Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:00:00]:
This is the horrible trap of the outside the box metaphor, right? Because none of us think outside our boxes. It’s not a possibility. We build our boxes and we change them and we reorganize them, but we don’t think outside them. We think outside other people’s boxes. And so that’s the kind of change that you’re bringing will depend on the context in the situation.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:27]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:30]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:32]:
This is the fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:36]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:41]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:52]:
Goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:00]:
So let’s begin today. We welcome to the show Michael Hanchet Hansen, who is a developmental psychologist. He is the director of the master’s Concentration in Creativity and Cognition at Teachers College, Columbia University, leader of the Participatory Creativity Lab, and a founding board member and the secretary of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation. Michael is one of the leading advocates for the participatory framework of creativity, which emphasizes the diversity of roles people take as participants in change. His most recent book, Creativity in improvised educations, case studies for understanding impact and implications, looks at case studies of creative work across a variety of domains and what these cases can teach us about the roles of education in lifelong creative development. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:01:55]:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:57]:
So we’d like to begin with your work as the leader of the participatory creativity lab. Can you describe to our listeners what participatory creativity is and what you do at this lab?

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:02:10]:
So the participatory creativity framework that we work in looks at how we participate in change, and that can be at the level of the individual seeking new practices or ideas to integrate into their point of view. It could be trying to influence the ideas and practices of a group or organization, and then it’s writ large. It is also what the level of contributing to the paths that a society takes and change over time. It sounds probably kind of like an Od way to talk about creativity, but probably pretty reasonable. In reality, though, once you make this slight shift in how we think, there are really broad and deep implications. And one of them I’ll just cite to begin with is that the core question implied by the idea of creativity shifts. It’s no longer how do we, quote unquote, have ideas? Because the ideas, as Bogotsky enumerated, come from the outside world. We internalize them, transform them, sometimes distort them, sometimes misremember them and spit them back out.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:03:28]:
And sometimes we do that in extraordinarily formal, big projects. And sometimes we do it much less formally in everyday life, we all have ideas. If I am engaged deeply enough in any domain, in any subject, I will have ideas. No matter how convergently I tend to think, and no matter how traditional my values are, if you get deeply enough into the weeds, you have ideas. At another level, we’re all working in symbol systems, and those symbol systems have their own dynamics. They change the domains we work in, change. The very conversations we’re involved in take their own course, and we will both contribute to that change and have to respond to it. So we’ll have to have ideas.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:04:14]:
If you think about it, just really, at the most basic level, every sentence is a creative act. You have a general idea of what you’re going to say, but when you start out, you don’t know how it ends. And it is that sense of risk and organizing resources, hear vocabulary, syntax, knowledge, et cetera, to express something. So we’ve moved away from this idea of having ideas to how do we take up the roles to participate in change? What roles do we take up? How do we occupy those roles? What are the knowledge, the skills, the experience that we want to bring to bear? How do we navigate, manage, exploit the complexity of the systems that we’re working in and that we’re part of? I think a great example in this, in education is my former student, and now at Project Zero, my esteemed colleague, Edward Clapp, who has worked with this idea with makerspaces, right. And developing participant profiles where you help the students understand the various roles they’re taking as a project takes form and the history of the project itself, who contributed and how many people are involved? Because you put a bunch of kids in a room and you give them a group project, and somebody at the end will say, no, that was not my idea. The ideology of creativity has really kind of taught them to do that, and this helps break that up. And in my opinion, as an educator, giving them a metacognition about the roles and the way they bring to bear their knowledge and skills is usually better than any number of brainstorming sessions, because this really helps them do what I see education as, which is to help us prepare and enable us to engage our worlds. And knowing how you like to do that and how you can do that is important.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:06:30]:
So that means there’s a lot more people involved in how we think of creativity. And it’s a much more complex question. It’s not just coming up with a bunch of ideas and a divergent thinking test. It’s really carrying through. You’ll probably recognize, because I know that, cindy, we were talking about Howard Gruber before we started this. I studied with Howard Gruber, and he was Piaget’s protege, Jean Piaget, the famous developmental psychologist. And what he did is he took Piaget’s idea of systemic development that Piaget used with children. And Gruber took those same principles and said, can we apply them to lifelong development of a distinctive point of view? And he found we could, and with some really interesting implications.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:07:17]:
And so he saw creative development as the development of a new point of view. And he saw it as know Michael.

Matthew Worwood [00:07:27]:
There’S a lot, I think, you know, the first thing for our listeners to do is in season one of the fueling creativity and education podcast, or maybe it was actually season two, we did have Vlad Glavanu on the episode to talk a little bit about social cultural approaches to creativity. And of course, that’s where the field has been shifting. But I think connecting it to education and Piaget, this idea of knowledge, this has kind of been something that we’ve spoken about, is the relationship between the construction of knowledge, how the individual student, quite often in our conversations, we’re talking about this, about the student constructs the knowledge. And Jonathan Plucker’s got this great definition of creativity where it’s really about taking old stuff, putting it with other old stuff, and creating new stuff. And I think within your story and the information that you’ve shared at the beginning, there is, I think that really is, we can’t emphasize that enough, is that a classroom environment is where students are going. They’re being exposed to new information, they’re interacting with their peers, but also have the guidance of the teacher. And ideally, what they’re doing is that they’re constructing new knowledge. And I think, am I right in thinking that to a certain extent, what you’re doing as well, the application piece, is thinking about how that knowledge then can be applied to change and how we can go about continuing to construct knowledge and implement that knowledge to change.

Matthew Worwood [00:08:52]:
Is that close to a summary?

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:08:54]:
Yes, and even the knowledge as change, but then taking it up one more step of abstraction, that in that classroom, helping the student be aware of the processes that are happening as they individually and as a group are integrating. You know, it applies across the curriculum. One thing that I’m just shocked by, as you said, Matt, sociocultural theory has been around a while now, and it is part of the leading edge of the sea change that’s happening in my field, but it gets applied so seldom to the classroom. I tell another story. I’ve done a lot of work with art education, and I did a lot of research with the Guggenheim Learning through art project, which is just a tremendous program where teaching artists go into classrooms. And a really wonderful teaching artist was working with kids to develop prints to design row houses. They lived in Brooklyn, and so they were looking at their community. Each design their own row house and then put it on a piece of paper so that you made a block of row houses.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:10:12]:
Right? So it was learning how to do prints, how to do stamps, how to do the sorts of carvings, how to do design, et cetera. And one of the things that she noticed is the kids started copying from each other. And at first she came to me and said, how should I change this? How do I get them to be original? And my response, and what we worked with together on this is don’t. That is exactly how architecture works. If you go through Brooklyn and you look at the penetration of the row houses, those small design elements, if you’re a good architectural historian, will tell you when the building was built, because everybody was copying from everybody else. It was a style. And the key thing you can learn here is really trace it. Who first came up with this particular way of designing a window? Who copied it? Who copied the copier? How did it spread throughout the system, and how did we develop a style? And to me, that is sort of how you think of it more in terms of complex systems and dynamics.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:11:22]:
But it applies to everything, right? History. That’s what we’re studying. We’re studying how change happens.

Matthew Worwood [00:11:28]:
Well, even humanity. Just look at the digital computing revolution and what was classified as the first personal computer. So many different people working on similar things. And of course, they’re within the same field, so they’re borrowing and exchanging ideas and aware of what everyone’s doing. I think what I really like about what you’re bringing to the table is it really is a collective effort by, I’d say, humanity, right? When we’re talking about big transformational change, it’s a collective effort, and we’ve got to kind of move forward. But that kind of begs the question to a certain extent, with the digital age, we’ve had some amazing breakthroughs in technology. But then when you look at something like climate change, and I keep coming to this, I feel like we’re not progressing as fast as we should do. Right? So I don’t know.

Matthew Worwood [00:12:13]:
I mean, this might be a bigger question, but is there certain external motivations that take a group in one direction over another direction? Profit, for example, is a lot more attractive for the idea. Well, how do we commercialize this? How do we make money from it? And I’m just sitting there wondering, maybe we should try and challenge ourselves to sometimes think about the greater good.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:12:31]:
I think, absolutely. And again, if you go back to Chixen Mahai, when he wrote his book on creativity and introduced the systems approach, it’s a very interesting book because a lot of it is actually about individuals and research he had on individuals. But the chapter that he has on field functions, the evaluation, et cetera, he really acknowledges that this is very dangerous terrain. How we set up our fields and how we make these social evaluations can lead us very far astray. And in that chapter, he cited Jonas Salk, a quote from Jonas Salk about becoming good ancestors. And I think as we teach kids about creativity, that’s a key issue, is you’re trying to take a long term point of view. And do you know, if you take climate change, where do we get the problem of climate change? From creativity, absolutely everything contributing to it at some point was seen as a huge creative breakthrough. And so you have to continually navigate how these great ideas you have are producing all kinds of unexpected outcomes because you’re in a complex system and they’re going to be multiple outcomes always, and they’re never going to be fully anticipated.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:13:50]:
So that’s where I think, if we’re going to teach in the classroom, that slightly meta ideas about what we’re trying to do here are important. That doesn’t mean that coming up with ideas and engaging in doing project based learning isn’t important. It is, but at the same time always taking them up a level and saying, ok, so what in the big term is we thinking about this idea of creativity are we really talking about?

Matthew Worwood [00:14:17]:
And I think in an episode with David Cropley, we spoke about the idea of unintended consequences and design ethics. And I think that’s an important part of metacognition as well, is that we can kind of really be fixated on the end goal, the end prize. But do we challenge ourselves to sometimes say, right, let me look at this from another perspective. Let me think about this impact on a different group or a different context. And am I doing that enough? And I think that that is also part of the thing that can come into metacognition is to keep ourselves in check, keep our assumptions in check, and try and remain open to identifying the unintended consequences that come along, because actually those instances provide another opportunity for creativity to flourish. Let’s just be aware of them.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:15:02]:
Absolutely. So that’s, again, where we’re really shifting things. When we stop saying it’s the person who, quote unquote, has the idea, and we’re starting to say it’s the way the social system integrates the new ideas that we have and supports their development, the resources available, et cetera. When we start looking at it that way, it doesn’t stop with you introduce the product or you start manufacturing, et cetera. It’s a continual process.

Cyndi Burnett [00:15:35]:
I think what really strikes me is your concept around becoming good ancestors. And I think one of the challenges we face in education is a lot of people haven’t had creative educational experiences themselves. And I did a lot of research around looking at stories of people’s creative educational experiences, and a lot of people couldn’t even come up with something. So if they’re not having an experience or they’re not having a teacher that really sees that creative potential that Mark Runko spoke about, then they’re not going to be that teacher that is being creative in their classroom unless there’s some sort of intervention. So that’s just something know. And we were talking about Gruber before we started this chat and how much his work has infiltrated your own ideas. So how that morphs into your ideas and how that continues to infiltrate with your students, and then your students will take his work and how that continues to morph. So the best thing that we can do is be a model for it in the classroom, I think.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:16:32]:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I agree so much with, and this idea has been put forth by, I know a number of people, but it’s so important that the teacher practice what they’re teaching, that they teach from a point of personal experience. And we have a system. One of the ways I am not somebody who jumps on the bandwagon of dissing our educational system at every turn. I’ve been in good schools and bad schools, and there are lots of both of them. But I do think that one of the things that we need to do is really nurture our teachers and value our teachers so that they are teaching things with which they’re engaged and not stuck and teaching something that they really don’t care very much about, only know what’s in the textbook and encourage that development in their topics and their fields.

Matthew Worwood [00:17:29]:
And I think to take away from that, there’s what you teach and how you teach. And I think having the flexibility on both those is important.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:17:39]:
A lot of it is helping develop a teaching profession where people can teach in the long term, in a place in the long term and have stability as teachers. Way back. This is getting into ancient history, so only your slightly older audience will remember. But when no Child left behind came under the Bush two administration and there was a huge testing regime put in place to evaluate learning progress, I was at a really high functioning school in Queens, and that did a lot of work in art. I was talking to the principal, and they had just introduced these optional six week art modules that the teachers could teach and add to their curriculum. And there was a waiting list. The teachers, so many teachers wanted to do this. And I said, my students are telling me that they don’t have any time in the classroom because they’re having to teach to the test constantly.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:18:45]:
And she said, you know, that was a problem for the first few years for us, too. One of the things that stood out about it had, I think, its tenure, its average tenure for a teacher was over ten years. That was its average. And she said, but they’re all seasoned teachers. They learned how to do it. But when we have teachers coming in and out and we’re forcing them out of the field and we’re making it so difficult for them to work and so non remunerative for them to work that they can’t, it takes a special kind of condition to develop teachers, and.

Matthew Worwood [00:19:20]:
It also kind of, in some ways makes me feel, we go back to what you said earlier is this, I need time to develop my knowledge, perhaps through some replication, before I’m then able to start adding my own flavors and creativity to the process, and you’re completely right, there’s always a turnaround. All we’re doing is going in just trying to survive our first couple of years by replicating what we’re seeing, but we’re still learning what we’re replicating. We’re not actually in a position to create. And then that makes me actually think about, does it take a few years before we can find that fulfillment with our own creativity in a teaching profession?

Cyndi Burnett [00:20:03]:
So, Michael, we’d like to touch upon your book, creativity and improvised educations case studies for understanding impact and implications. Can you tell us about what you learned from writing this book?

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:20:15]:
Well, you talked a little bit earlier about the participatory creativity lab. And that lab is a group of my best students from graduate school, most of whom are alumni, many of whom have their doctorates and are teaching now, and are now all over the world in propelling for, in continuing to construct the ideas and address the controversies implied by the participatory framework. And so we got a book contract with Rutledge to do a series called Creativity in Practice, where we take the kinds of in depth case study work that we do in graduate school, and we take that two or three steps further in looking at how real world creativity works. How do people navigate the extraordinary unpredictability of doing this kind of work when it happens professionally, and in this case, particularly looking at lifelong learning? And how does learning impact what is happening in these people’s work when we’re.

Matthew Worwood [00:21:29]:
Talking about changing a domain? I’m just curious, when I look at the four c model, the mini C, little C, pro C, big c, the mini c is that discovery point, making new discovery, constructing our own knowledge. Do you feel like there’s a time piece? I mean, chick McSee High has spoken about the time it takes to generate knowledge, right. And the importance of knowledge when it comes to that big c and pro C level creativity within your work. From a change perspective, is there a certain set time that we need to understand an existing context or existing situation before we can go and propose new ideas? Or does someone going back to the teaching situation, is it possible for a new teacher to come in and produce systematic change within the school within twelve months, for example?

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:22:22]:
Yes. Meaning I’m not going to take that choice either is possible. And that’s the thing. So that is one of the key principles, right, that I actually got from Gruber on creativity, because you’re dealing with something unexpected. It’s going to happen in different ways. And so if the context is right, and the school has the right kinds of openings for change, and the right teacher comes in, then, yes, it can change very quickly with a single personality. If in other situations it takes longer. I mean, there are kind of two questions there, right? Matt, as you know, I know Dinky Simonson’s work on historiometrics has looked at the ten year rule and how it differs across different domains.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:23:12]:
And that, yes, it does take a while of really in depth knowledge to change a domain, to change a classroom, or to change an organization may be a little different. And it’s according to the background you’re bringing to it and where you start the clock. Right? Because whatever I bring to a new organization may be something I’ve been developing for ten years, but it’s new to the organization. This is the horrible trap of the outside the box metaphor, right? Because none of us think outside our boxes. It’s not a possibility. We build our boxes and we change them and we reorganize them, but we don’t think outside them. We think outside other people’s boxes. And so that’s the kind of change that you’re bringing will depend on the context and the situation.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:05]:
Thanks for sharing those case studies with us. Now, we unfortunately have to wrap up, but we wrap up every episode with three tips that you would provide to educators to bring creativity into their classrooms.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:24:18]:
First thing, think about it as creativity in the service of good education, not education to produce creative people. Because if people are well educated and like I said, and are deeply engaged in a domain, they will have ideas. And creativity can be incredibly useful as a way of helping students think about what they’re doing and understand their challenges. Second thing in the book that we just did, we find that the combination of formal traditional education and self directed learning is different in each case. But both are absolutely necessary to each case. And the formal learning lets you know the conventions you’re trying to change as well as the conventions that you will use and perpetuate. Even with your changes. It also gives you a lingua franca to engage with your world and your profession.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:25:25]:
It is really necessary that we be able to talk to each other. You might notice we don’t do that so well in America anymore. And even within a mean, it goes down very deeply. Right. You need to understand these conventions to have that lingua franca. But then the other side is you need to have the self directed motivation to find and construct your own point of view. And those things come together in all kinds of different combinations. But that’s the challenge.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:25:56]:
And so here’s what I think. We have to bring the students in on that long term challenge. We tend to treat them like they’re lab rats and we’re going to put them in a classroom. And if we do this and this and this, they’re going to be creative. But the reality is the challenge they have is long term, they’re going to be lifelong learners, and we have to help them think that way. That this class that you’re in under me is a beat, but the music, it will help define your music. So how do you do that, and how do I help you do that? We need to collaborate. So that’s two things.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:26:31]:
Third, thing. And this is where I wanted to get back to the work that you guys have done, which I really love, on questions. And this is my big proponent, one of my big soapboxes. I put myself through graduate school by developing instructional design for corporations on training projects. And so when I was in graduate school, I kept thinking about, what’s the difference between training and education? And this is what I believe. If I’m training someone to sell something, that person has to have an understanding of the basic questions of what does the client want, what’s client going to object to, et cetera. But mostly, that person has to know the answers, really shut down the questions. Education, I think, is the opposite.

Michael Hatchett Hanson [00:27:17]:
Really good education is understanding the deep questions that drive our domains of knowledge and of having an appreciation of how those questions have resulted in new questions and yet new questions and what our immediate contingent answers are today, which will be useful because you’ll be able to use them and apply them in different ways, but most useful, because as the world changes, you have a structure of questions into which to put knowledge. And the fact that something has changed, an answer has changed, doesn’t mean your world falls apart. It just means it becomes more interesting, actually. So those are my three things.

Matthew Worwood [00:27:59]:
So, Cindy, that concludes this episode of the fueling creativity in Education podcast. And, Michael, I want to thank you because I’ve written down a whole bunch of quotes that I think we’ve got to help promote this show. Some wonderful quotes. Like always, if you’ve got any questions about this episode, future episodes, potential guests, or if you yourself would like to be a guest on our podcast, please reach out to Cindy and I via questions@fuelingcreativitypodcast.com. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:28:25]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dabsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.