Food for Thought: Can Creativity Be Taught?
The following excerpt is from my part of a conversation on the Learning, Education, and Training Professionals Group on LinkedIn. Amy Stempel: There is a big difference between intellectual creativity and artistic creativity and I think we confuse the two all the time. Intellectual creativity is not “anything goes” nor is it especially artistic. Albert Einstein had to work within and explain the known rules of the universe before he could convince people of the Theory of Relativity. Truly creative people do not, in fact cannot, ignore the realities in which they find themselves. What they do is to interpret and make connections between and among facts and disciplines in ways that no one else has previously done. True intellectual creativity requires making peace with limits and constraints. That’s why it’s creative. Now, can you teach it? Yes and no. Counterintuitively, people need frameworks to begin creative thinking (see text structures). Those can be taught. However, only practice,
