Tag: LEGO

Let play perish and innovation will follow

Innovation, PlayPublished onUpdated onLeave a Comment on Let play perish and innovation will follow

David Whitebread and Marisol Basilio, in their essay “Play, culture and creativity”, explain that play is ubiquitous in humans and that every child in every culture plays.

A key adaptive advantage of the long period of human biological immaturity is the opportunity for play.

When writing about curiosity and discovery in the past I have read about these concepts through Alison Gopnik’s work.

She is a child-development psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik explains that humans have a longer childhood, a slower path to puberty in which we can exercise our urge to explore.

This occurs while we’re still dependent on our parents and have an unmatched period of protected “play” in which to learn exploration’s rewards.

Yet while other animals play mainly by practicing basic skills such as fighting and hunting, human children play by creating hypothetical scenarios with artificial rules that test hypotheses. Can I build a tower of blocks as tall as I am? What’ll happen if we make the bike ramp go even higher? How will this schoolhouse game change if I’m the teacher and my big brother is the student?Such play effectively makes children explorers of landscapes filled with competing possibilities.

Whitebread and Basilio explain that this longer childhood provides a critical foundation for thinking, establishing:

the basis for the ‘flexibility of thought’ (Bruner, 1972) which underpins the astonishing problem-solving abilities and creativity of humans.

What do you know about the links between curious children and how playful they are? How do you see children engaging in more purposeful exploration? What value does playfulness have in problem solving?

The impact of playfulness

I was interested to read of the wider implications of developing the creative problem solving capacities in children and young adults. Beyond simply the obvious value, creative problem solving skills have importance for both the individual and the wider society.

Children and young adults who are creative problem solvers have been shown to have better coping skills to deal with everyday problems and crises, and this skill is increasingly important in the ever-more complex and rapidly changing modern world.

Typically we focus on the intrinsic value of creativity, or the importance of young adults exercising that skillset in the workforce. We want those entering work to understand their own creative skills and be well equipped to apply them purposefully.

However we rarely look at the increased coping skills and resilience of creative problem solvers, as highlighted here by Whitebread and Basilio. That link between creativity and resilience is a new insight for me.

Playfulness and creativity have a strong relationship. The essay presents a range of studies that reveal the connection.

These go back as far as the 1960s, with the early studies of Wallach & Kogan showing that creative children were more playful than less creative ones (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). Subsequent studies have shown that playfulness predicts scores on divergent thinking tasks (Howard-Jones, Taylor & Sutton, 2002; Lieberman, 1977).

The ‘divergent thinking tasks’ are often used as devices to measure creativity. Divergent and convergent thinking modes are essential throughout an extended creative/innovative process.

I think there is an ebb and flow between these different modes or thinking states. An awareness of these and how we remain cognitively flexible enough to switch from one to the other, without diminishing efficacy, is a typical characteristic of those with effective creative problem solving skills.

As part of a previous article, I asked why we marginalise the conditions for children to be creative. I recognise that part of this is the reduction in opportunities for play in primary schools. Even in pre-school.

In comparing my experience from England I have noticed that classrooms in Australia don’t have as much resourcing around pretend play. Dress up and role play resources, everyday objects, sand, water and messy trays were always so plentiful in the early years classrooms I led and worked with.

It worries me to see early learning experiences morphing into readiness for future grades or preparedness for higher year groups.

If playfulness has such a strong impact on developing creativity, why are opportunities for play in school diminishing? How might we protect play environments in the classrooms in our schools? How might we help broaden the understand of this area of research?

Pressured play

One of the key challenges for early childhood practitioners, raised by Whitebread and Basilio, is the pressure of covering a prescribed curriculum.

They go on to suggest that this exists in all urbanised cultural regions and is especially evident in the Far East.

A review of attitudinal studies on play and creativity in Hong Kong and mainland Chinese societies revealed that,

a cultural emphasis on narrowly conceived academic achievement was deleterious to developing playful, creative school environments (Fung & Cheng, 2012).

Not only is the word “deleterious” a wonderful new addition to my lexicon, but I also think that this statement holds true for education systems. What do you think?

The latter part of the essay explores the impact of parents and teachers on the development of the child and early achievement. An important element of this is that “specific practices by parents and teachers consistently over-ride broader cultural influences.”

The authors conclude by focusing on the importance of the school experience and the impact of parenting.

while there are clear challenges for human culture on our increasingly crowded planet, we must believe we can overcome these, and playful, creative approaches to parenting and schooling are clearly likely to be very helpful in this endeavour.

Takeaways

Here are a few key ideas, insights and provocations that stood out to me.

  • The challenge set out by the writers to ensure that what we can control of the experience in school, nurseries or where learning happens, is a creative and playful one.
  • The influence of creative teachers as a leveller of achievement for students from different social classes and backgrounds.
  • Children with creative problem solving capacities are more resilient.
  • Creative children were more playful when they were younger. Would an increase in opportunities for different types of play help develop more creativity? How might we sustain access to play in our primary classrooms?

If we want innovation we need creativity, if we want creativity we need playfulness.

Download the essay here: “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.

This is the second in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.

Next in my series is “Building cultures of creativity in the age of the Knowledge Machine” by Michael Wesch.

How our creativity is shaped by our culture

Creativity, FeaturedPublished onUpdated on2 Comments on How our creativity is shaped by our culture

When you think of creative people who immediately springs to mind?

Da Vinci, Ive, Lovelace, Pelé?

Far from just an individual capacity, our creativity is also influenced by the environments that we live and learn in. Each of those memorable people were shaped by their culture.

our behaviour is also shaped by the culture we live in, largely through social norms, contexts that cue them, and motives that drive us to follow, reject or invert those norms.

Thomas Wolbers a Professor of Ageing and Cognition explains in his essay,”Three Pathways By Which Culture Can Influence Creativity”, that it can impact on our cognitive abilities, the creative process and the value we associate with the output.

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Creative Potential

Wolbers explores the concept that our application of creativity fits the domains that our culture values. If we are products of our cultural influences then we all carry a certain bias.

This bias is perhaps towards applying our creativity in domains that continue to affirm what our culture deems as important.

For example, Korea with its strong cultural valuation of status and interdependence is the world leader in the industry of massively multiplayer simulation games, which involve accruing and using status and maintaining coalitions

Individuals may be more creative in some domains than in others because their cultural background values those domains and focuses the individual’s cognitive and motivational resources.

I wonder what those domains are for me? I suppose in some way sharing content, thinking and understandings through my writing is a direct consequence of the culture my professional life started in.

When I say direct result, I mean I worked in the opposite direction. Much of the expertise, sharing and learning was in closed and stagnant systems. That was a norm I wanted to invert.

In what domains do you apply your most creative self? How are those choices influenced by the cultural cues you have experienced?

Creative Process

Most people don’t think that creativity has a process. It can be often viewed as a magical act of serendipity for special talented people.

This is a long way from the truth. Creative processes are much more rigorous than we think. Those processes can be clearly defined and described. Also true is the ability to describe the salient conditions for creativity to flourish.

Wolbers explains that creativity usually involves two types of processes: the flexibility pathway and the persistence pathway.

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ease with which people can switch to a different approach or consider a different perspective, and cognitive persistence represents the degree of sustained and focused task-directed cognitive effort.

The reference to cognitive flexibility and agility here reminds me of the type of language we often see defining divergent thinking. Our ability to see a challenge from a different perspective is an important creative trait.

The cognitive persistence pathway refers to a more incremental, cautious, and analytical processing in an attempt to be incremental and cumulative.

Our cultural norms and cues will push us towards these pathways differently. What is valued in our society, in our culture, directs the process we apply in generating new ideas.

“inventions result more frequently from projects with incremental objectives in Japan (66 percent) than the U.S. (48 percent), and less frequently from projects with breakthrough objectives in Japan (8 percent) than the U.S. (24 percent).”

It is one thing to look at inventions in the US, it is another to look at the professional culture of teaching in the UK or Australia. On reflection the professional culture that I spent ten years working in was a risk averse culture.

The majority of breakthroughs and shifts in education are incremental, cumulative, glacial.

I may have a preference for more significant, higher-risk ideas as part of my process, but I think the culture around me wants me to slow down.

What do you think? Does education covet the paradigm shift, but really just wants slow change?

Creative Output

The value we place on ideas can be vastly different depending on the perspective we have.

Creativity is often defined as generating ideas that have value. Wolbers points out that this can be very subjective and wholly dependent on the culture of the beholder.

A famous example is the reception of Ang Lee’s movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was acclaimed by Western film critics for its stylistic innovations, whereas Chinese critics judged it as Ang Lee’s weakest movie, presumably because they had seen many similar movies before.

Over the years I have spent countless hours talking with different groups about how we might judge different ideas as part of the process of design thinking.

All of this time perhaps our cultural preferences have been influencing what we consider has value. Wolbers explains that Chinese culture values usefulness more than novelty, whereas Western culture values novelty more than usefulness.

individuals with an Eastern background may be more concerned with usefulness than originality and engage different implicit or explicit standards to downplay or elaborate ideas and insights than their counterparts with a Western background.

As a primary school teacher I certainly had both in mind. I think the culture around me, in the schools I worked in and the wider education system valued usefulness over originality.

Original ideas were entertained on the fringes.

How does our definition of value influence the emphasis we put on certain ideas? Do you think you value originality or usefulness, or both?

Takeaways

A few key takeaways for me have been the three areas highlighted by Wolber. It is a succinct collection of elements we might consider in our own contexts.

  • Creative Potential — where we apply our creative capacity
  • Creative Process — how we go about generating ideas
  • Creative Value — what we value most about our ideas

As I have been exploring this work I have also been thinking how school culture might influence creativity. However you could replace school with company, organisation, club or whatever you like. When I say school culture I mean the implicit and explicit values, beliefs, and norms that surround each student.

Some takeaway questions spring to mind to ponder on further:

  • How might school culture influence each student’s creative potential and the domains in which they apply their creative capacity?
  • How might the culture at school dictate the type of creative process that is adopted by teachers and students (all learners)?
  • How might we explore what value systems we use to judge creativity in our schools?

Download the essay here: “Three pathways by which culture can influence creativity” by Thomas Wolbers.

This is the first in my thinking series exploring the Cultures of Creativity essays published by the LEGO Foundation, and their relevance to schools and learning organisations.

Next in my series is “Play, culture and creativity” by David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio.

Finding the edges of your page

28 Days of Writing, Design ThinkingPublished onUpdated on3 Comments on Finding the edges of your page

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Not to be confused with restraint which is much more about self-control, constraint is about finding the edges of the page before you begin, it is about knowing what limits you have in terms of resources. It is about must haves and must nots. And to be honest not something I previously worried too much about, but now I see constraint in lots of work that I do and inevitably seek them out if they are not so explicit.

In many ways the 28 Days of Writing project is built around the concept of healthy constraint, about creating an edge where often there isn’t one. A rule to stick to and enjoy the creative challenge. 28 days of writing with a time constraint on how long you can spend every day.

Twitter was such an interesting medium to write through. The constraint of writing within a specific character limit is just second nature now – I always try not to abbreviate or shorten words unnecessarily too. Back when the education community didn’t know it’s tweet from it’s blog it was a fascinating challenge to share your thoughts with such brevity. In many ways this is the most enduring feature of the Twitter platform and certainly something I still enjoy.

Another time when I observed the impact of constraint in a rather unexpected place was a Year 3 classroom in London. The class were all set to build some versions or prototypes of their new house/dwelling ideas they had been intricately designing on paper. Detailed diagrams and rough drafts overlapped on the tables as the class clamoured to discover what was next for their ideas. LEGO makes a similar introduction when used in most classroom, eyes light up and ideas roll over in the mind. However something unexpected happened once construction of the next prototypes commenced. Constraint.

Boys and girls grabbed LEGO baseboards to build on and suddenly fell into a steady rhythm of stacking bricks around the edges, the cuboid house once again asserted it’s dominance. It was a fascinating thing to reflect upon for Meshendia (the classteacher) and I once all was said and done. The LEGO had in fact imposed its own constraint to the process and those baseboards even more so. What were dreamy, intricate designs on paper soon became cookie-cutter boxes in LEGO.

I think this happens a great deal once we are up to our armpits in the making process, the standard classroom doesn’t quite cater for the resources our ideas truly need. Why would they? After all if we are not given enough signals of the constraints in the early stages of a process when we are encouraging new ideas, those ideas will grow and expand without an edge to them.

I was with a school in Perth last week and the very same thinking task for one group of 3 teachers produced completely different results compared with another. The reason. Simply the size of the paper they chose to work on. One group had a large sheet of flipchart paper and their ideas were more numerous, sprawling and often tangential. The other had an A4 piece of paper, the group’s ideas were fewer, focused, more potent. Same task, just a different piece of paper. For one the edges were tighter, closer and more constrained – for the other much more open and freer. The constraint, or lack of, impacted on the type of thinking the group achieved.