Matthew Worwood: In this episode, we reconnect with James to discuss our new co-edited book on generative AI and creativity, reflecting on concerns about how AI may influence learning and the creative process, and then we’re gonna dive into his latest exploration of creativity in the movies.

Matthew Worwood: Hello everyone. My name is Dr.

Matthew Worwood: Matthew

Matthew Worwood: Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett: And my name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett: On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood: We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett: All with the goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood: So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood: Last time we had our emerging scholar, Jimmy Wilson, onto the show, and if you remember, Jimmy is a longtime participant of the podcast, but we also have a really close friend and colleague that we like to bring on when we can, and that is James Kaufman. So before I welcome James to the show,

Matthew Worwood: i’m just gonna give you a little bit of his bio in case you’re not familiar with James, but if you’re in the field of creativity, my gut feeling is you are. So James Kaufman is a professor of educational psychology at Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. He has written or edited more than 60 books.

Matthew Worwood: In fact, we think it’s exactly 60 books based on our conversation including the forthcoming Creativity Through the Movies and The Creativity Advantage and many Cambridge handbooks. James has developed many theories, most notably the Four Cs with Ron Beghetto, which we talk about so much on the show, and it’s such a big part of the work that Cyndi and I do.

Matthew Worwood: And he’s also developed several self-report measures of creativity, including the Kaufman Domains of Creativity scale, and is currently focusing on positive outcomes of creativity. James, welcome back to the show. It’s great to have you.

James Kaufman: It’s great to be here. I always really enjoy coming and getting to see you guys and chat about creativity.

Matthew Worwood: I was gonna joke around and say we need to give James a name

Cyndi Burnett: We do need to give James a name, but I think this is his fourth time because we had him on a Double Espresso initially. Yeah. And then we had him on with Dana Rowe- Yeah

Cyndi Burnett: about the creativity in theater, and then we had him- There we are … come back again on AI, and now fourth time to talk about what’s happening in the field of creativity and creativity research. And I wanna start off because I don’t think, Matt hasn’t really talked about this on the show, but if you’re watching the video, here it is.

Cyndi Burnett: Ooh, here it is. Their latest edited collection, edited by Matthew Worwood and James C. Kaufman, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Precautions, Perspectives, and Possibilities. So congratulations to the two of you. Cue really fun celebration music.

Cyndi Burnett: That is us celebrating because, I don’t think in the academic world we celebrate enough when we tackle something as big as an edited collection on a topic that is so incredibly pertinent to what’s happening in the world today around- AI and creativity. So I would love to interview both of you for a little bit on what you have learned from this experience in pulling together this collection from some of the leading scholars in the field of creativity research.

Cyndi Burnett: And what were some of y- I would love to hear what were some of your key insights in putting this collection together?

James Kaufman: James, you wanna go first? I can jump in. The, probably the biggest one was realizing that nearly every creativity researcher either has a gut feeling of the possibilities are amazing and it’s exciting, or, “Oh my God, this is not good.”

James Kaufman: And that as we received the chapters, it was usually relatively easy to see what camp each author fell into. And obviously people could see merits of the other side, but so I’m very much in the, “Oh no,” camp, although I can see aspects of it being positive. But I found it fascinating, not just the content, but also the valence of do you see this new paradigm shifting thing as the, what are the ca- what’s the capacity for good, what’s the capacity for not good, and what will probably happen in reality?

Matthew Worwood: Yeah, I had a very similar experience to James. I remember when we started this project, which was… James, I wonder, i- it was it 2023? Was it spring 2023 or spring 2024? I’ve forgotten.

James Kaufman: Probably 2023.

Matthew Worwood: Yeah. That’s incredible. So yeah. And I remember when we actually started the book, there was that kind of fear of how long it would take.

Matthew Worwood: In the end I feel like the outcomes of the chapters are highly relevant and remain relevant because it wasn’t… A lot of it was thinking about the precautions of possibilities well into the future. But I remember I started off as an AI centralist to a certain extent, and I think that’s important.

Matthew Worwood: Cyndi, a shout-out, you’re always talking about keep open, and I think one of the reasons why I’m an AI centralist, or was an AI centralist, is because I’ve been trying to remain open to the different perspectives. And that was the key point when we had the word perspectives in the title as well, because there’s a recognition that there are different perspectives, and quite often depending on what perspective you’re taking and the context to which you’re discussing, y- y- you know, we, we can see, some significant swings between one person’s view and another person’s view.

Matthew Worwood: But as I began to read all these chapters coming in, I don’t know if it’s almost like a social media feed because they were kinda… I felt like at one point they were coming in again and again and again. I started to feel myself just swinging a little bit more to the negative, to the extent that maybe influenced the chapter that I wrote, which James I’m not criticizing.

Matthew Worwood: I remember your feedback was, I think you wrote positive about the argument, and then you kinda said, “But glum.” It was, I think you referred to it as glum. So yeah, the similar, a similar outcome. I think I went a little bit on the negative side, and I think I’ve kinda stayed there to tell you the truth.

Cyndi Burnett: So what is the negative? You probably uncovered a bunch of negatives through all of the scholars’ voices. So what are some of the negatives that we should be watching out for?

Matthew Worwood: I’m gonna basically say that I think our negatives were pointing towards the most recent publications that we’re starting to see coming out over the last 12 to 15 months. I will do a shout-out to David Cropley. If anyone’s following David Cropley on LinkedIn I think his camp is very clear, shall we say based on his LinkedIn posts. And I would say be aware if you’re gonna post anything positive about AI and he’s following you. But I think that, y- you could see that the, this idea that, look, if we think about originality and appropriateness, the more appropriate, we endeavor to make AI and AI platforms, the more we’re gonna put at risk originality.

Matthew Worwood: And I think there w- there definitely was a concern about how original are the ideas going to be when we use terms like cobots or collaborating with AI agents. And, you start getting into the conversation that we’ve had a lot on the show, Cyndi, around augmentation and automation, and if you’re automating too much, particularly when it comes to doing that cognitive offloading around creativity or the thinking skills that we associate with creativity, what might be the long-term impact?

Matthew Worwood: And I don’t know about you, James, but I’ve actually been quite surprised from some of the recent publications about how quickly we’re starting to already see some indications that we can observe that negative impact in the field. That, That’s one thing I wasn’t necessarily expecting to happen, but I felt like that was definitely emerging in the book.

James Kaufman: Certainly, I feel like the initial research on AI and creativity was, for one, a lot of it wasn’t by creativity researchers, it was by people who are more in computer science. And just the fact, oh, AI can be creative and do well in a divergent thinking task. Okay, that’s just neat. For me, it’s this fundamental split between the process and the product, where if you want to talk about the product, yeah, AI can absolutely make it better, make it perhaps more creative But in real life, any individual product usually doesn’t really matter.

James Kaufman: Like I, I was talking with somebody about how to use AI in the classroom and how these different exercises with AI and how, it could improve the kids’ drawings for the fridge and… But it was like, but what does that matter? What does it matter if a second grader’s drawing for the fridge looks better?

James Kaufman: Do they gain anything by using AI? I feel like so many of the advantages of being creative are about the process, not how creative is your product. And again, a lot of this later research is showing there’s no transfer. Most of it shows that, yeah, once the AI goes away, there’s no improvement that’s maintained, and usually it’s worse.

James Kaufman: And people aren’t very insightful about understanding how they use AI.

Cyndi Burnett: So do you think that’s gonna hurt our creative process? Or if we were to look at our undergraduate students and they start using AI in their creative process.

Cyndi Burnett: So let’s say they wanna write a script. You’ve written an off-Broadway show called Magenta, and let’s just say you’re coaching students on writing their own script, and they’re using AI to help facilitate that. Do you think that AI is going to inhibit their creativity in using AI?

James Kaufman: To me, it’s all about how it’s used.

James Kaufman: If somebody’s using AI to Check the language to make sure there’s no typos or check for consistency. So if if you’re writing a play, it’s very easy to have the stage direction say, scene it’s daytime, and then have a character go look at the moon. So having AI, in essence, be the same way as if you asked a friend to read it carefully, I think that’s fine.

James Kaufman: In terms of if you’re brainstorming with AI, again, I feel like people overestimate what they contribute, and they underestimate what they take from AI and there’s some slowly growing work on this

James Kaufman: I guess, like if it’s you’re trying to do something that’s like a pro speed level, you want it to be as good as possible. There are ways that AI can help make that product better, and I think there are ways that AI can take away some of the boring, annoying part.

James Kaufman: I guess I feel Most times when it’s used for convenience. And look, I get it. I- it’s not like I am, it’s not I am shocked, that, people wanna do the easier thing. I like doing the easier thing. I don’t know what I’d do if there was a button on my laptop I could press and it would just, boop, finish this article for me and have it all be done.

James Kaufman: And if I truly thought it would be like as if I did it. But it’s a lot of what I’ve been studying recently is on creativity and meaning and purpose. And I feel like an awful lot of the good parts of creativity and that feeling that we’ve accomplished something, we’ve created something I think we lose an awful lot of that with AI

Matthew Worwood: And I, just to build on that a little bit and, something that I think I expressed in my chapter was this idea of the convenience trap. And then and to your point, James, right? Like there- there’s so much around the product. And when you think about as humans, we wanna be more productive in producing the product, creating the thing, getting it to market, making it better.

Matthew Worwood: Okay. To your point, I think we could be in a situation where AI could assist in, in… it will assist in the productivity and potentially increasing or enhancing existing products in some ways and different outcomes. Again, we have to be mindful that there’s different contexts, and I’m probably speaking more general and thinking a little bit from an education perspective.

Matthew Worwood: But like, to me, that seems very situated in industry. And I feel- … James, when you’re talking about this idea of how it’s used There is a lot of experience and knowledge that these professionals have that can help them determine where it’s the most appropriate time to integrate AI tools into their workflow.

Matthew Worwood: In the classroom and learning environment, I think, do we really wanna care about product? This is the wake-up call. It’s no longer about you you taking this piece of paper at the end that is 10 pages of writing and you evaluating just that as representative of the student learning.

Matthew Worwood: We now need to recognize that we need to get more in the weeds of the process and what’s happening with the process, and how we’re monitoring and evaluating and measuring both creativity and also the learning that’s occurring within the process. And the thing that I’m, going back to the chapter I’m most worried about, and I was alluding to social media and all these different things, it’s like, if we’re totally honest with ourselves, do we really think we can stop students just skipping the process and rushing towards the product within our current culture of learning?

Matthew Worwood: And I look at if we think about social media and even with all these things that we know about social media and the harm it can create, we’re still struggling and debating about access for young people. So I feel like this is gonna be a scenario in 10 years, we’re gonna see some research and we’re gonna be like, “Ooh, maybe we shouldn’t have allowed middle schoolers to be using AI,” and that, that’s where I’m at. And see the more I talk about it, James, the more I think I’m leaning more on that negative camp, and I really think it’s an outcome of the book.

James Kaufman: Knowing what we know about the social media and all of that, it’s still happening. Schools still have kids using iPads and having access to all this stuff.

James Kaufman: Just in the same way that a lot of schools and colleges are leaning into AI, and a lot of colleges are really leaning into AI and pushing it, and I have no idea why other than maybe fear of missing out, fear of seeming old-fashioned. Certainly the fact that there’s no reliable way of Finding out if people used it or not, the AI checkers are a chance.

James Kaufman: So it’s, it again, it’s the problem of this thing being loosed on the world without any checks or balances. And, shockingly, there are more people who are willing to bend ethics who wanna try to make money. But even in industry, certainly AI for the short term, but there’s also this…

James Kaufman: I don’t know, it just feels like all the companies who are embracing AI, everything’s starting to feel similar, and you can tell, and already there’s a pretty big backlash, at least among actual human beings

Cyndi Burnett: But don’t you think it’s like the toothb- the toothpaste issue? Once you take the toothpaste out, you can’t really put it back in.

Cyndi Burnett: And now that we’ve, like with social media, we can’t– we can tell kids, “Don’t go on social media,” or, “It’s not good for you to be on social media,” but they will always find a way. And even I was having a conversation with my own two kids who are both in high school, and I said, “What’s the policy on AI in your school?”

Cyndi Burnett: And they said, “Absolutely no use of it.” And they both laughed and they said, “Yeah, but everyone still uses it.” So- the toothpaste is out there’s no going back to say, “We’re just not gonna use it because it’s gonna stop our learning.” And I’m sure this is the conversation that most educators are having right now.

Cyndi Burnett: So what do we do about it? Do we help them work with it? Do we help facilitate the appropriate use of it? Ethics is such a big piece of AI and creativity. Um, Do we start teaching courses on the ethics of using AI? What are your perspectives on this?

James Kaufman: I don’t know how much it’ll help.

James Kaufman: I like the idea of a class on teaching the ethics of AI and creativity, and my guess is that most students would still use AI to write their assignments.

Matthew Worwood: I do teach that course, actually.

Matthew Worwood: One of the things that I do is we actually get them to uh, do one of the divergent thinking tests. So I can have like, 60 students in the class, and we go through and we do one of the divergent thinking tests.

Matthew Worwood: And I, I, and I kinda, like, say, “Right, compare your outcomes to the outcomes of your partner.” And I say, “How many of you got similar?” And there’s only a couple of hands out. And I say, “Right, now we’re gonna do the same thing a couple of times with your preferred LLM, right?” And so, you know, you have all the 60 students, they all do it.

Matthew Worwood: And then I say, “How many are similar?” And suddenly all these hands start flying up, right? And to the extent that it’s not even similar, you’ve got identical words. Even after doing that, it’s my hope that they recognize maybe I shouldn’t be using the AI at all. But I think, again, it comes down to the culture.

Matthew Worwood: I think Learning is too much about that product and that outcome. And I think that, that actually I don’t have , a massive issue in some ways about AI being used to create something, so long as you’ve learned and met the objectives through the process. Like it could be that I’m interacting with a wonderful product or a publish-ready paper that now suddenly we can do really great things with because it’s actually a much higher level, that end product.

Matthew Worwood: But as long as all of the learning that occurred is of value to the student and it’s them who’s constructed the knowledge. To your point with the toothpaste, what’s interesting, Cyndi, is that I actually wondering if that question is less about AI and more about the existing culture of learning that we’ve established, right?

Matthew Worwood: Can we get the focus more on I value learning? ‘Cause I think if students value learning, I think they can kinda like self-regulate their use of AI. But if they don’t value that learning experience, then to your point, James, they’re kinda just gonna do the quickest, least path of resistance, right?

James Kaufman: And it’s this almost circular thing where particularly if they’re in a context where AI is allowed and even encouraged, and perhaps things like critical thinking aren’t being pushed, why would they value learning?

Cyndi Burnett: What was the word that James used when he read your article, Matt?

Matthew Worwood: Glum. Glum.

Cyndi Burnett: Glum. Okay. So that was a bit glum.

Matthew Worwood: So- hold on. To switch it a little bit positive though, all right? ‘Cause I wanted to do this- that’s

Cyndi Burnett: what I was gonna say. Let’s get

Matthew Worwood: a

Cyndi Burnett: little bit into the possibilities. Okay.

Matthew Worwood: All right. The one thing that, that

Matthew Worwood: Before you asked that question, Cyndi , uh, James, I can’t remember exactly what you were saying, but you brought up a little bit, ’cause you’ve done so much around the creativity advantage and the meaning of creativity. And, I just referenced this idea of value learning. I do think that when I observe students truly identifying themselves as a creator within a particular domain, they seem to be a lot more resistant in wanting to use, and I don’t know if there’s any research or articles being written on this, but they seem a lot more resistant to use AI.

Matthew Worwood: So if I’m i- an English major in creative writing, I’m a lot more resistant to using AI to support my creative writing, but I might be more than happy to use AI to assist in creating the posters or content creation on the other side. But if I’m a digital media and design major and I’m actually seeing, identifying myself as a creator in the domain of animation or a domain in graphic design, I’m less wanting to create it.

Matthew Worwood: So I just wonder from a positive, if actually where students, and even all people, value their creative contributions within a domain, maybe they are likely to use it less. But where they don’t necessarily identify as a creative in a domain, perhaps they’re more likely to use it more. So I’ve

Matthew Worwood: That, that’s my first question, and the other question is to bring that up about what does that look like from a democratization perspective, James? ‘Cause that was something of your title, right? So if I identify myself as a creative writer, I might choose not to use it ’cause I value my creative writing, but then am I competing against the business student who is using it to create a book? Because they don’t see themselves in that way.

James Kaufman: I feel like that’s where I think of the work of David Cropley and others, which I think we were talking about before. But the idea that there is, at least for now, a certain ceiling of how good AI can be.

James Kaufman: And I also feel like there’s a certain feeling you get when you read something that’s mostly AI. Like I feel if that writer is talented and good I feel like, let’s say you’re working at a publisher and you’re reading all of these manuscripts, I feel like when you’re looking at the aggregate, something that’s written by a human who is decently talented will still stand out just because it isn’t the same.

James Kaufman: And that so much of the AI stuff, if you look at it one by one, AI stuff looks creative. It’s when you’re looking at it in groups of 10, 20 thousands that you realize, oh, when you look at it this way, in the aggregate, it’s pretty limited. But most people don’t do that

Cyndi Burnett: So James, I’m recalling our conversation that we had around your book, The Creativity Advantage, which talked about the health and wellness benefits. So do you think with everything happening with AI, there will be a wonderful increase in creativity, in meaning-making, in building, in creation that will come because of our wellbeing, and maybe a shift more toward that side of creativity versus sort of the work side, because some of our tasks are being taken up with AI?

James Kaufman: I’m worried I’m going to become glum.

James Kaufman: It’s a very nice way of thinking about it. I guess my concern is that it’s often random what is the spark that gets somebody to fall in love with being creative. I feel like if you’re used to using AI for outsourcing your thinking, you’re gonna keep doing that. And almost all of the creativity advantage is about the process and we discover what we are passionate about in part by doing stuff we don’t like. I knew when I was pretty young I wanted to do creative writing, and that was my thing.

James Kaufman: But most people don’t necessarily know when they’re super young, “This is the thing I wanna do.” And you kinda have to discover it, and sometimes that means being forced to do it.

James Kaufman: There are all sorts of things that aren’t my primary passion but that I’d like to be able to do creatively. But in the real world, if I’m not forced to do them, I don’t. I’d like to get into crafting. I have all these little sewing type of, little kits to make stuff, and they’ve been very nicely sitting in the corner of my bedroom for the last three, four, seven years because unless somebody says, “You do this right now,” I’m not going to

James Kaufman: Comparably, if there is, “Oh, I have to do these seven things and I can do all of them with AI.” If you don’t already know that you enjoy doing something, I think a lot of folks are just gonna keep doing it that way, in which case they won’t discover all this stuff. And certainly you could argue that you’re always gonna have people who resist it, and that always gonna have people who at some point will do something creative on their own, and once you do it and you like it…

James Kaufman: it’s one reason why when I teach undergrads, I have them do a big project, and it can be almost anything they want. And an awful lot of them really enjoy doing it. They do something they didn’t think they were going to ever do or something they thought about doing. But again, unless you have this, “Oh, I have to do it for this reason,” a lot of times you don’t do it.

James Kaufman: So if nothing else okay, if I can be the reason you have to do something creative, but

James Kaufman: I don’t know. I don’t see AI in that kind of positive way as, oh, we can outsource the stuff we don’t wanna do, and we can spend time doing the stuff we really like to do. And again, in, in part because where is AI being used right now? AI isn’t loading and unloading my dishwasher. AI isn’t cleaning my house.

James Kaufman: AI isn’t doing my taxes. AI isn’t making sure that my car gets to the mechanic. What can AI do? It can write poetry for me. Great. That’s something I actually wouldn’t mind doing.

Cyndi Burnett: So I just want to congratulate you. Let’s go back to the celebration of this wonderful book that you’ve both created and edited together, and we will make sure we link this in our show notes.

Cyndi Burnett: So make sure you check that out. Now, James, we have a- Wait,

Matthew Worwood: Cyndi, there’s one w- quickly I just want to throw out. There are some positive views of AI in, in the book, so we should clarify it, all right? We do have, the idea of AI obviously providing us potentially with a lot more knowledge, for us to, to work toward, particularly if we can be more trusting. And of course, that’s gonna be a huge assistant for creativity. We also have chapters around the book some interesting things around copyright and to some of the stuff that James alluded to, when you’re a professional, there are probably some ways that it can actually enhance or lead to new artistic outcomes.

Matthew Worwood: And there’s probably ways to maintain the artist and their relationship with the creative process despite those new outcomes. And of course, there’s also opportunities for us to shift how we’re viewing where we’re prioritizing creativity as well. I think a lot of this conversation is around creativity, but there’s a lot of conversation around idea validation um, as, as well.

Matthew Worwood: I think ultimately just to quickly summarize, I think within the process itself and the act of creating and making I think teachers just need to be really sensitive when you’re going and giving them an assignment and you want them to learn something. You want to be really careful how AI is being used to assist in that process, that struggle toward that learning objectives.

Matthew Worwood: You don’t want to make it easier, and you certainly don’t want them offloading any of that learning to AI. Um, So I think maybe if it focuses more on the creation after the learning, that might be okay at the moment, I think,

James Kaufman: maybe.

Matthew Worwood: Any- anything more, James, to add positively from the book?

Matthew Worwood: Feedback. There’s some conversations around feedback as well.

James Kaufman: Certainly I think that AI has tremendous potential and capacity when used well. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff being done with it, with training bots to do different things. And I think certainly there is a possibility and potential of some really exciting things that could assist and help people develop their creative potential.

Cyndi Burnett: I wonder about assessment as well, like creative assessment. And we had Selçuk Acar on last season I believe, wasn’t it, Matt? Yeah. And he was talking about how we might be able to use AI to look at students’ levels of creativity. And so I, I think there is a possibility in that as well. And, and James, I know you were involved a bit with the PISA that came out.

James Kaufman: Yes.

Cyndi Burnett: Do you think that AI could help with doing something like that?

James Kaufman: Absolutely. And in fact, I think one of the frustrating things with PISA is just timing, where P- the PISA creativity assessment was done before AI was really out there. And so much time and energy was spent on scoring and, and- all this stuff that was done by humans. And honestly, I think that’s a good example that I think if AI had existed then I think that could have made things so much easier and better and possible at a larger scale,

…

James Kaufman: Which would’ve been wonderful.

Cyndi Burnett: Yeah. So do you think we could be seeing assessments in the near future that could be using AI to help us assess students’ levels of creativity?

James Kaufman: To a degree they’re already there. It’s just more being used for research. But there’s a lot of different creativity researchers who developed different measures that can be scored and almost everything you could imagine, different domains, different types. I think that is something as a creativity researcher that that’s neat.

James Kaufman: That if we can have AI be trained to imitate expert raters, and so all of a sudden we can do stuff more like consensual assessment technique where you use expert judges, except you don’t need to have the actual expert judges look at everything. That sounds terrific, you know?

Matthew Worwood: okay, James, let’s move to some lighter stuff, shall we? was, that was, That was pretty heavy. So let’s go to movies. All right? Let’s talk a little bit about movies, because you’ve been working on a book around the movies and creativity for a while. Um, and ac- actually, I’ve signed up to do a chapter on that book, haven’t I?

James Kaufman: That’s a different book. Oh, no. So I’ve just finished a book for Oxford, Creativity Through the Movies, where basically it- it’s me talking about creativity, the basics and the process and related constructs, and the good, the bad. And throughout, everything is movies. So there’s between three and fi- or five or six case studies per chapter, where it’s discussing movies and using movies to illustrate all these different creativity concepts.

James Kaufman: And I’ll weave in the research we have on the movies, like what are the motivations for watching movies, or the personality associated with different types of movies. And to be honest, I wrote this one for absolute fun. I enjoyed every minute of this. It got me to rewatch a lot of my favorites. I got to have the forward by Richard Schenkman, who directed The Man from Earth, which is one of my absolute favorite movies.

James Kaufman: I am working with Alexander Punt and PJ Barnett on a still gestating edited book on creativity in the movies, where it’s taking this idea and now tossing it out there and having a whole bunch of people doing, “Here’s a movie, here’s an idea,” as a compliment. They’re actually two different books.

Cyndi Burnett: Can you give us an example of the movies and the concept?

Matthew Worwood: Yeah. What movie should we all be watching, and why?

James Kaufman: Oh, that’s a good question. Okay. For the concept, one of these I used, I easily could use the other one. There’s a lot of stuff on how creativity can help us process grief, deal with grief and trauma and heal ourselves.

James Kaufman: And there have been a lot of recent amazing movies about that. One that flew under the radar, not last year but the year before, was a movie called Ghostlight, which is, it was filmed in Chicago, and it’s about a construction worker who ends up involved in a local production of Romeo and Juliet that helps him come to terms with his son’s death.

James Kaufman: It features him and his wife and his daughter, who are married and their daughter in real life In real, but all of them then play these same roles in the movies, in the movie- … and it, but not playing themselves. And it gives this lived-in feeling and showing how, in this case, acting and performance lets him come to terms, lets him grow.

James Kaufman: And then more recently Hamnet was another … I don’t know if you’ve seen Hamnet. It, one of my very favorites of last year. And again, how theater creation and the arts can help us come to terms with our grief and our loss. Another one from two years ago was Sing. How can we use, again, theater and creativity in the arts to cope with difficult situations?

James Kaufman: In fact, all three of these are these amazing and very different illustrations of how creativity can hold our hand through some of the darkest moments of our life.

Matthew Worwood: And just to throw it out there, the process probably, right? Like you look at Hamnet and that’s the, out of the, all the films you shared James, I know you like the kinda like less blockbustery type movies, but it’s the process, right?

Matthew Worwood: The, this … I don’t wanna give any of the titles away, but like the event occurs, the loss, and then I’m assuming all of them, there’s that process of engaging in this creative act that kinda- Exactly … leads to that healing along the way.

James Kaufman: And I think it’s notable with Go- both Ghost Light and Sing that we’re talking little C creativity.

James Kaufman: He’s joining a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet that is very much local people who have jobs who are doing this. Sing is about a prison theater group who is creating their own show. These are not professionals. These are not, … hamnet, yes, it’s about Shakespeare, but even then it’s the process of him writing and performing and his wife experiencing that.

James Kaufman: It’s not about, oh, Hamlet’s amazing. It’s about the journey.

Cyndi Burnett: I love that. I can’t wait to read, so you’ve got that book, and you’re doing something around motivation?

James Kaufman: Yes, I’ve been doing a bunch of new studies on motivation and just this idea that so much of the creativity motivation work looks at intrinsic and extrinsic and maps creativity onto that.

James Kaufman: But the idea that are there some specific motivations that are unique to creativity? And and Matthias Benedikt and colleagues have done some great stuff on this, and I’ve been working with a small group. Again, what are these unique motivations perhaps towards healing or expression?

James Kaufman: And looking at how creativity, yes, it maps onto standard ways of thinking about motivation or meaning for that matter, but are there specific to creativity additional pathways that we might wanna think about and study more? And all this stuff will hopefully be coming out relatively soon. , My guess, one of my future books will be about this,

Cyndi Burnett: I see episode five in the near future. You know what? I think, Matt, we should give a special award to James when we have episode five, because then, it’ll be like on, Saturday Night Live when you have like-

Cyndi Burnett: number five, he comes back. Number five, he gets a special award before he talks to us about his 80th book, which will probably be by the end of this year.

Matthew Worwood: I must admit, James what’s crazy is that my email always pings, right? I what’s it, ResearchGate? And it just pings, boing. James Kaufman has pub- And it’s it’s almost like once a week- … there, there’s a new article coming out. And what’s crazy, James, is how diverse the topics are.

Matthew Worwood: Yes. It’s incredible how different topics of creativity that you’re really kinda like delving into with your research.

James Kaufman: Yeah, so much of that is I have a huge network of amazing collaborators, and I’m often like, the expert who can just go and make sure this part is here, tidy this up.

James Kaufman: But a lot of the brilliance of this is just a very large network of amazing collaborators, which is honestly probably my favorite part of getting to spend creative and just getting to work with creativity researchers.

Matthew Worwood: James, thank you so much for coming back on the show. We look forward to coming on, and of course we’ll have a chance to talk a little bit more about a big project that you’re working on with Adam Green.

Matthew Worwood: We don’t wanna give too much away around that, but I think that is- It’s pretty cool … highly timely. Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting. Until next time, James, thank you. Absolutely … and if you are an emerging scholar in the field of creativity, then obviously you know James Kaufman, and I would encourage you to share this episode with your network.

Matthew Worwood: My name’s Dr. Matthew Worwood.

James Kaufman: And my name is Dr. Cyndi Burnett.

Cyndi Burnett: This episode was produced by Cyndi Burnett and Matthew Worwood. Our podcast assistant is Ann Fernando, and our editor is Sheikh Ahmed.