Matthew Worwood:
Hello, and welcome to our fourth listen and learn series, or shall I say episode for summer 2024. And as a reminder, these episodes are super duper short and designed to support professional learning for educators and emerging scholars over the summer months.

Cyndi Burnett:
In this listen and learn series, we are focused on classic literature from the field of creativity, which we hope will not only offer you a historical perspective, but also bridge some of those connections between research and teaching and learning environments.

Matthew Worwood:
Now, Sundina have been talking about this a lot because it’s still exciting news. And to us it’s still extremely new because, remember, we produced these episodes, a few of them back to back, but we have an emerging scholar in residence in Jimmy Wilson, and he’s going to be offering some commentary about some of these episodes on our website, fuelingcreativitypodcast.com dot.

Cyndi Burnett:
And to make things extra fun, which we are all about, the fun in the summer. At the end of each episode, we will share a single letter which is part of a code word that you, our listeners, must put together and scramble around and try to guess before the end of August.

Matthew Worwood:
And we did say in the introduction episode, which has two letters, that you’re not allowed to use AI to work this out. And once you’ve got these letters and identified the code word, you have to email us@questionsuelingcreativitypodcast.com. not only with the code word, but we also would like to see some connections you’ve made to some of the conversations we’ve had around the classical literature and how that might inform what you’re planning to do for the upcoming school year. And of course, if you do that, we’re gonna give away a prize to a winner, so long as we receive this by the end of August.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Matt, let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood:
Okay, Cindy well, we’ve kind of got into this period in our classical journey through the study of creativity. As a reminder, we introduced Joy Paul Guilford in the first episode, who really kind of stood up in inaugural speech to the American Psychological association and said, hey, we’re not doing a very good job in terms of studying this thing called creativity. And in essence, putting out there and saying, I think creativity is something different than intellect. And what we then started to see is the field beginning to emerge. People obviously having to then say, well, let’s look at defining creativity because we need to define it. We need to operationalize the construct so we can study it. So we got into Melrose, who tried to do that wasn’t necessarily successful, but what he did do is present the four P’s and said, hey, when we’re talking about creativity, it’s, we’re talking about the product, we’re talking about the press, we’re talking about the person, and sometimes we’re talking about press, the environment. And we also got into McKinney in our last, I think, episode three.

Matthew Worwood:
And that was kind of like, okay, let’s go and look at some of this emerging talent. Let’s not just focus on eminent creativity practitioners. Let’s go and look at how we might nurture creativity in the classroom. So we’re starting to see that. We’re starting to look at identifying personality traits that might be particularly conducive for helping people go on and be creative later in life. And then we also covered Alex Osborne and the creative problem solving process that had some ideation. But now I think that the following two articles is really focused, beginning to focus in on the classroom environment. Now we’re about 20 years into the field of creativity, and it makes sense that we’re starting to see some of these creativity scholars really starting to focus and say, okay, well, can we teach creativity? And if we can, how might we go about doing that? And so you’re gonna introduce who I’m assuming must be, well, a very special scholar to both of us, but particularly to you.

Matthew Worwood:
So I’ll turn it over to you now.

Cyndi Burnett:
Okay, so today we’re gonna look at the work of E. Paul Torrance, who is known as the father of creativity and education. And he started his work in this field in 1958. And this article we’re gonna look at today, which was published in 1972, is called, can we teach children to think creatively? So let’s just position this in the rest of the timeline. So Guilford does his speech in 1950. This is 1972. Now, Torrance established the most well known test for creativity, which is called the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, which was established in 1966. So this is just six years later, in 1972.

Cyndi Burnett:
And in this paper, he summarizes the results of 133 studies that were designed to test approaches to teaching children to think creatively. Now, Matt, one of the most interesting things I thought about this article is the fact that IPal Torrens says, right from the beginning, I know I’m going to get a lot of criticism from this paper. I know people are going to snap back and say, creativity cannot be taught. And he said, but I have seen students teach creativity. I’ve watched my wife teach students creativity, and I’ve seen many other people learn creativity. And I know it can be taught from a qualitative perspective. But he said, we do need to start looking at studies and we need to look at the measurement. And that’s one of the reasons why he established the Torrance test of creative thinking.

Cyndi Burnett:
So he looks in this paper at different modalities of how people have taught creativity with training programs, with CPS, with creative problem solving, which we will see in our final paper that we reflect on with the creative studies project. We look at training in semantics and creativity research. We look at complex problems involving packages of materials like the Purdue creativity program. He looked at articles related to creative arts as vehicles for teaching and practicing creative teaching. He looked at curriculum, teacher classroom variables, motivation, which we see a lot of when it comes to creativity in the classroom now. And then he looked at testing conditions which were designed to facilitate a higher level of creative functioning. Now, what I think is so interesting is there has been so much research that has emerged from those nine areas that he outlined. But at the time of this publication, which again was 1972, really the predominant place that they found the most impact in creative problem solving was training programs with creative problem solving.

Cyndi Burnett:
And as I mentioned in the next episode, we’re going to be talking about the Creative Studies project, which was done by Sid Parnes and Ruth Noller over at Buffalo State. And they look at training and creative problem solving. So I don’t want to get too deep into that. But what did really strike me, Matt, is here we have all these different modalities, and now we can honestly say that so much of this has been researched. We’ve looked at climate, we’ve looked at motivation and intrinsic motivation, rewards, things like Theresa Mable, who we you’ll be having coming on the show probably season eleven. We see all of these different types of programs that have emerged since the 1970s, which was obviously, it seems crazy to say this, but this was over 50 years ago. So what’s exciting is that so much has been done to flourish teaching creativity and the impact of creativity training. What I really loved about this article was the vulnerability he shared in saying, I know I’ve seen this, but it may not all be represented through quantitative research.

Cyndi Burnett:
And Matt, I know for myself and for you as well, we have both had experiences where we’ve taught creativity and we see the impact of that. And I even remember myself as a young graduate student in the late 1990s when I took my first graduate course with Doctor Roger Firestein. And I was sitting in the course and I was in a very dark place in my life. It was in my early twenties. I just come off a national Broadway tour. And I said, I don’t know what I want to do with my life. And I really felt like the possibilities of the world were sort of limited. I didn’t really think that I had the capacity to do that much.

Cyndi Burnett:
I had very little hope in terms of what my future looked like, because what I originally had planned as being an actor was no longer something I wanted to do. And I remember the first night I came home in learning creative problem solving with Roger, and I started brainstorming different things that I could do with my life. And I was really trying to live the principle of delaying judgment, which we talked about in that last article with McKinnon. I was really trying to delay my judgment. And by the time I woke up in the morning on the second day of class, my entire bedroom was covered with post its of all the things that I could do with my life. And what it really taught me is how to create possibilities, to go beyond my limitations, and to imagine things that don’t exist. And that’s sort of how I’ve lived my entire life after that moment in time. In terms of what I believe creativity really brings to the table is this idea of possibilities and hope for the future and a better future and improving on things.

Cyndi Burnett:
And so that really struck me. And I remember going to Roger on the second day of class, and I said, I not only have one thing I want to do with my life, I have at least 200. And he just laughed at me. And he’s like, yep. And he still talks about that day where I shared with him this, we didn’t have phones at the time because it was, like I said, the late 1990s, but I already shared with him all of these post its that I had across my entire bedroom. So can you think of a time that you really felt like you learned about creativity and the impact it had on you or learned creatively, or that someone taught you how to be more creative?

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah, I actually can. And I think it’s related within these creative thinking skills. And if you think about, just to kind of back down to the article little bit, this is about identifying, in essence, whether you want to call them actions, strategies, ways of thinking that are conducive for creativity. And so you’re referencing in that story this idea that we can focus on quantity over quality and reserve judgment. And what that does is obviously, it produces a massive amount of ideas, and we can teach that. We can promote that in our classroom. And that piece of your story relates to how I kind of discovered creativity. And it was actually, in some ways, I think in terms of my generation and people who’ve probably been teaching for the last 15 to 20 years, Ken Robinson’s connected to it.

Matthew Worwood:
But before I do that, I’ll premise the story. And it is a funny story, and I appreciate the fact you’ve given me an opportunity to share it. And I used to share it. In fact, all of my. I used to about four or five years. My main conference presentation was around creativity and problem based learning, and I infused the torrents incubation model of teaching and learning, which I learned above state with yourself and Susan Keller Mathers, actually her class. And I integrate it into my project based learning environment, both in the high school programs and then when I transitioned to university. And I’m going off in a little bit of tangent, but I wanted to do a shout out to Doctor Keller Mathers, who has been a guest on our show.

Matthew Worwood:
And before I met Susan Keller Mathers, I kind of stumbled along this problem. So here it is. I am about 18 months into working with about ten to twelve high schools in Connecticut, and we are doing a project based learning environment at these schools. And I’ve been tasked with implementing a new digital media movie making program, which went on to establish the Connecticut Student Film festival and the 84 hours film challenge, and a whole bunch of different activities centered around digital media and movie making. And I, one of the first activities was to produce a psa, a public service announcement, 1 minute. That had to center around the green theme. Okay, that was it. Green was the theme for that year.

Matthew Worwood:
And we had about, I think we brought all of the schools to this single event, and it was kind of like a new program. All of the funders were there, and everyone was excited to see the first draft of these public service announcements. And this was the first project. At the end of the year, they had to produce a documentary film, and we had an online curriculum that they were following. And there was a lot of kind of excitement in the x. It’s this new program. Connecticut’s just introduced all these film and digital media tax credits. So it’s kind of connected to this talent pipeline.

Matthew Worwood:
And I’m starting to feel a little bit nervous because I suddenly realized, wow, like, you know, there could be a little bit of judgment on me. And, you know, I sit in the front row, we’ve got all of these different funders here and members of the state here. And I remember going up and setting up the laptop and creating a playlist of all of the films. And I remember the first film was like wow, this is, this is impressive. This is. It was, it was, it was reasonably good. I said, yes. The only concern I had with it was the fact that it was on recycling.

Matthew Worwood:
And I was like, hmm, you know, I was like, okay. You know, like. But I didn’t necessarily feel like it was a very creative story to share. So anyway, the second film came on and it was like they were kind of, like, there were some sound issues. The quality wasn’t as good. So it kind of, like, took the mood down a little bit. But what really was challenging was the fact that the story was, again on recycling. So I was like, ah, how much bad luck did I have to play these two films from two different schools back to back? And it was on recycling.

Matthew Worwood:
So then what was funny is I looked around the room and school a was looking at school b, given it. I can’t believe they did our theme, you know, I can’t believe it that we did it. Recycling. I was looking around like, yeah, it’s pretty bad luck, you know. So anyway, the third film came up and it was okay, but of course, the theme was recycling. And I think nine films were shown that day, and I think seven of them was on recycling. And I said to myself, I said, hold on, like, did I say the PSA should be on recycling? You know, and I looked in the material, I said, no, the assignment wasn’t on recycling. And I think the issue that I had at the time, I think, you know, going back, I think I’ve always valued originality and the new ideas, and I think you’ve worked with me.

Matthew Worwood:
I’m always, like, craving to do new, different things. So to me, dare I say recycling was boring and it didn’t offer anything new. If there was no information, everyone knows they’re meant to recycle. Why we don’t recycle, that could be an interesting problem to explore. But just telling us that we’re going to recycle and, oh, we can put a can in a trash can, a special trash can. I was like, this is terrible. So cut. Long story short, you know, my boss looked at me, who’s actually Michael Mino, who we’ve had on the show, and he said, matt, you know, he wasn’t, no one was disappointed because the quality of the films weren’t too bad, but he was like, Matt, we better make sure that we don’t end up with a bunch of documentary films about recycling.

Matthew Worwood:
So I had to go and do an intervention with these schools. And I went to one school and we had a little bit of a conversation. I didn’t get enough from that conversation to really work out what the problem was. In essence, I said, try and do something different than recycling them. Then I went to the second school, and one of the teachers said to me, I said, you know, it was a very positive conversation, but they said this interesting thing to me. They said, I think one of the challenges for the project is the theme. I said, okay, why is that? They said, well, it’s green. It feels very restrictive.

Matthew Worwood:
And I went, wait, green to color. Like, what do you mean, it’s restrictive? Right. And I suddenly realized that they connect green with recycling. And that was all they had. That was the only connection they made. And I suddenly went away and I said to myself, the problem is actually just that people don’t know how to be original. Now, I didn’t have the word creativity at that point, but around the same time, because this was 2007, around the same time, someone shared me Ken Robinson’s TED video, the 2006 TED talk. And suddenly I made the connection that originality is associated with creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
And I was like, that’s the problem. And I suddenly realized that’s what I was passionate about. That was something that I enjoyed doing, is always being original. And I suppose in some ways, maybe. Maybe it was things like the likes of Alex Osborne noticed that they liked to go and find original ways to generate ideas. And so I said to myself, okay, like, this is something that I’ve got to do, an intervention. How do we teach students to be more original?

Cyndi Burnett:
Yep.

Matthew Worwood:
So cut a long story short. I did some googling. I was looking for a graduate program at the time and that actually, Cindy, within a few months, I called you, spoke to you on the phone, and then I enrolled in some classes at buff state while I was doing a master’s at Central Connecticut State University. And that opened up my eyes, of course, not only to the field of creativity, but to you. Your point? Scholars like Epaul Torrens that have identified the fluency principle and the ability to be original and then provided strategies on how to do that. And I would say I spent the next three to five years after that focusing primarily on trying to get kids to think more original and to try and apply the fluency principle. And even when I transitioned to the University of Connecticut, that was one of my number one goals. And so you were talking a little bit about how I interpreted it, is going in with the goal to try and teach creativity in the classroom.

Matthew Worwood:
And I think it’s definitely complex, and there’s environmental factors that come in and I don’t know if you can, if a single strategy can always be the answer. But what I would say is through modifying and tweaking, I believe, and I’ve done this for ten years now, that my project based learning class, my digital media one on one class, where they have to identify a problem and then come up with an original solution to that problem. I believe I’ve developed a formula where for the most part, every single year, for the last ten years, very rarely do we get the same ideas. We get some similar themes and we talk about that. Bullying, for example. Popular theme a few years ago. Anxiety, depression. Popular theme a few years ago, over the last couple of years, but for the most part, I’ve had, like, know your rights when you get pulled over.

Matthew Worwood:
I’ve had, like, how to back up your hard drive. I mean, we’re going back ten years now, but just all these original ideas. And I believe it’s come about because of the work, me basically modifying, tweaking, and applying the work of E. Paul torrent in the classroom. And I know, right, that. I know that I have also observed increased creativity from the perspective of getting more original ideas out in the classroom through these strategies.

Cyndi Burnett:
Matt, thank you so much for sharing that story. I love it, and I didn’t know that story. So thank you for sharing. So, to wrap up, this article on EPaul Torrance, again known as the father of creativity and education, has done over 1800 journals, articles, books, and all sorts of things to add to the field. And so much as you know, Matt, so much of the work that he did, I built upon because my mentor, Doctor Mary Murdoff, was a student of his. So I know a lot about Torrance and feel blessed that I am sort of a grandchild of Torrance, Paul Torrance, and.

Matthew Worwood:
Hold on, hold on, Cindy. I want to jump out just in case you’re uncomfortable plugging it. And of course, if you’re interested in this work centered around creative thinking, any of Cindy’s books, the most recent one around higher education and infusing creative thinking to your point, it provides the context to Torrence’s work and then how you’ve built upon it. So. So just wanted to throw that out there. Sorry to interrupt you.

Cyndi Burnett:
Thanks so much. And I just want to close out with, if you see this monkey in my background, this was one of Torrance’s original monkeys that he used in the test of creative thinking. So I keep this. And it’s funny, because when we did the Torrance festival of ideas, someone had another version of this monkey a later version of the Monkey, which he used in the Torrance test of creative thinking. He didn’t ask the monkey to generate ideas. It was what were all the things you could do with the monkey? Make sure you check out the work of epaul Torrance if you’re interested in the classic literature. We will be revisiting him in the winter months as we get into a listen learn series next winter that focuses on the eighties and nineties of creativity. Until then, we have one more episode for you and Matt.

Cyndi Burnett:
We can’t forget to give them the special letter for today. So are you ready? You can give the letter.

Matthew Worwood:
Okay, sounds good.

Cyndi Burnett:
Here is the drum roll.

Matthew Worwood:
The letter is r for Romeo.

Cyndi Burnett:
Red ridicule, ridiculous.

Matthew Worwood:
Romantic rest required.

Cyndi Burnett:
Rolling.

Matthew Worwood:
Okay, well, we’re going to end the rolling of this episode here, so let’s cut there. And rolling. My name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is curiosity to create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.