Imagination & Creativity: Sir Ken Robinson

I recently listened to Ken Robinson interviewed by the IMNO (International Mentoring Network Organization). In addition to the audio interview, the site contains a list of the questions that were asked of Sir Ken. Of particular interest to me are the portions of the conversation dealing with imagination.

Sir Ken believes that imagination is the foundation of creativity; it is bringing to mind things that are not in front of you and that are not currently present. Imagination is the “process of having in your consciousness conceptions of things that aren’t present.” Based upon memories, if you can summon up the past, you are then able to conjure up the future.

If that is imagination, then what is creativity? Creativity is “applied imagination” and therefore a practical process. Creativity is “doing something with materials in a medium.” Robinson goes on to note that is it helpful and important to love both working with the tools of the medium and the medium itself.

And then, of course, there are the crucial questions to ask oneself:

• How am I creative?
• How am I intelligent?
• In what ways does my creativity show itself?

“Creativity is nourished by keeping your imagination alive (stimulated).”

Sir Ken goes on to state the importance to him of humor; learning, which consists of speaking and meeting with people; and reflection, which he does via writing. He also spoke a bit about communication and speaking skills:

• Relate to individuals even though the room may be composed of a large group. Connect with individuals; be yourself and be natural, relaxed, and conversational.
• Know your material but don’t over rehearse. You can have a set of bullet points just for yourself, as a reminder, but it is not necessary (nor is it desirable) to display them on a screen for all to see. Much better is to improvise while you talk; it is much like playing jazz, and will sound more natural. Tell stories that are relevant to your points and your audience. Aim to “engage at the personal level.”

As of the interview, which was in the middle of 2007, Robinson said he was working on a new book, The Element, which will be about how folks “achieve their best when in their element.” I eagerly await the book and the launching of his new site Sir Ken Robinson. Meanwhile, you can read more about Sir Ken at Principal Voices, including this White Paper: Creativity in the Classroom, Innovation in the Workplace.

Imagination: Norman Doidge & Others

Norman Doidge writes, in The Brain That Changes Itself, “experiments have shown that we can change our brain anatomy simply by using our imaginations.” Using various methods for scanning the brain, researchers have discovered that “from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound.”

Doidge discusses the topic of imagination in detail in chapter eight, and presents tantalizing evidence, based upon experiments, that “imagination and action are” integrated, “despite the fact that we tend to think of imagination and action as completely different and subject to different rules.” And he goes even further, stating “But consider this: in some cases, the faster you can imagine something, the faster you can do it.” This reminds me hugely of the process of visualization.

Karin Wells, of CBC Radio Canada, did an interview with Norman Doidge. You can read more about the interview, and even listen to it, on the Feldenkrais Manitoba blog in Feldenkrais ahead of his time: CBC Radio on Rebuilding the Brain. In the blog, Feldenkrais is quoted as writing that “…[Learning] is also the foundation of imagination…”

In discussing what he is doing to stave off cognitive decline, Doidge leaves us with this message about new learning:

It’s really important to do something you enjoy, that you’ve always wanted to do….because….you turn on the same neurochemical system, the dopamine system, which both gives you the thrill of completing the goal and consolidates that network that led you to the goal. So it’s much better to do something that’s fun; fun and a challenge.

There is so much yet to understand about imagination. Take, for instance, the following two short films. In the first, author Neil Gaiman tries to answer a question from the audience about his imagination. The second is a Japanese commercial on children’s imagination.

Above: Neil Gaiman and His Imagination (4/13/08 – Just watched the 2007 movie Stardust, based upon Gaiman’s novel. If you are not familiar with his writing, this is a delightful display of his imagination. He also wrote the English translation of Princess Mononoke.)

Above: A Japanese commerical on children’s imagination

Imagination: Ramachandran

Phantoms in the Brain is an engaging tale of individuals who have odd and curious brain quirks, often resulting from a malfunction in their brain such as a stroke, which display in sometimes unbelievable manifestations.

Ramachandran begins with an overview of the brain’s physiology, coupled with sharing how he approaches study of the brain. He likens the work to that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the pursuit of solving mysteries. As a youngster, Ramachandran was intrigued by science, concocting unusual experiments with simple tools, and with “being drawn to the exception rather than to the rule in every science” he studied. He believes that “the odd behavior of these patients can help us solve the mystery of how various parts of the brain create a useful representation of the external world and generate the illusion of a “self” that endures in space and time.”

Once explained, the experiments that Ramachandran designed sounded deceptively simple and logical. What impressed me was his imaginative insight in concocting them in the first place.

Chapter Five describes patients who have discrepancies between what they visually see, and what they believe they see. Damage to some portion of the visual cortex can result in hallucinations, and depending upon the type of damage, the hallucinations can impact specific portions of the visual field, such as the lower half or the left half. As an example, there is the story of one patient who sustained damage to his eyes and optic nerves as the result of an auto accident. Greatly, though not wholly, recovered, he had visual hallucinations in just “the lower half of his field of vision, where he was completely blind. That is, he would only see imaginary objects below a center line extending form his nose outward.”

Ramachandran goes on to describe how the patient discerns between what is real and what is an hallucination. At one point, the patient says he sees a monkey sitting on Ramachandran’s lap. The patient notes that while “it looks extremely vivid and real”, “it’s unlikely there would be a professor here with a monkey sitting in his lap so I think there probably isn’t one.” The patient goes on to state that the images “often look too good to be true. The colors are vibrant, extraordinarily vivid, and the images actually look more real that real objects, if you see what I mean.” The hallucinations tend to fade fairly soon after being “seen”, and while they usually blend in with the rest of what is actually being seen, the patient knows that they are part of his visual imagination. He enjoys the surprise of what he conjures up, and is more concerned about his partial blindness.

By the end of this chapter, which has a number of other interesting and curious vision tales, Ramachandran hypothesizes that “all these bizarre visual hallucinations are simply an exaggerated version of the processes that occur in your brain and mine every time we let our imagination run free. Somewhere in the confused welter of interconnecting forward and backward pathways is the interface between vision and imagination. … what we call perception is really the end result of a dynamic interplay between sensory signals and high-level stored information about visual images from the past.”

What starts to emerge is an explanation of imagination as a combination of that which we have visually seen, processed and stored in memory, coupled with crafting something new based upon those conceptions. Interesting questions arise…

• If we had no prior knowledge, would we be able to imagine?
• Do we consciously conjure our imagination, or is it a subconscious process, or a little of both depending upon the situation?
• When we are feeling stymied and need a nudge to get our imagination going, how do we do that under our own power?
• When we totally zone out (like I do when getting in the groove of swimming laps), how is it that thoughts can just “pop” into my head?

Response Essay – most of the second part

National Educator Workshop – Response Essay
Summer Session 2002 / July 8-12

A conversation with Catherine (colleague from my school who also participated in this workshop) after the first music workshop yielded these observations:

• Everyone did something and was able to do something.
• There was no “wrong” or “right” approach or answer.
• Using our imagination it is possible to create something out of nothing, in this case just using our voices and bodies to make music.

Five days into the workshop I heard Tenesh (one of the group leaders) say that we are developing skills to focus, and that we try to go to the core of what the thing is all about. Being able to release our imaginations to focus in a multitude of ways and thereby get to the core of what we are learning…wow, very powerful ideas which this workshop modeled and helped me experience.

Eric Booth’s talk continued to model the ideas of the workshop and provided a more concrete framework for implementing those ideas. The brainstorming guide Entering the World of the Work of Art also provides a substantive model to use. And the two basic questions of the inquiry method: What’s going on? and Why do you say that? form the backbone of how to get started. Couple this with a work of art and you have a jumping off point. On the last day of the workshop I wrote the following notes in my journal. I don’t recall whose words they were but they sum up my feelings about this workshop experience, and the goal I have for my students (and myself):

There is excitement in experiencing something intrinsically. This experience makes you the expert; it empowers you and draws out your imagination. The result is self-confidence and a depth of knowledge.

It is more difficult to apply the concepts from this workshop to my work with faculty, not for lack of ideas or how to approach aesthetic education, but more because people tend to be protective of what they already do. Many faculty have invested time and energy in developing their curriculums, and those curriculums seem fine as they are. Tweaking those approaches ever so slightly to alter a lesson requires much conversation and modeling, and a willing audience/participant. But then again, that is the approach I have to take anyway when talking about technology!

Response Essay – first part

National Educator Workshop – Response Essay
Summer Session 2002 / July 8-12

An article in the October 3, 2001 Metro section of The New York TImes piqued my interest in Maxine Greene. I had never heard of her beforehand yet the ideas she espoused about education gave direction to the thoughts about which I had been ruminating. This prompted me to read her book Releasing the Imagination, which in turn led me to John Dewey’s Experience & Education. And all of that pointed me to the National Educator Workshop. My expectation for the workshop was to give my imagination some much needed prodding and help me look at what I do through a different perspective. With that in mind, the most significant ideas embraced during the workshop include:

• The aesthetic approach is one of self-discovery which can be guided through a series of carefully crafted questions and activities.
• This self-discovery is a process, and that process should tap into what people can do and help them expand their thought repertoire.
• Collaboration, questioning, and experiential learning (all part of the process) help to make learning intrinsic and give it meaning within the context of the student’s life.

To borrow from others (Maxine Greene and Apple Computer): With aesthetic education we are “releasing the imagination” and enhancing our perspective to “think different”. Imagination is an entry point into something that might otherwise by ordinary.

My perception of the works of art (each piece seen and heard twice) changed substantially over the course of the workshop. In both cases, viewing and listening to the art without any prior knowledge of the artist or piece was very satisfying. This let me form my own response to the art, modified a little by the comments of my workshop mates. In the case of Poulenc’s music, I listened “hard” the first time as I concentrated on what was being played; this was not listening for pleasure? The Chuck Close portrait interested me for its size and colors. The subject of the portrait intrigued me and I wanted to know more about him.

The early hands-on activities were enjoyable to do but I did not yet make connections between those activities and how I felt about the art of Poulenc and Close. The collaborative brainstorming (of questions we would like to ask about the artists/works of art) was highly satisfying. Indeed, it almost did not matter to me if the questions were ever answered. The very act of collaborative discussion and questioning was exhilarating, cementing ideas and possibilities for me to ponder. It was the satisfaction of thinking and the interaction with others concerned with the same topic.

Lincoln Center institute for the arts in education

In my post about Maxine Greene, I mentioned the Lincoln Center institute for the arts in education. During the summer of 2002 I participated in The National Educator Workshop: Introduction to Aesthetic Education. Everyday for the week of July 8 through 12, I trekked to New York City and spent my days at Lincoln Center. As a child growing up in the Long Island suburbs of the City, I had my fill of concerts, opera and ballet at Lincoln Center, but for that week in 2002 it was a treat to enter buildings that for years had seemed out of range to me as a theatre attendee. The location, and having access to these buildings that are home to artistic endeavors, made me feel artistically inclined; it was as though my surroundings could rub off on me and cause me to feel like an artist!

Wikipedia has some pictures of Lincoln Center’s buildings, and Carthalia contains a compilation of history about the buildings along with some postcard pictures of the complex. In fact, if you have an interest in old postcards or theatres and concert halls worldwide, you should check out Carthalia – Theatres on Postcards.

During the week long workshop I participated in activities designed to expose me to the sensations of aesthetic education. There were hands-on art workshops, hands-on music workshops, attendance at a concert, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and attendance at a dance performance. There was also a lecture by Maxine Greene, which was one of the many highlights of the week. I was immersed in the arts, and loved every minute of the process!

Throughout the week each of us (there were about 40, if memory serves correct) were encouraged to keep a journal. After the workshop concluded, we were asked to submit a Response Essay about the week long experience. In addition to various handouts provided during the workshop, we were also given a booklet entitled Entering the World of the Work of Art – A Brainstorming Guide. The booklet’s purpose was to guide us in bringing art into the world of education, particularly as a way of expanding imagination. From the booklet:

“At Lincoln Center we believe that works of art provide an inexhaustible resource for exploration, reflection, and understanding. Children and adults have the capacity to respond to a work of art in ways that can stimulate fresh insights, encourage deeper understandings, and challenge preconceived notions. Without the limitations imposed by “right” or “wrong” answers, the process of responding to a work of art develops each student’s ability to think in fundamental and powerful ways.”

“As a result, unexpected connections are made, alternative points of view considered, complexities explored, and doors to new and imagined worlds opened.”

To read more about this experiential program, first visit the Lincoln Center page and then scroll down to the lower right corner, under Arts and Education, and click the link for Lincoln Center Institute.

Imagination & Experience: John Dewey

Experience and Education, written in 1938 by John Dewey, was read as a result of reading Maxine Greene. She referenced him often in her writings, including this sentiment:

Consciousness always has an imaginative phase, and imagination; more than any other capacity, breaks through the “inertia of habit” (1934, p. 272).

Dewey’s book is short and the commentary on the back cover calls it his most concise statement of his ideas. Well, it may be concise for Dewey but for me his writing was dense and his sentence structure was awkward. By the second to last chapter I was growing impatient with his prose and skipped that entire chapter. Nonetheless, I did benefit from the reading, and here are some of his ideas, mostly from the early chapters, which made an impression on me.

Educational reform based on opposition to what is current in education results in developing a potentially negative construct. Education has tended to be the handing down of information. Education based on experience will be perhaps more beneficial as it helps prepare students for what they will face. Therefore, it is necessary to have a philosophy of experience.

Of importance is the quality of the experience. Is it immediately agreeable or disagreeable, and how does it/will it influence future experiences? Dewey goes on to mention the experiential continuum.

And then there is the following quote, which resonated with me as a teacher and parent, and made me think of those teachers who practice their craft in one way only and do not take into consideration the differences or needs of those they teach.

The principle of interaction makes it clear that failure of adaptation of material to needs and capacities of individuals may cause an experience to be non-educative quite as much as failure of an individual to adapt himself to the material.

The Outdoor Education Research & Evaluation Center has extensive pages about Dewey, including a number of summaries of Experience and Education, a multitude of pages about Experiential Learning & Experiential Education, as well as pages about John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education.

While Dewey is perhaps more commonly linked these days with the idea of experiential education, he did a lot of writing about the arts. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent article discussing Dewey’s Aesthetics, in which much is made of imagination. (I smiled to see that the author had similar feelings to mine regarding the accessibility of Dewey’s written words.) The discussion of imagination begins with part 2, Early Psychological Aesthetic Theory, and makes note of Dewey’s books, Art as Experience and Psychology, neither of which I have read.

According to this article, Dewey defines more than one stage of imagination, with creative imagination being the top level.

The highest form of imagination, creative imagination, allows us to penetrate into the hidden meaning of things through finding sensuous forms that are both highly revealing and pleasurable. The creative imagination makes its objects anew: it separates and combines, but not mechanically. It senses the relations of parts to the development of the whole and it raises details to the level of the universal. It develops the ideal aspect of things, freeing it from the contingent.

Imagination: Maxine Greene

In 2002 I read Releasing the Imagination – Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, by educational philosopher Maxine Greene. I stumbled upon Maxine Greene in an October 2001 New York Times article, One Philosopher’s Alchemy: Teaching as Romance. Alas, the online version does not include the photo of the then 83 year old Green, reddish hair, v-shaped face, glasses, broad-shouldered jacket, collared dark shirt and matching skirt, flowing scarf dotted with green and white, looking intent and much younger than her age. Luckily, you can both see what she looks like and hear her discuss snippets of philosophy at the maxine greene foundation for social imagination, the arts & education, which she founded in 2003.

Since 1976 Greene has been the Philosopher-in-Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. (To read about the Institute, click the “Lincoln Center Institute” link in the lower right of the Lincoln Center page, under Arts and Education.) I was so taken with Greene’s ideas that during the summer of 2002 I participated in the Lincoln Center Institute’s National Education Workshop: Introduction to Aesthetic Education. (More on that in a future post.)

Maxine Greene’s ideas, along with the Lincoln Center workshop, greatly informed my vision of professional development. Greene also introduced me to John Dewey, another educational philosopher. (Yes, more on him in a future post.)

From 1996 to 2005 I kept a journal of writings about books I read. Here is part of what I wrote about Greene’s Releasing the Imagination. In fact, these are quotes from her book that set the stage for my philosophy of professional development, and confirmed my ideas about education that were formed by my initial six years of teaching at St Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York.

…to provoke our students to break through the limits of the conventional and the taken for granted, we ourselves have to experience breaks with what has been established in our own lives; we have to keep arousing ourselves to begin again.

By “aesthetic education,” I mean the deliberate efforts to foster increasingly informed and involved encounters with art.

All depends upon a breaking free, a leap, and then a question. I would like to claim that this is how learning happens and the educative task is to create situations in which the young are moved to begin to ask, in all the tones of voice there are, “Why?”

Mel meet Ken, Ken meet Mel

Just imagine a conversation between Dr Mel Levine and Sir Ken Robinson. They’d both be telling stories about individuals, education, and the process of learning. They really should meet each other, if they haven’t already, as they both advocate for finding your passion and pursuing it, and they both would like to see education change to better serve all students.

Mel Levine aims to help demystify kids and young adults to themselves, so they better understand how they learn by understanding their strengths and weaknesses. A person’s strengths can serve as the foundation around which their learning and maturing take place. Sometimes it is difficult to assess one’s own strengths, though, particularly when one’s weaknesses can seem insurmountable or simply overshadowing. The goal of Mel’s program is to assist individuals in overcoming or circumventing their weaknesses, while highlighting, enjoying and celebrating their strengths.

Ken Robinson believes that individuals should pursue their passions, and that many times in education the educators school individuals out of their passions. Schools should retune themselves to place equal emphasis on the nontraditional areas, such as the arts, thus permitting students who enjoy or excel in these areas ample opportunity to pursue their studies while being lauded for those skills, regardless of their aptitude in more traditional areas.

Both Mel and Ken feel that having a passion and being able to pursue it are highly motivating and important aspects of education, and are often downplayed (when not in typical academic areas) in favor of more traditional areas. I think they would have a fine time chatting with one another!

Don’t take my word for it! Here they are, in their own words (except for Garr’s blog entry.)

On his Presentation Zen blog Garr Reynold’s has an excellent summary of Sir Ken Robinson on the art of public speaking.

Interviews with Ken Robinson

• IMNO – International Mentoring Network Organization: World Renowned Expert on Innovation and Creativity
• Phorecast Podcast No 01 – Sir Ken Robinson (12/10/07)
• DishyMix Episode 6 – Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity and Innovation Expert
• Mediasnackers Podcast #88 (6/24/07)

Interviews with Mel Levine

• Educational Leadership – Celebrate Strengths, Nurture Affinities: A Conversation with Mel Levine (9/06)
• NPR – Mel Levine: Teaching All Kinds of Minds (1/24/05)
• A Series of audio and video interviews with Mel Levine on the All Kinds of Minds web site
  Family Talk – Part 1
  Family Talk – Part 2
  How To Nurture Success In All Children
  Students As Innocent Victims Of Their Own Wiring
  How To Understand Difficulties That Are Not Well Understood

Time Off to Think

It was a sunny Sunday, the day after our closing performance of The Pajama Game, and my husband and I were taking one of our regular long walks in the brisk sunshine. Sometimes we are quiet and pensive, and other times we are quite talkative; this walk was one of those chatty times. As we returned home and unbundled ourselves from winter jackets, my husband commented that I should participate in the musical again next year, as he had been struck by the number of creative ideas I proposed during our walk.

My reply was that during the last month of preparing for the musical, and especially during the last ten days (including the two performance days), I had not consciously thought of any of the topics about which we talked during our walk. It occurred to me that by taking my mind completely off of the topics, the ideas had been able to jell on their own; just like leaving a good dish alone in the frig to marinate.

Janet Rae-Dupree writes for the Business section of the New York Times. In her February 3, 2008 Unboxed column, Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work she discusses what it takes for innovation to happen. In describing one innovator, she notes that he “likes to go to bed with one or more problems on his mind.” and his response is that “Typically, I’ll fall asleep chewing on it and then I’ll wake up at 4 in the morning with some sort of solution”. Rae-Dupree goes on to quote a psychologist who states that “Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume that some kind of information processing keeps going on even when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep.”

While the article is focused on innovators and entrepreneurs, that incubation process happens to all of us when we are mulling ideas over a sustained period of time. The ideas come in and out of our consciousness, and they simmer in the background until sufficiently cooked. At that point, we may refine them, toss them, or serve them up as is. It is this incubation, or simmering process, that is intriguing, because it is possible for all types of outside stimuli to impact the process. You never know in advance what comment or image or interaction will help the idea ferment and bring it to fruition.

Image: iStockphoto 3879802