Teaching Creativity

The steps taken in interdisciplinary research, referred to in Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration, are similar to those identified in the literatures on creativity and design: each involve gathering and evaluating relevant ideas, integrating these in a novel fashion, developing a more comprehensive understanding or approach, and persuading others of its value.

The creativity literature insists that students can be taught to be more creative. In particular it is useful for them to understand the interdisciplinary/creative process discussed above. It is also useful to appreciate that creativity is facilitated by (a time-consuming and risky process of) reading/looking widely and not casually ignoring ideas that have been tried unsuccessfully before. Interdisciplinary practices such as trying to understand the perspectives of others encourage creativity.

Creativity involves both the conscious and subconscious minds: The conscious mind gathers the necessary insights and evaluates the synthesis generated by the subconscious. The subconscious can be stimulated in a variety of ways. Importantly, it is most likely to generate ideas when we are not consciously thinking about our problem. The strategy of visual "organization" discussed under Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration can be extended to mind-mapping, a strategy of placing all relevant ideas on a piece of paper and studying these: this has been found to encourage subconscious synthesis.

Increasingly, the creativity literature emphasizes the importance of persuasion, itself a creative act. General Education programs might then decide to teach students rhetorical techniques. See Designing a General Education Curriculum

Creative Design thinking from an interdisciplinary perspective (Frédéric Darbellay, Zoe Moody, Todd Lubart, Eds.), Berlin: Springer. Forthcoming, 2017. Some chapters in this book apply interdisciplinary thinking to creativity while others address how creativity can infuse interdisciplinary research and teaching.

See Welch, James IV (2007) “The role of intuition in interdisciplinary insight” Issues in Integrative Studies 25, 131-55 for a discussion of the role of the subconscious in interdisciplinary research. [All past volumes of the journal are available at http://oakland.edu/ais/publications/]