Creativity Skills Applied to Earth Science Education: Examples from K-12 Teachers in a Graduate Creativity Class

Journal of Geoscience Education, Jan 2005 by Rule, Audrey C

ABSTRACT

In 1950, J. P. Guilford, the President of the American Psychological Association, gave a speech often identified as initiating national interest in creativity in which he asked researchers to find the promise of creativity in our children and to investigate enhancement of the development of the creative personality. Fifty years later, Yager (2000) called for the knowledge accumulated during the ensuing years of inquiry to be applied to science education.

This article briefly explores different aspects of creativity, and then examines K-12 teachers' reactions to exercises applied to earth science concepts in a graduate creativity class. Different types of puzzle activities centering on geoscience content include a quiz game based on Odyssey of the Mind spontaneous problems, and other exercises related to embedded words, transformed clichés, remotely associated word sets, and wordsmithing. Teachers used visualization for an imaginary interview with a geoscientist, along with personal analogy of an earth science feature. As a culminating activity, teachers fashioned a geoscience curriculum material with a given set of items after using Productive Thinking (Schlichter and Palmer, 1993) to generate possible uses for each given material. Ideas for applying the activities to geoscience classes at various grade levels are included.

INTRODUCTION

Yager (2000) presented a six-domain model for science teaching in his article titled "A Vision for What Science Education Should Be Like for the First Twenty-five Years of a New Millennium" that called for the incorporation of more creative thinking into science education. This domain of imaging and creating included visualizing, puzzle solving, generating alternate or unusual uses for objects, combining things in new ways, and producing unusual ideas. Yager lamented (p. 337), "Most science programs view a science program as something to be done to students to help them learn a given body of information. Little formal attention has been given in science programs to the development of students' imaginations and creative thinking... Much research and development has been done on developing students' abilities in this creative domain, but little of this has been purposely incorporated into science programs... Attention to these features approaches real science far more than remembering details or performance skills." Most geoscience instructors are interested in incorporating creative activities into their teaching, provided these exercises enhance student learning of content. How might this be accomplished and what constitutes a "creative" activity, anyway? I will explore these questions by showing how inservice elementary teachers apply creative thinking exercises to earth science topics during a graduate level course in creativity.

CREATIVITY

There are many research-supported approaches to defining the components of creativity. These include examining mental abilities, creative accomplishments, personality traits, biological traits, biographical traits, observable behaviors, and more-recently explored aspects such as systems of creative activity and motivational aspects of creativity. I will briefly visit different facets of creativity here to give the reader a sense of the many ways creativity manifests itself and therefore the many ways it may be encouraged.

Torrance (1992) identified five major mental abilities, fluency (the ability to produce many ideas), flexibility (the ability to take different approaches to a problem), originality (generating unique ideas), elaboration (the ability to add details to ideas), and resistance to premature closure (the ability to stay open and avoid leaping to conclusions). He also noted several other important creative strengths. Among these are emotional expressiveness, storytelling articulateness, unusual visualization, humor, and fantasy. However, there are other widely recognized mental abilities that contribute to creativity (A good discussion is in Davis and Rimm, 1998, p. 186-8). These include problem finding (detecting difficulties, missing information), problem defining (the ability to identify the "real" problem), visualization (imagining things in the mind's eye), regression (thinking playfully like a child), transformation (changing ideas into new ones) and analogical thinking. In addition, many intellectual abilities support creativity: evaluation, synthesis, analysis, prediction, concentration, and logic.

Bull and Davis (1980), among others (Holland, 1961; Walkup, 1965, Taft and Gilchrist, 1971; Davis, 1975) contended that the best measure of a person's creative potential was his/her history of past creative accomplishments. This supports the argument that involving students in creative school activities may lead to later creative achievements. Bull and Davis classified activities as non-creative, minor creative, and major creative, providing a scale against which to judge a set of accomplishments. Minor creative activities were mostly for personal enjoyment and involved such things as flower arranging, personal home decoration, writing unpublished stories, and producing artwork (unpaid), among others. Major creative activities required some type of public recognition and included publications of poetry or stories, sale of crafts or artwork, patents and commercially available games, and being hired as a performer.