Ruth Richards:
Emergence is about humility, because how many things are emergent? The stock market, the weather, the growth out the window, what our child learns to do tomorrow, all of this, we may not be able to predict it at all. The whole is greater than the sum of its part.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello everyone. My name is Doctor Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the fuelling 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 a 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 back to our double expresso with Doctor Ruth Richards, who is a researcher in the field of creativity. In our first episode of this double expresso, we’ve been talking about everyday creativity, and now we’re going to consider the challenges to everyday creativity. And to a certain extent, are we losing our everyday creativity and get a little bit into the win win scenarios? So let’s get back into our conversation.

Cyndi Burnett:
So Ruth, in our last episode with you, we explored what is everyday creativity and what it looks like in the classroom and how it helps us with our health and well being. So do you think we have lost our everyday creativity and why?

Ruth Richards:
So I’m going to be giving a talk with that title, but it’s not about where we had it and dropped it and couldn’t find it again. Right? Although that’s a concern. The concern I’m having is the many people, including students and teachers and everyone who has it because we all have it, but doesn’t even realize they have it. And what does that mean? Okay, some of this goes back to how creativity has been defined in the ancient past, how it’s been defined in a more recent past. I’m going to do that briefly, that if we believe in a time where what was important to be creative was to do work in the arts or the sciences, and maybe something else, but those two especially, and where this was special work that would be done by eminent people and distributed to a culture so that this would change the lives of everyone. Nothing wrong with that. But what if that’s all that there is? And some of us still grew up in that time. I don’t know about you guys, you young guys, but going way back, that was one of the views.

Ruth Richards:
There was a time when before 1950. I make a big deal about 1950 changing a little to win win. You can see if you agree win lose has been too many schools, I’m sorry to say that, let’s say, grade on the curve. And so this person does well, and that means that person doesn’t have as good a chance, that isn’t doing as many group projects, that isn’t looking at how everyone can win at once. So that’s the problem with win lose. There are many win loses in life. You get the job or you don’t, whatever. But how many ways can we build in win win where we can all benefit together with everyday creativity? Let’s go back before it IQ.

Ruth Richards:
Okay, the era of IQ. So, IQ test, was it Stanford Binet or the Terman test? And Terman was following these high IQ little kids to see if they would end up being geniuses, because who else would be right then? The high. I. If you assume that this western mainstream model of academic achievement is the be all of our human potential, and so you have people who do well, remember the bell shaped curve. Now people are in the middle, and the ideal is to get up there at the end and to be in the higher end of the bell shaped curve. Furthermore, not only is this hierarchical, it was somewhat fixed where the early testing that was done in schools, I’ll say, kind of determined who might be seen as a higher potential student, and the achievement tests and so on. There’s a lot of discussion, obviously, over the years that has gone on here, but I want to make a real distinction between this and what’s happened with creativity. And there’s nothing wrong with IQ in its place.

Ruth Richards:
It’s a wonderful predictor of certain kinds of achievement and so on. That’s not the point here or to get into those discussions, but it’s to look at how we are complex beings with many aspects. But IQ was it, in fact, I’m sorry to say, going way back, there was even an era of eugenics from some people based on IQ. We just want these. I mean, think about this. And so here you have win lose. You have a hierarchical thing you have fixed in time. You can’t really do all that much better than that.

Ruth Richards:
Maybe a few people will. And guess what? The term and geniuses didn’t turn out to be the most unusual ones. Some did, but it didn’t turn out that IQ, as was defined, say, by Termin or Stanford Binet, was the end of the story. Okay? But I think we still, some of us, carry the legacy of that as well as thinking that if we do better on this, someone else will do worse, which need never be true. A little educational assessment here. If we are doing criterion referenced assessment like anyone who does well, you know, does well, and not comparing this one to that one, then came 1950, I think is important for two reasons, or many reasons, but two of them are Guilford’s presidential address to the APA, american psychological, which is where he introduced his structure of intellect, model and divergent production thinking. And since that last part is part of so many good things that have followed, I’ll just mention fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration. And Guilford had these for various products and contents and dimensions and moats.

Ruth Richards:
But suddenly you have a different kind of measure here, which led to, as you know, and as your listeners probably know, so exponential increase in creativity research over the years beginning in 1950. Okay, but it’s a different kind of thing, because if we’re doing originality here and Cindy and Matt get super original, does that mean I never can? No, I still have a chance. So we have that and we have a measure. Yet what I’d say about our everyday creativity measure, which was done for certain purposes. But when you have a measure, there’s a power there if it’s reliable and valid, and there’s a lot to be learned about Guilford, Wallach and Kogan. This is what I did my dissertation on, and others who have developed creative thinking scales of different kinds. The win win aspect comes when you begin to have something like this that looks not at how we all do on one thing and who does it best, which, again, that’s life, too. We’re not ruling that out.

Ruth Richards:
But how many ways can we find different approaches to something? So let me just go back here to the other aspects of this, which are with creativity, we can all change and grow. So there’s no assumption, say, if we’re doing your 20 lessons, Cindy, we’re doing that to grow. We’re doing it so we will know more things. It isn’t as if you get this one score, and that is your fate at that point, and we can learn from each other and etc. Etcetera. I would like to also bring in Abraham Maslow, who did many wonderful things about human development and higher possibilities, but his hierarchy of needs is probably best known and began with physiological and safety and so on. We need to, you know, feel we’re safe in the world and have some astigmatic. Then at the top at that time, when he began, was self actualization.

Ruth Richards:
So having dealt with all these places where we feel a deficiency now, can we really find what’s important to us and the world and develop it? And that is one way of looking at self actualization. So he wrote his original chapter on that, which became part of a book published in 1950. And the book that really made it was 54, called motivation and personality. Suddenly, self actualization became this goal. Okay, there were several things that were very interesting about that. Many things. And Stanley Krypton and I just did a chapter for the forthcoming APA handbook of humanistic and existential psychology. If you want to read about Maslow, and this is in there, what I’m referring to here is how the vision was one of an ever unfolding person.

Ruth Richards:
In this case, self actualization, having to do with personal social health, of going beyond the personal to something more, how that is part of an unfolding process. And so suddenly we have these two main figures who both, by the way, were presidents of APAE in their day. Maslow was as well. And Maslow worked with Thorndike, who is a psychometrician, who are giving us an opening out. And I just think that’s really cool and very important and not necessarily highlighted enough, although Mike Ahrens and I did that in something for a much older handbook of humanistic psychology. So suddenly we have change, we have possibility, we have opening out, we have win win, because we can even do better together, believe it or not. And it’s a different story, it has not taken hold everywhere. But that potential, again, has been exponentially growing from that time, and that’s very important.

Ruth Richards:
And then guess what? How did IQ correlate with these various measures? I don’t know if it was correlated with self actualization, but Mark Bronco has a scale. But with these measures of fluency, flexibility, and so low positive, like 0.3. And if you know about statistics, square it to get the shared variance, 9%, not so much. Okay. Both Guilford and I did something a little different. I did it after Guilford with plotting and found a necessary but not sufficient relationship between certain factors that may have had to do with vocabulary, who knows what? But because life is not always linear. But the fact is, IQ is something else. And to think that that is the answer to creativity or genius.

Ruth Richards:
And I’m not saying these scales are anything but artificialities we’ve constructed to understand our continuous experience. I’m not trying to overdo it on scales, but there was a shift in 1950. There were a lot of shifts, but it brought us more into a potential in a classroom where everyone could win. And I think I was telling the Torrance story of the kid who liked radio. So I’m going to go back to that story in case you. Because Torrance was talking to this young man, and this young little boy wasn’t doing well otherwise. But he loved radios, and he became the radio expert for the class once he found what he really loved. And so that’s the promise here.

Ruth Richards:
It’s to. To find out who. What. Where each person is and how to help that to blossom, as well as learning everything else that one can learn in a curriculum.

Matthew Worwood:
And just to follow up on that, because I get this sense of community. And, you know, I put together a film in 2013 called creativity and education exploring the imbalance. And there was this scene that I wanted to put in from a movie, which is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. And it made me think of some of the earlier part of your answer is that you can see what is obviously meant to be a primitive species of what perhaps would become ourselves. And they have these bones. If anyone’s familiar with the film 2001 Space Odyssey, they have these bones. And then there’s that moment, right? And maybe this is a little bit more connected to the chaos aspect, but there’s this moment to which that single individual picks up this single bone and recognizes that actually, it doesn’t have to just be a bone. It actually can have another use, which is a tool.

Matthew Worwood:
And you can use that tool to hit. And then you obviously get that scene where they’re breaking the bones. And in some ways, it looks a violent act, which, actually, you could suggest that there’s other ways to which you could use this tool. But in essence, it was another purpose for this. And then, of course, flinging up in the air, which perhaps might symbol that celebration, that recognition, right. That I’ve made this discovery, and it spins up, and immediately it transitions into that space station that is orbiting planet Earth, which is the evolution of humanity. And the reason why I bring this up is, in the end, I spoke a lot about. You know, I wanted to situate creativity as being outside the arts, within the film.

Matthew Worwood:
And so I spoke a lot about the NASA program. Cause it’s all these problems that you have to address to get someone on the moon and back. But I think within your answer, really, that win win, there is that community. We all have a plot to play in advancing, hopefully, humanity, not necessarily a single nation or society. And if we can get to that point where we recognize that everyone has a part to play and create a system to which everyone’s part is celebrated and nurtured, then we all get to win win. And I think that’s a very powerful perspective to view education and to also view our role and responsibility as teachers.

Ruth Richards:
So you have just given me an entree to a little bit of chaos theory, because one thing I’ve written about for years is a creative new normal. But put it in terms of five examples from chaos theory more recently, because people say, ah, chaos theory. So see if this works for you. We need a different normal. We don’t need everyone doing lockstep the same thing. We don’t need a classroom that’s going to make everyone the same as in quiet or raising their hand that they know. The question we need, though, a way of honoring the divergence, the diversity, the kind of rich tapestry of what people bring.

Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org, comma. Or check out the links in the show notes for this episode.

Ruth Richards:
So here are five aspects of a creative new normal, each one taken from a concept and chaos theory that’s very relevant to creativity. And the first one is sudden, and I’m not going to go through a whole thing on it, but stuff happens all the time. That’s sudden, whether it’s a supernova or we drop something on the floor, or there’s an avalanche or an avalanche of mind, an insight, let’s be more aware of that. That is part of our normal life. Again, it’s like the little sparkles and then bigger ones and bigger ones. We are having little sparkles all day. Yes, we are being creative all day, hopefully. Right? And so sudden is one.

Ruth Richards:
Another is to, let’s see, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What word does that suggest to you?

Matthew Worwood:
A single word?

Ruth Richards:
Yeah, I think I’m just giving you that as a fun test. While I remember the word. So emergent is another example. And look at our lives. I ended up doing the work I was doing because I was at a bus stop in Toronto and Mike Aaron’s humanistic psychologist, whom I had heard but never met, came up and we were both waiting for this bus that never came and took a cab to the airport. And that kind of changed what I did, going into humanistic psychology and so on. And that this is the emergence coming out of a set of circumstances that we don’t really understand. And it happens all the time.

Ruth Richards:
Okay. And another one is balancing, and this might be of interest to a lot of people, it’s mental health one, too. We are balancing the insights we get from our unconscious, if you like that word or some other word, with our executive functions. We’re always doing that, hopefully, right. Or if we’re not, we know we’re not, and we know why. And so that’s the kind of answer to some of these paradoxes about mental health. It’s like if you’re going to, like, go off the rails and not make sense to other people or yourself, maybe. I mean, that’s a different story than if you were using fantastical imaginings like 2001 to come to some new insights.

Ruth Richards:
So that’s another example. Dynamic is good because everything changes. Everything changes. We change from the beginning of this, but that’s also about being alive. And so we are talking about ourselves as change processes, dynamical processes of change. And we are also open systems because we read the paper, we change. I listen to you. I change.

Ruth Richards:
I grow new neurons to encode 2001 and wonder what happened to your movie. That sounds good, that all of this is also part of it. And the last one here, these are just examples that we chose for several reasons, is interdependence. And if you’ve ever heard of forest bathing, which is done in Finland, in Japan, and so on, where you go in the forest and the awesomeness of the. Of the quiet and the complexity and so on, lowers your blood pressure and your heart rate. It also changes your mind. It makes you more aware of a greater unity and less about the individual self. There are so many ways that we are connected with everything else that we haven’t a clue, and that one might even be epigenetic.

Matthew Worwood:
It’s what I think, what I find really fascinating about this, and it kind of relates a little bit to some of the other things that I’ve said in our discussion, is when you put it back into a classroom environment, and I often refer to myself as a social culturalist in that I really value dialogue and discussion. But as educators, when we put something out there, we have to acknowledge the fact that it’s going to be interpreted in different ways. So to your point, we’re individuals and connected, so we are looking to make connections to what is obviously a shared phenomena or a shared topic to which we’re exploring. But we’re going to make those connections from very unique perspectives. And I think one of the things that I do a lot on this podcast is I sometimes provide those summaries. Oh, I’ve made this connection to this movie, and Cindy does the same. And sometimes when we’re having Marco Polo, we’re sharing these different perspectives. We’re talking about the same topic, and we’re actually sometimes in alignment.

Matthew Worwood:
But in order for it to make sense to us, we are having to make those unique connections, connecting it with our past understanding of the world. And I think that’s where it goes back to that idea of what I was kind of like saying that if you’re in this classroom environment that doesn’t have time, doesn’t have the flexibility to allow all of these different voices or at the very minimum, these thoughts, these individual thoughts to emerge, then obviously I think it’s going to have an impact not just on the creativity of the individual, but also just on that discovery and growth aspect. And we’ve had some conversations where people have said, as the teacher, sometimes you put something out there, share lost, because once you share, you’re obviously going to influence the uniqueness that they bring because they’re going to assume they have to bring your perspective, but your perspective is you, it’s not them.

Ruth Richards:
Right? And let me add mental health, if they feel they can’t have a voice. And some students need more help there than others. I want to go back to the new normal, because our creative new normal, which now calling CNN headline news and these kind of five aspects, is really not about a norm. The new normal is not at least who we are, is not about a norm. We don’t want to be lockstep the same. It’s about diversity in every way. Diverse views, diverse backgrounds, cultures, and so on. So it’s how in our new normal, do we honor all of that, even when we don’t understand it, when it’s strange, do we immediately think there’s something wrong? This is part of the conversation, too, the fears? Or do we suddenly see, maybe there’s some new insight, as Matt’s saying, that we never thought of and we might have just canceled out before someone had the chance to say it.

Ruth Richards:
So that’s really important, as well as being open to our own diversity, if you will. The insights that might come from us may surprise us at times if we’re not processing them consciously and if we’re taking the risk, say, in a brainstorming group, to say things without kind of monitoring or judging them at all, never mind beforehand. So can we be authentic again? This isn’t what you do every moment. It’s like the parents saying, you’re teaching our kids to be wild people. No, only sometimes. And the emergence is about humility, because how many things are emergent? The stock market, the weather, the growth out the window, what our child learns to do tomorrow, all of this, we may not be able to predict it at all. The whole is greater than the sum of its part often because we can’t see all the levels and the whole thing that’s going on there unless we are a reductionist who thinks it’s very simple and we can pick it all apart and we don’t. And so being alive is to live with that uncertainty and humility and to want to hear what other people have to say as well as that interdependence.

Ruth Richards:
So this creative new normal is really part of what’s needed. It’s not there, right? Call it CNN. It’s not there. What’s there is you’re supposed to be attended in class. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you look at what Freddie Reisman and colleagues are calling the crisis in teacher education, which has to do with teachers not getting enough in service training or early training, and creativity, that’s helping to blot out a lot of this as well. If they aren’t in their own lives, open to all of this uncertainty, tolerance of ambiguity, also authenticity, those are the usual words, but also some bizarre things, also some crazy sounding things. Like Frank Barron said that, you know, the difference is these creative people are both more conventional and unconventional, are both crazier and saner than the average person.

Ruth Richards:
I knew Frank Baron too. He was special.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, Ruth, this has been an incredible conversation. Double expresso. And I know myself and Matt and our emerging scholar in residents. Jimmy, we have really enjoyed listening to you and hearing your stories and hearing your perspective. And Matt and I do debriefs on all of our episodes. And I know we will have a lot to talk about with regard to everyday creativity and creating the new normal. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Now, before you go, we do ask all of our guests to recommend three tips they would give to educators to bring creativity into the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
So what three tips would you recommend teachers do to bring creativity into the classroom?

Ruth Richards:
Well, I’m going to say again, looking at the bigger picture. First is to ask three questions. That’s not the three things to ask questions that we are always open, what we don’t know. That’s what I told the parents who thought I was making their it’s wild. I’m going to give you some concrete suggestions here. The second one, and this comes partly out of chaos theory, but it’s really to look at the creativity of nature and to look at what suddenly happens. The flowers bloom in spring, the avalanche down the mountain may be very much like the creative insight, but anyway, to see beyond ourselves and to look at other creatures, other beings as well, to look more at our world. And so the third one, since you liked it somewhere, I’m going to say it again, is to put yourself in a mindful state of someplace where you were being very creative or generative or just felt that you were really expressing yourself, and write down three words that fit with how you were feeling.

Ruth Richards:
This is a little study I did. It was so telling and nice what people put down in general. I think one person put something negative. It was just very joyous. And to remember that we have this within us. And you can actually, if you read the paper in the Journal of Creativity 2023 on the new normal, it has that study in there, too.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, Ruth, thank you so much for that. And I will say that latter one in particular, at the time of recording this, I’ve still got time to plan that into my first week of the new semester, which I know right now most of us are in. What I would say is we’ve covered a lot on this double x espresso. And I think that particularly if you are looking toward doing a doctoral program or engaging in any type of activity associated with being an emerging scholar, these two episodes are packed full of information and also, to a certain extent, providing us a little bit of context to the history of creativity as well. And we’ve just come off the summer listen and learn series where we did dig into that a little bit. So it’s a kind of wonderful connection with that listen and learn series. So please share this episode or the previous episode with anyone that you think has that intellectual curiosity for the field of creativity, and then also maybe just some philosophical perspectives of creativity that they want to kind of explore and reflect upon. Also, don’t forget to give us a review, and be sure to check out the show notes where we will provide some links to Doctor Ruth Richards work.

Matthew Worwood:
My name is Doctor Matthew Worwood.

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