Eric Booth [00:00:00]:
I think of artistry as simply making stuff you care about. And I don’t know if that’s different than creativity or not. I just know that the skills I use as an artist in my artistic discipline, the verbs of art that I use when I’m making stuff in theater are the same verbs that people are making when they make a beautiful conversation with a friend, when they make a gorgeous Thanksgiving dinner table. Artistry is not a discipline specific category. It’s a capacity and a kind of irrepressible impulse.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:42]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:44]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:47]:
This is the fuelling creativity in education. Podcast.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:50]:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields of education.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:56]:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:04]:
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 [00:01:17]:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:19]:
Today, we welcome to the show Eric Booth. Eric Booth was given the nation’s highest award in arts education in 2015 and was named one of the 25 most influential people in the arts in the US. He is the author of eight books. The most recent is making change. Teaching artists and their role in shaping a better world. He has been on the faculty of Juilliard for twelve years, Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, and Lincoln Center Education for 41 years. He works around the world as a consultant for many organizations, as a frequent keynote speaker, and founded the International Teaching Artists Collaborative, the world’s first network of artists who work in schools and communities. So, welcome to the show, Eric.

Eric Booth [00:02:05]:
A pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:07]:
So now, before we begin, I know you started your career as a Broadway actor, and many of our listeners probably don’t know that matt and I also both started our careers in acting as well. So that might come up, I just might mention. So Eric, can you tell us a little bit about your work as an actor, as a Broadway actor, and how that led into arts education?

Eric Booth [00:02:26]:
Sure, it’s a pleasure. I came through the conservatory pipeline, serious young actor, Shakespearean focused, got to play Hamlet three times, played 32 Shakespearean roles, although that’s a little misleading because four of them were the bear in Winterstail, and I’m not sure that counts as an actual Shakespearean role. But got to New York and things were going the way you want them to go. I was working on Broadway, doing shows all the time, and the problem was, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the scrambling for TV commercials and playing gynecologists on soap operas, and it kind of wasn’t what I got into it for. So things were still going well, but on the side I began kind of exploring for something that would feel more fully utilizing, more creatively demanding and stumbled into teaching artistry a field that was just beginning a few years prior at Lincoln Center. And so tested it out a little bit in workshops and found it was to actually being working with kids in schools around activating. Their creativity was far more rewarding for me than playing the same show eight times a week on Broadway.

Eric Booth [00:03:49]:
And it finally came clear in the career issue when my agent was know, okay, I’ve got an audition for said, no, no, I’ve got a rehearsal with these fourth graders in the South Bronx, so I won’t be able to make the rehearsal the audition. And it was become clear I had actually switched fields, didn’t even realize it. And it really came down to finding so much more creative challenge in activating the artistry of others instead of cranking out performance sausages from my own New York career.

Cyndi Burnett [00:04:25]:
I can completely relate with that, Eric, because I actually left theater because I felt like it was uncreative. Like I did the same show 189 times and people were talking about going and auditioning for the same show somewhere else and I’m like, wait, we just did it 189 times. So I can relate to that lack of creativity that sometimes comes with being a professional actor and then finding that joy in walking into a classroom of fourth graders where you never know what’s going to happen and trying to think on your feet and do improvisation and bring in these wonderful skills that are all related to creativity. So I love that story.

Eric Booth [00:05:03]:
It’s the truth. And we do need to credit there are some amazing actors who can do the same show eight times a week for five years, ten years, and they have a kind of creative groove that enables them to discover it afresh each time. I didn’t have that gene, but some actors do. And it’s a particular kind of creativity, almost a capacity to discover what’s familiar afresh on a regular basis. And I really respected it, I just didn’t have it.

Matthew Worwood [00:05:38]:
I want to build on that a little bit because I can relate a lot to what you were saying. Eric. I dreamed about being an actor. I’m not entirely sure whether I can reflect back and identify all of the different elements that I associated with acting and perhaps why I found acting attractive as a career pursuit. But I certainly got to the point toward the end of my drama school and unfortunately, I don’t think Shakespearean roles were ever on the agenda. Partly because I still remember my Southeast London accent being ridiculed in my very traditional establishment that said, I would never be able to play Shakespearean unless I could speak standard English, but I still was wanting to move forward on the acting front, despite my accent. You can see I’m obviously a little bitter about that, but what I would say is I began to become more aware of this desire for that new beginning, avoiding habit. And there was a sense of habit occurring within this kind of like even when you’re not always doing the same play every few weeks, you’ve got a new script, there is a certain level of monotony about it.

Matthew Worwood [00:06:39]:
And I started to find myself feeling that I was more like a pawn in somebody else’s production, as opposed to it was my character and being able to explore all the different possibilities. I had to stand here for this line, and I had to look in this direction. Not every director’s that liked that, but there certainly were directors, probably more directors that at least I experienced, that was providing those kind of, like, quite rigid set of criteria for the shows. The reason why I bring this up, though, is that you’re making me reflect a little bit about me. Like, you always wanting to kind of find an environment where I can pursue new and different things and the need to pursue new and different things. And I am going to bring this back to the classroom environment because I just wonder if there’s that relationship with teaching, because I feel like to a certain extent, I’m working with a group of teachers right now. And we had this conversation about the summer, and some of them, of course, was going and teaching the 7th or eigth or 9th year teaching fourth grade. And it was very much about trying to think about tapping into your past experiences, meaning you’ve got a sense of what the new year is going to bring you, but at the same time trying to find new and different approaches to your instruction.

Matthew Worwood [00:07:46]:
I don’t know if you’ve kind of got a follow up, but it just kind of feels like there’s a close relationship with how we’re reflecting on our acting careers and to a certain extent, how teachers might be experienced in teaching as well.

Eric Booth [00:07:58]:
Absolutely. I did an experiment once years ago with a social studies teacher at the 6th grade. And the experiment was she had taught the same piece of information exactly the same way for 15 or 20 years. And our experiment was I challenged her somewhere in the middle of the class, just switch and start teaching it in a new way. That was the experiment. I was in the back of the room. I watched carefully. I couldn’t tell when she switched from the old to the new.

Eric Booth [00:08:29]:
At the end of the class, I asked the kids, I said, did anybody in here notice that something changed in the teaching that was happening somewhere along the way in the classroom? And, like, all the hands shot up into the air. And I said, well, what did you notice? And they all said, oh, well, there was this moment, and they could describe it exactly. And here’s the words they used when she started making up sentences. They could tell the difference within 2 seconds. They could tell the difference between repeating information even in an engaging way, which I could witness, to actually that little edge, and it’s an energy edge of actually constructing new ways to express something you’re interested in. They picked up that something was being created in front of their eyes rather than something was being regurgitated at them.

Matthew Worwood [00:09:29]:
That is incredible and scary at the same time. And I do not have a question, but I do have something for our audience to think know. I teach two sections of the same class at the University of Connecticut and I’ve been doing it for a few years and we do it back to back. And I have not been able to identify why I have such a different experience between the first section and the second section. But typically I’ve been noticing a subtle pattern that the second section I have to work a little bit harder in terms of engaging them. And I believe wholeheartedly it’s something to do with me. It is something that I’m doing now. One of the things that I clock myself doing this semester is that in the first class it’s very spontaneous because I don’t know what the students are going to bring to me.

Matthew Worwood [00:10:11]:
And so I’m very kind of like discussion orientated. I like to put something out there and we have a conversation about it and I’m very flexible on where that conversation may take us. But interestingly enough, in the second section, because I feel that we’ve covered some important topics in the first section, I try and replicate the same discussion even if it’s not said. And so now I have to go away and really, really think about that because I’m actually worried. I know why I’m doing it. I’m worried because I’m like okay, well, in essence, because I’m so discussion orientated, we may have two completely different discussions. And how might that impact what the two sections experience? They might potentially experience two different learning environments, but at the same time I’m obviously doing them a disservice by trying to be repetitive. It’s interesting.

Matthew Worwood [00:10:59]:
As I said, I don’t have a question, but you got me thinking a lot.

Eric Booth [00:11:03]:
I have noticed for all of my decades that I’ve been working with young people, it’s in a sense terrifying, the degree to which they are observing or picking up on subtle information from us. They know when I’m in love with a subject that I’m teaching and when I’m teaching something that I’m required to teach, it is like blindingly obvious to them. Which is why teaching artists who are freelancers, that’s my field, teaching artists. My rule with teaching artists is if you do not love a body of work, a project, do not do it because your number one job as a teaching artist is to light up the artistry of other people. And in fact, one of the rules I use in training teaching artists. It’s called the law of 80%. 80% of what you teach is who you are. I call it a law to make it sound scary.

Eric Booth [00:12:05]:
And that 80% number creates the false impression. I’ve done some research, which I haven’t. But the law of 80% is true that the single greatest tool you have as an educator is your authentic presence in the room with them. Your curiosity, the way you pick up on things that happen and build on them, the quality of your listening to hear what’s almost been said and build on it. Kids learn a whole lot more about creativity from the authentic engagement with a person who is creatively engaged than from any amount of good curriculum or handy workbook activities. 80% of what you teach in creative engagement is who you are.

Cyndi Burnett [00:12:56]:
I completely agree with that. Eric a wonderful stat that you made up. So I want to talk about teaching artistry and the work that you do with teaching artists. So can you tell our listeners what a teaching artist is? And I mentioned before we started that I was a teaching artist when I came off tour, and I loved the work that I did. But can you tell everyone what are teaching artists? What role do they play in schools, and in what ways could their work make a difference in the classroom?

Eric Booth [00:13:24]:
All right, beautiful set up there. Let me first do two definitions of what teaching artists are, not because people mistake them. First of all, a teaching artist is not an artist who just is earning some extra income by teaching. A teaching artist has developed the capacities to engage with learners to accomplish the number one goal, which is activating the artistry of other people. And a teaching artist is not necessarily a teacher of an art form. They have different jobs. The job of an art teacher is to induct learners into the world of that art discipline, to actually introduce the key tools and the pleasures and the ways that it works. The job of the teaching artistry is not really to start you on a path, but to actually activate this capacity within you that is handy to express in that artistic discipline.

Eric Booth [00:14:25]:
But we want it expressing itself everywhere. We wanting it spilling over into the math class and into what you do when you go home. So teaching artists are generally artists who were hungry for something bigger in terms of what they do with their own art. And they kind of naturally found themselves doing workshops or doing the neighborhood kids. They were making stuff together with the neighborhood kids because they couldn’t stop themselves. It is someone who has the educator’s gene and the artist’s expertise as a field. There are some 30,000 professional teaching artists in the US. The vast majority are freelancers.

Eric Booth [00:15:11]:
They work usually project based in schools or after school programs. The lucky ones get long term relationships with schools or classrooms. And their work is really to creatively invigorate the learning that happens in schools. And then a lot of teaching artist work is in communities and often for health or wellness or environmental issues. So there’s a real social outreach with the creative engagement that is their stock and trade. There isn’t an exact pedagogical tool, but there is a kit bag of approaches and tools that they customize from. And as we have discovered, the US field is about 50 years old. But we’ve recently become more in contact with teaching artists who go by different names than that around the world.

Eric Booth [00:16:06]:
And there are teaching artists have arisen from the grassroots in every country in the world, many where there’s no separation between being an artist and being a teacher. It’s just understood if you’re an artist, you’re engaging with communities and with young people. And so teaching artistry is really a global practice even though it remains largely invisible and definitely underpaid.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:33]:
And if you don’t mind, could you talk a little bit more about artistry? Is it a process or is it a thing? Is it a person?

Eric Booth [00:16:42]:
All right. There. Now we’re getting into the thick of it. I am not sure if it is different than creative capacity or not. When we start getting into semantic sticky places, I think of artistry as simply making stuff you care about. And I don’t know if that’s different than creativity or not. I just know that the skills I use as an artist in my artistic discipline, the verbs of art that I use when I’m making stuff in theater are the same verbs that people are making when they make a beautiful conversation with a friend, when they make a gorgeous Thanksgiving dinner table. Artistry is not a discipline specific category.

Eric Booth [00:17:30]:
It’s a capacity and a kind of irrepressible impulse.

Matthew Worwood [00:17:36]:
What I’m taking away with that as well is that there are teachers who are solving problems, using technology in new ways, designing all of these different types of instructional experiences because they want to, they’re into it, they’re passionate about it. And to me, that is a sense of artistry. But the flip side is that sometimes, again, going back, we can get into the routine. So we’re going through the procedural steps to doing these things because it’s our job. And then maybe that’s when it becomes a little bit of a craft. And so I just wonder if for administrators listening, it’s a case of we need to continue to promote the concept of artistry and to try and provide opportunities for our teachers to engage in artistry. And likewise, if we’re teachers, we’ve got to pursue opportunities within our classroom environment for artistry and to a certain extent, reflect when we’re not engaged in artistry, because we understand we can’t always be engaged in artistry, but we might be missing that artistry that might give us that sense of meaning and purpose when we come in every day.

Eric Booth [00:18:38]:
I hear two things in what you’re raising. Number one is supporting the artistry of the educators themselves. Because of the law of 80%, we know how essential that is if they are going to activate the artistry in their learners. And those are partly conditions that encourage it. My God, most schools are diabolically designed to squelch the creative impulse of teachers with so much pressure, so much demand, so much coverage, that the pressure squeezes a lot of that creativity right out. The way to invite it back in is to encourage their reconnecting with their passion about the subject matter and create some free space so that they can a term teaching artists often use slow down to speed up. They can slow down for part of the work, for the kids to discover the relevance and their own interest and their own angle, because as the research shows, they’re going to go further and faster in the long run. I mean, the research on that is inarguable around the intrinsic motivation research, so that if you can create conditions that support teachers to slow down in order to speed up in the long run, you get a more creative classroom.

Eric Booth [00:19:56]:
The second part of your thought was, how do you activate the artistry of young people? And that is partly irresistibly delightful invitations to make stuff you care about that is relevant to the subject matter being taught. But it is not the same as head on hammering content. It’s about invitations into irresistible creative challenges. Teaching artists use the phrase the ruthless use of fun to gamify the learning into certain areas so that you enter it because of the pleasure of the process. And then you find yourself self making stuff with that material that is relevant to curriculum goals and delightful for a human being.

Cyndi Burnett [00:20:50]:
Eric my mind is going in so many different directions, and you’ve really struck a chord in terms of things I’m really passionate about, because when I started out in the field of creativity, I came in with an artistic perspective. So I was thinking artistry, I was thinking creative process, I was thinking blocks and barriers that inhibit our creativity. And that’s why I went into the field of creativity, and I entered into a master of science in creativity here in Buffalo. And I started learning all about a deliberate, cognitive, rational, semantic process called creative problem solving. And it was so different than how I viewed myself as an artist. And then they brought me on to teach the cognitive, rational, semantic approach to creativity during the day and at night, I was working as a teaching artist, and what I was doing was also creative, but completely different. And when I would go to my artistic colleagues and say, you have to look at this deliberate, creative problem solving process, and these cognitive, rationalist semantic tools are like, oh, no, that’s not what I do. I’m an artist.

Cyndi Burnett [00:21:51]:
It all comes from intuition. And then I would go to my scientific friends and I would say, oh, you’ve got to see what we’re doing in the arts. And they say, oh, no, that’s too woo woo. We don’t do that sort of stuff in the scientific realm. I mean, I spent my whole career sort of looking at this early on around what is this bridge between expressive creativity and artistry and improving on things and the cognitive, rational, semantic, scientific approach to creativity? And I’ve been using the set of creative thinking skills that bridge that gap between the two conversations. So artistry and scientific approaches to creativity teach us how to keep open to new ideas. It teaches us how to visualize things in rich and colorful ways. It teaches us how to embrace ambiguity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:22:39]:
It teaches us how to be flexible in our cognition and I guess in dance, flexible in our bodies. It helps us to put things into context. So using this language is both artistic and creative and scientific in so many ways. If we can bridge that gap because there’s so much that the arts can learn from the sciences and there’s so much that the scientists can learn from the artists, and I think we don’t spend enough time making those connections. What I think is so beautiful about the work as teaching artists is you go in and you’re bridging that gap between artistry and everything else they’re learning in their domain specific classes.

Eric Booth [00:23:20]:
I certainly agree with you. And I think we don’t help our case often when we use language that adheres to one or the other of those polarities. I always remember that beloved quote from the physicist David Bohm who said, anytime you see seeming opposites, look for the greater truth that contains them both. Yes, and for me, the greater truth that contains the science art false dichotomy is when we start referring to the nouns and the outcomes, it starts to look like they’re very separate. When we start to pay attention to the verbs, to the processes, they start to come much closer together and have a real conversation with each other. About 20 years ago, I did a little project where I was fascinated with habits of mind. I was inspired by Costa and Calic and their 16 habits of mind. So I came up with what I called the habits of mind of creative engagement.

Eric Booth [00:24:25]:
And so what are the things human beings do when they are creatively engaged in scientific inquiry, in studying what’s in a painting, in trying to figure out what the next moves in a dance should be? And I came up with this bunch that I used to introduce in schools. I had 20 of them. A not very helpful small list, but it boiled down to terms we all hear. But it’s simple things like generating multiple ideas and selecting solutions based on quality. Things like sustaining an inquiry of questions over time. It has to do with accurate self assessment it’s certainly all driven and you’ve got fuel in your podcast title with Intrinsic Motivation, where a lot of my work lands itself in exploring what can we do to activate the possibility that young people will invest themselves in the invitations we offer. Because creativity doesn’t happen unless it is intrinsically motivated. So those are the kinds of questions I and teaching artists I work with are always wrangling with.

Eric Booth [00:25:48]:
And it’s less about whether it’s happening in dance or in biology and it’s more about how do you decode new texts, how do you discover what else it is that you’re seeing that might have a significant connection and then going to those god love them. Abraham Maslow’s primary creativity, secondary creativity and tertiary creativity. The skills of making stuff from scratch, the skills of shaping stuff other have made so it has impact on others, the performer and then that third tertiary, the improvisational capacity to make and express effectively together at the same real time. So that’s where the teaching artist inquiry lives and you know it well. Cindy.

Matthew Worwood [00:26:50]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:26:58]:
Curiosity to Create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood [00:27:10]:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their Creative Thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:27:25]:
To learn more, check out Curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode.

Matthew Worwood [00:27:33]:
This has been an incredible discussion and I’m really looking forward to Cindy and I having a debrief about this conversation because my gut feeling is we’ll continue our debrief offline, but I suspect it’s going to come up in our end of season seven debrief as well. But we do have to end the discussion now because we’re getting a little bit short on time. So for all of our guests, we ask them to provide three tips that educators can apply in their classroom when it comes to promoting creativity.

Eric Booth [00:27:59]:
All right, three tips. I already named one of them. The ruthless use of fund to invite small, regular creative play as a habit in a classroom or in a regular community process. So that number one, it’s short. You don’t have to assess it, you don’t even have to tell the administration you’re doing it. But to actually activate the verbs of artistry on a regular playful basis so kids are noticing how they work, they’re taking charge of some of this play so that there is creative playfulness becomes a part of the culture of that classroom. Consistency is important and I guess brevity so that it doesn’t become a heavy have to do, but it becomes this place where you work, your ideational fluency or your divergent thinking. Or you come up with one of those specific skills of creativity and you practice it like a gym machine that you work on a regular basis quickly.

Eric Booth [00:29:15]:
A second one I would offer is people tend to think of creative activities as big things. It’s like, oh, man, I don’t have any time in my curriculum to do a big creative project. Think small sometimes. Like those little creative bumpers I was just describing. Do small creative projects. Sometimes think small. In fact, sometimes focus small, sometimes focus on take ten minutes to create one sentence that accomplishes something beautiful or surprising or interesting. Sometimes work small, and look at the processes you went through to come up with that small thing.

Eric Booth [00:30:03]:
And my third would be don’t think of the development of creative capacity as happening in one shots. Think of it more like a muscle that’s partly to encourage that shy or not so confident part of a lot of students to regularly be invited and feel the pleasure of making stuff they care about and making it a regular part of a classroom culture. Because it is partly a cultural issue to have a space where kids can feel they’re succeeding if they’re coming up with divergent ideas, not that they’re creating trouble or they’re being the weird kid. So the regularity of creative invitations, even if modest in scope. My dream is that schools have creativity coaches. That teaching artists are hired to be a coach for every teacher in a school to kind of look at the ways in which small regular activities can become a part of every classroom. And big projects, too. So three guidances, ruthless use of fun, regularity, and small focus can change any classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:31:21]:
Well, Eric, thank you so much for your time today. If you’re interested in Eric’s work, check out his website, ericbooth. Net. We’ll put that link in our show notes and check out his most recent book, making Change teaching Artists and Their Role in Shaping a Better World. And we always could use more of that. So my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:31:42]:
My name is Dr. Matthew Warwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:31:45]:
This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity to Create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.