Creative Engagement

Abstract

Education is generally focused on achieving certain basic skills, rather than on the potential that might be achieved through the development of thinking and its improvement. As the previous chapter indicated, generative thinking fosters creativity through freedom of expression, experimentation, scaffolding of ideas, and reconstruction of thought. But generative thinking does not exist in a vacuum, and relies on evaluation in order to give it focus. Put another way, critical and creative thinking are interrelated and complementary aspects of thinking. As Richard Paul (1993) points out, if thinking lacks a purpose it becomes aimless, and if it does become useful it is merely by chance that we stumble across it. If we only employ creative thinking in the classroom it has nothing to keep it in check, and it will diverge and is likely to wander off aimlessly. In other words, if we continue to generate new ideas or come up with original ideas, these may go untested. As noted in the previous chapter, all ideas are generated from existing ideas; from the familiar, new ways of thinking come about. New ideas, however, must go through a process of evaluation and judgment in order for us to question what already exists and to see it in new ways. Reconstruction, as we noted previously, requires the use of both critical and creative thinking. Paul (1993) is worth quoting at length here with regards to what I have just said.