Booth espouses - that when we integrate through the nouns (concepts) we'll have limited success, but when we utilize the verbs (processes) we get to deeper learning and more authentic connections. He also pointed out that the prototyping process - in which participants are forced to move away from the page and into a physical model - is a great place to make learning more active and more collaborative. It is true that the prototyping phase caused us more head-scratching about how to get started, surely an indicator of our brains having to stretch. This phase was also the most animated, with participants standing, moving, gesturing and experimenting - all indicators of physical engagement. And, for me, some pieces of our design literally firmed up as we created our physical model.

The other foundational assumption that Mahiri makes is that learning can be "multimodal" - a text is a text is a text, regardless of the mode of communication. So when a student makes connections between a phrase of music and a series of images, that's what reading guru Ellin Keene would call a text-to-text connection - an important part of developing comprehension. (In fact, the subtitle of her book was my first clue that reading teachers think of themselves as teaching not just reading but comprehension. What if we all did this?) Mahiri illustrated this by presenting a handful of images from the lengthy picture book, The Arrival by Shaun Tan and allowing us each to create and share our own meaning from them. (Check out the NPR story for a sense of this beautiful book In Wordless Imagery, An Immigrant's Timeless Tale). Then, modeling a text-to-text connection for us, he compared a series of images from the Let it Be and Come Together portions of the Julie Taymor film, Across The Universe - a different interpretation of the same archetypal story.

For the phases of the design process, Mahiri uses the vocabulary from Stanford University's design school, or D-School. Here are my notes on them:

• Empathy: uncovering meaningful needs, identifying with user needs. Clients (students) are the experts in their own needs. Interviewing, observation & immersion are techniques to gain empathy.

• Define: distilling the specific need and behind that need, insight into what the design will address, leading to an actionable problem statement. In Education this means defining who are the users, what grade, etc.

• Ideate: generation of ideas – use post-its so you can regroup as needed. Go broad to provide fuel for prototype. Later, you'll focus and select ideas.

• Prototype: creation of artifacts – physical, digital or experiential – that provide visible models of solutions being designed to address user needs and that can be tested for viability. Prototype gives us a physical springboard to which people can respond.

• Test: trying out the design solution with actual or potential users. Prototype like you know you’re right; Test like you know you might be wrong in order to refine the solution and make it better.

The best thing about this class was that we got to do the process. I know that I learned in an entirely different way from this active process, and I connected with my partners as well as the members of the other groups better. What we designed, in groups of 3 or 4, was a unit that incorporated digital tools. Though it was not a requirement, all of the groups ended up with designs that had students participating in a design process as well - even the 5th grade Vocabulary unit!

I got assigned to work on a Social Issues unit, with the requirement to include the iveBeenThere site. Specifically, we were assigned to use the Race portion of the site. The site started out as the project of a graduate student - along the lines of the Coming Out project, but featuring young adult "mentors" speaking about a range of social issues that younger kids might face: race, sexuality, bullying, drugs, making friends - you name it. The idea is that teens can access advice from a mentor on their own - one that looks like them, just a little bit older. They can search by topic, or if there is a particular mentor they like, they can follow that person.

From this site we found several others that would be great for a social issues/race unit. The Race Awareness Project  has a "Guess My Race" app similar to the section of the Science Museum's Race exhibit. There's also a "Who Am I Race Awareness Game," designed to open dialog about human physical diversity, colorblindness and race. It's  recommended for children ages 3 and up, care-givers, teachers, etc. Teachers with iPod access, this could be something to check out! Also, there's a way for people to upload their own head shots to be a part of the games. 

The site that ended up organizing our unit design was the Understanding Race site originally developed by the Science Museum of MN for their Race exhibit. The introduction to the site is one of the few in the world that is really worth watching completely, as it cycles through a mosaic of facial features making up a multi-racial face, all the while listing  off multiple ways that humans can differ from one another. This of course is also a list of things that we might use to construct our identities. From this and the other sites, we decided that a race unit should be embedded in a large, interdisciplinary unit based in identity. Hmm, this is sounding familiar. FAIR teachers, I did give you some credit when one person asked if we would actually teach something like this in the classroom and if so, how would we structure courageous conversations with students? I was proud to say that we would, could and do at the FAIR schools, and that Paul or I would be glad to discuss this with them.

We heard about two more juicy, equity related sites at the end. First, check out the Question Bridge, a project that asks black males a set of question and then edits down to the meatiest parts of their answers. There are over 2,000 men represented so far and the designers are trying to reach 200,000 participants. They have put out an app with which black males can upload their answers to the questions. There is also an identity map which is a tag cloud of words the men use to describe their identities, and a high school curriculum framework. The site was not fully functional today, but the parts I have been able to see are promising, so it would be worthwhile to check in periodically to see how it is developing.

Second, Virtual Oakland Blues and Jazz: Remembering 7th St.
This is a second-life tour of historic Oakland, California during the post-World War II period when there was a prosperous black business community based on the port of Oakland. Students can make an avatar, take it to the actual clothing store to pick out a vintage outfit, then check out the shops and of course, the blues and jazz clubs. They can interact with some residents to find things out. This seems like such a great way to use the 3-d virtual environment - not as a substitute for reality, but a way to see something that's just not currently available.

I expected to learn about a lot of cool sites today. What I didn't expect was to begin to see ways that students could use these sites not just for traditional research, but to really participate in their own design processes. I'm excited to see so many interactive sites and sites to which students can upload their own work, share with each other and their teachers, and even invent entire worlds of their own. I'm encouraged that time students spend in design-based games is adding to their persistence, taking them to new places and allowing them to experience things that no longer exist - or don't exist yet!

 

Teaching Thru the Prism 4: Pardon my Transient Hypofrontality

So sorry to have left such a big cliff-hanger - hope no one has lost sleep wondering "What is the Bad(ass) technology that Dr. Rex Jung talked about?" Of course, it is imaging technology - that super-power that now sees faster than the blink of an eye, more deeply than the TSA, and is able to track brain activity in any task. Through imaging of people who produced multiple ideas during a creative task, Jung and others have cataloged the anatomy of the creative brain.

So, what are the brain characteristics corresponding to heightened creativity? As you might suppose, there are certain areas of the brain that are thicker, both in grey (active) and white (insulating) matter. But I was surprised to learn that other areas are actually thinner. In particular, the frontal lobes of highly creative people are thinner than average. What's going on here? Well, as high school teachers know, the late-developing frontal lobes are the parts that control judgment, sequencing and the "if. . . then" logic that understands the consequences of our actions - as Dr. Jung says, the "ready, aim, fire" part of the brain.

But, for all the importance of these logical traits in self-control, time management, and task completion, they can be the death of creative ideas. To allow creative ideas to flow, we need to suspend these judgment kinds of activities, put seemingly unrelated ideas out on the table of our mind and play around to see what combinations can happen. Of course, we need to bring these activities back once we have our new idea in order to actually bring it to fruition, meet our deadline, etc. Again, we need both sides of our brain to get it done (back to Eric Jensen & post #3!). So we don't want to permanently turn off our frontal activity, just to temporarily dial it down - hence the name Transient Hypo-Frontality.

I thought of two educational uses for this right away. The first, I'm sure you've all seen - that kid who just can't seem access any ideas because they are already censored before s/he is even conscious of them. Sally Fitt at U of Utah used to call this analysis paralysis. I've seen kids in every school clam up like this, and no amount of shi-shi artsy talk or trust-building activity can penetrate that shell. After all, if my inner critic is in hyper-mode, it is going to scoff at any touchy-feely-artsy-fartsy stuff. So if you see this, you now can offer an appropriately analytical reason to ease up - and because you are talking to an analytical part of the brain, what you say just might get through.

Second, this just reinforces the practice of many arts teachers who strictly disallow put-downs in their class communities. Just this last year at FAIR, I had a conversation with members of a choir that were acting out a disagreement through harsh criticism of one another. I asked who had been proud as Kindergartners to bring artwork home and have it put up on the fridge. They all nodded, smiling at the warm memories. Then I asked whether they still did this - they looked shocked! I asked when it stopped. As is often the case, they said some time around 4th or 5th grade. Why? Because they got teased about it, started thinking about it, and stopped feeling like they were any "good" at art. Try having this conversation with any group of high school or middle school students - unless they are the kids in the advanced Visual Art class, they will be able to trace for you the development of their inner critic. Vis Arts kids will be able to do the same if you ask them about singing outside the privacy of the car or shower. The point is, we educators have to do what we can not to over-build that frontal lobe as it relates to allowing creative, unregulated thought.

A corollary to this is that when schools and teachers emphasize compliance and task management at the expense of creation and elaboration of ideas, they again run the risk of hyping those frontal lobes.

Finally, I'm indebted to a Kindergarten teacher who was seated in the front row for raising a nuts-and-bolts school issue. She raised her hand to tell her sad story and ask advice: apparently, all teachers in her school were now required to post the minute-by-minute daily schedule of class activities. She had been able to comply with this until a recent dictum that they were to forgo the use of the word, play. As an experienced early childhood educator, she knew that play is the work of young children - but she needed some theory to legitimize it. What Dr. Jung had just said seemed to back her up - they need to let their minds wander through unstructured play.

"Do you have any advice for me?" she asked.

"Transient Hypofrontality," responded Dr. Jung in his best James Earl Jones voice-over of God.

In the exchange that followed, Dr. Jung clarified how the brain not only comes up with creative ideas, but consolidates ideas and makes connections during times of play or other unregulated activity - walks in the park, a bubble bath, yoga class, doodling, you name it. The teacher vowed to go back to school and put up her schedule, proudly displaying the activity, Transient Hypofrontality.


Next time - More on how we consolidate learning and why Martha Graham had her neuroscience right when she said that it takes 10 years to make a dancer.

Meanwhile - What else can you think of that we do to potentially overdevelop those frontal lobes?

Teaching Thru the Prism 3: Neuroscience of Creativity

OK, if you don't already follow Dr. Rex Jung, you should. He studies the Neurobiology of Creativity at the University of New Mexico. A man after my own heart, he started with the top 3 myths of popular brain science, each with a wacky, yet memorable made-up name:

1. You have to be a genius to be creative (plebophobia) - the idea that there's a bell-shaped curve with Einstein at one end and Homer Simpson on the other is flat out not true; in his research with undergrads "in the middle of the curve," everyone has creative capacity.

2. You have to be crazy to be creative (mentallyillophillia) - again, just not true. While there have been many people who have struggled with mental illness and who also have demonstrated great creativity, there are also many who have not, and just as many who do not have a mental illness but are highly creative. Personally, I find that creative activity is what keeps me sane. My sister, a therapist, once told me that the creative process as I described it was much like the process of coming out of an episode of mental illness - you have an idea, you listen to others' critique of it, you take in what you think is right and reject the rest, and move on with your idea. I also think that this is one myth we really need to fight because parents who believe this are not likely to expose their children to arts education!

3. Horribly Overinterpreting Research Regarding Neurosurgical Interventions (HORRNI) - this is the myth that the the brain is neatly split into a creative (right) and an analytical (left) hemisphere. The Neurosurgical research had to do with severing the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres. In epileptic patients who had had this intervention, all sorts of interesting things were noted about which hemisphere took over control of what. However, for the rest of us whose brains are intact, there is a real collaboration between the two hemispheres. In creative work, we may imagine things more on one side, but we need the other side to plan and execute their design. And, all along, impulses are firing back and forth between them. Those of you who attended the MN Retreat for the Arts at Perpich in '06 heard a similar message from Eric "You name it-ing With The Brain In Mind" Jensen. Take home point is that developing all sides of the brain as much as we can will strengthen our creative capacity.

From the Ugly Myths he went on to the Good and the Bad(ass).

There were three important parts to the Good:
First (and aligned with #3 above) is that Creativity has both Emotional and Cognitive domains that cross Spontaneous and Deliberate processes. OK, this completely fits with the old Essential Learnings: something Emotional and Deliberate might be the work of a playwright, say, Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America has a highly emotional impact on the audience, but went through a deliberate process from idea to manuscript to produced play. Emotional and Spontaneous might be someone like Miles Davis, improvising to create an emotional connection between himself and his audience. Cognitive and Spontaneous might be someone like Robin Williams on Letterman's couch coming out with spontaneous commentary on the day's events or the previous guest's remarks. Cognitive and Deliberate creativity might be Einstein working through one of his "thought experiments."

Second - To have a brilliant idea, you need to have lots of ideas. Scott Weston, early VSAA Photo teacher used to say this about photos - to get a good one, you need to take lots of them. Apparently there's a Picasso web site that has now cataloged over 20,000 works by him. They were not all Guernica.

Third - and this goes along with Plato's ideas about teaching by Uncovering (previous post) - In the cycle of creative production, there need to be 4 elements:
Preparation (read: skill acquisition)
Incubation (mulling it around)
Illumination (AHA!)
Verification (hypothesis testing - is it novel? useful? matching the intent?)

According to Dr. Jung, schools are spending way too much time and energy on Preparation and Verification, when what kids need is more downtime for Incubation in order to uncover their AHA!

Well, laundry calls - getting Nat ready for his hike through northern Spain! Next time I'll go over the Badass technology that has uncovered the brain processes (or lack thereof) that coincide with creativity.