Abstract
A growing number of scholars have come to see creativity, not as a trait or force or process, but as ideology – a set of seldom questioned values and assumptions about individuals and change that characterizes our time while unifying and reinforcing other ideological concepts, such as individualism and neophilia. What does this ideology look like in education? Can educators manage its impact, and even influence its meaning? In other words, inevitably working from within our ideology of creativity, what moves are available once we are aware of the stakes?
This chapter provides two examples of how the ideology of creativity can affect education. Then potential next steps in managing the ideology and influencing its development are proposed: adopting frameworks that promote participatory creativity, ensuring that analysis of complex systems is taught effectively and studying famous creative people with a broader social lens. This is a suggestive, not comprehensive, list. A form of creativity itself, this work will have to emerge from the complex interactions that constitute, maintain and drive both creativity research and education. More important than any specific recommendation, though, is awareness of the ideology – being attuned to the issues and discussing them.
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Freedan (2003) has argued that, based on convention, the term ideology proper should be limited to traditional ideologies: communism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism and fascism. The argument presented here obviously differs from that position, given the number of scholars who have talked about creativity as ideology. In addition, there does not seem to be another word that works as well in capturing the pervasive nature of unquestioned assumptions to so many aspects of life; the broad network of values, ideas and practices that fall under creativity; its use (in some contexts) as smokescreen for oppression as discussed by Weiner (2000), and its power within a particular period of time.
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For example, the chapter on the meeting of the Native American, European and African worlds in Houghton Mifflin’s The Americans (Danzer et al. 2012) describes the social, economic and political conditions of these three civilizations in the fifteenth century. Attention is also given to naval technologies that allowed Europeans to undertake colonial expansion. There is even a boxed text juxtaposing positive and negative historical views of Columbus. At the same time Columbus is definitely the central focus of the changes that occurred. This balancing of systemic and individualistic views is a step in the right direction but also confusing to read. The description of European society makes Columbus seem like a common type of man of his times, looking for upward mobility in one of the only ways possible at the time – trade – when naval technologies made such navigation possible, nation states were rising competitively and his backers, the monarchs of Spain, were particularly ambitious. Then the pages and quotes devoted to just Columbus, as well as the point/counterpoint about his legacy, seem to indicate that he was, for better or worse, both extraordinary and the cause of the change.
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Hanchett Hanson, M. (2019). Navigating the Ideology of Creativity in Education. In: Beghetto, R.A., Corazza, G.E. (eds) Dynamic Perspectives on Creativity. Creativity Theory and Action in Education, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99163-4_16
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