Jonathan Fineberg [00:00:00]:
I’ve learned, really, from watching my own children. But through many 45 years of teaching students that you need to figure out what a student’s interested in and you need to enable them. And you realize also, and this is something I learned from my training on psychoanalysis, sometimes you get a patient who comes in and you know how to provoke an insight, but you don’t know exactly what’s going on.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:25]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:28]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
This is the fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:34]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:40]:
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 [00:00:50]:
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 [00:00:58]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:00]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And in this episode, we have an opportunity to dig a little further into the connections between art and creativity with our guest, Dr. Jonathan Feinberg. Dr. Feinberg is the program director of the first PhD program in Creativity at the University of Arts in Philadelphia. He’s also the author of some 30 books and catalogs on modern art and the co creator, with Jonathan Carlin of Imagining America, icons of 20th Century American Art, which is an award winning PBS television documentary. Dr. Feinberg is also a recipient of various awards, including the Pulsar Fellowship in critical writing.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:42]:
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:01:44]:
Well, thanks for asking me.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:46]:
So, Jonathan, given your extensive art background, I think it gives us an opportunity to revisit the relationship between art and creativity. So I was wondering if you could first provide us with your definition of creativity and then tell us how that definition relates to the arts.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:02:03]:
I suppose I’m a subscriber to the comment that Wittgenstein made, that there’s a lot of things you just can’t put into words and that our ability is circumscribed by that inability. And I’ve learned really from watching my own children, but through many 45 years of teaching students that you need to figure out what a student’s interested in and you need to enable them. And you realize also, and this is something I learned from my training on psychoanalysis, sometimes you get a patient who comes in and you know how to provoke an insight, but you don’t know exactly what’s going on, and there’s a lot that we can’t put into words and works of art. It’s a very powerful realm of discourse, which is not verbal. And oftentimes we’re able to communicate through images and through forms about things we can’t actually talk about quite yet. And there’s actually a chapter of my book on modern art, the border of mind and Brain, which is dedicated to the relationship of Calder and Murot, who didn’t have a common language. Odly enough, they both spoke very broken and terrible French, but they communicated through their materials and compositions, and it was a fascinating thing to look at. So for teachers, that’s, I think, a great cue.

Cyndi Burnett [00:03:26]:
So if you can’t come up with words to describe what creativity is, how do you have a whole doctoral program in creativity?

Jonathan Fineberg [00:03:34]:
Well, I think it’s about realizing again that there are certain things you can do to stimulate a student to break out of the hierarchies of thinking that they’ve been trained in, which is anybody who’s done a PhD. I mean, I did my PhD at Harvard. It took me ten years to get over that. And you’re trained so thoroughly in methods and literature that precede you that it’s very hard to do something new. And on the whole, the academies and the fellowship committees and all the other formal things that exist are disposed to not letting you do that. So this program, the way this program works, I invented this. After years of teaching PhD students, I realized that you needed to break down those hierarchies. And so this program takes somebody out of their job for two weeks, which everybody can do, and I throw them into one experience after another for which they have no tools, push them to make sense out of it on their own, supported by a cohort of other students who are not only not in their own field, but are also very bright and are critiquing their work as they go along.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:04:46]:
So there’s this kind of esprito core, all the usual things that interfere with the PhD program, the competition, and all that other stuff. I just took it all out, and I decided to really focus on the dissertation and on the creativity of trying to solve a problem that people haven’t seen before. And first of all, I’m astounded by my students. They really are amazing people. I’ve learned a lot from them. But I think that we’ve gotten them all to a successful point of doing more creative work in what they do.

Matthew Worwood [00:05:19]:
Just to follow up on something you said around critique, because I work in the Yukon school of fine arts, and critique is such an important part of not just the art process, but, I think any type of creative process. But what you said that fascinated me was the fact that you have critique coming from people with backgrounds in other disciplines, and I’m curious to see how you’ve seen that play out, because quite often, we are encouraged to provide critique from a particular perspective, often shaped by the discipline to which we’re studying. So it must be really fascinating to see this critique taking place under the umbrella of kind of like the arts, but everyone’s from different backgrounds. How does that play out?

Jonathan Fineberg [00:06:03]:
Well, one of the issues I wanted to get away from was jargon. Right. Every field has it, and if you have a group of fellow students, none of whom are in your field, you can’t use it. The other thing I eliminated was the competition among students, because in most graduate programs, you all end up competing for the same attention and the same jobs, and that’s gone, and there’s no exams and there’s none of that. So it’s all about really trying to frame an idea based on experiences that you’ve had and to be able to communicate it to people who are really smart but not in your field. And it’s worked out incredibly well. And then, actually, once they’re done with this immersion course, which is very intense, it’s 14 days with no break, and it goes morning till night. We’re all exhausted.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:06:53]:
I’m getting too old for it, but we’re all exhausted at the end. It’s very productive, and the exhaustion is, in a way, part of the process. And I bring in other people to help with this process, to really accelerate it. And then when I’m done with that, in the process of doing that, first of all, I keep asking the students to rewrite their dissertation proposals, and in lieu of what they’ve just experienced. And so there’s this constant rewriting and rethinking and group critique, which comes from an art school. That’s why I’m doing it in an art school, even though none of my students are artists. And when I’m done with that, what I try and do is I compose dissertation committees of three dissertation advisors. I pay them, which never happens and should happen in universities, and they also agree to meet with a student once a month and critique the work and sometimes meet as a group with the student.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:07:51]:
I recruit people from all over the world. I try and get the people who I think will help this student the most in making a really creative and make this the best thing that it can be. And so I’ve got students not only from all over the world, but I’ve got advisors from all over the world, and they’re really extraordinary. People have volunteered, people I didn’t think would say yes when I called them, but I’ve got MacArthur fellows and national medal of Science winners and really amazing people signed on for this university presidents, all kinds of people who have the expertise that really fits a student’s project. And they’ve all said to me at the end, we do do a dissertation defense. But that dissertation defense has turned out to be just a very elevated conversation with these advisors and the students about the subject, not an interrogation. And every one of them has said to me, this is the best committee they’ve ever been on in their academic careers, and they’ve loved the experience. So some of them are coming back to do it again.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:08:55]:
I think it’s something we all need to think about in higher education, about what this might imply for how we do the PhD. I think it goes all the way back to preschool. I mean, the lessons that we can learn from enabling a student’s intelligence and creativity. I don’t know if you know that book by Jacques Granciere called the ignorant schoolmaster, but he talks about this was a french philosopher, the wonderful book. And he talks about that idea that you need to enable the viewer or enable the thinker, enable the student to use their own brains and to make that as sharp as it can be. And I just noticed that raising kids for my own kids, I wish I’d been faster and better at this to begin with. But I realized that what you really want to do is understand where a kid’s coming from and what they’re interested in and how to enable them to do what they want to do better.

Cyndi Burnett [00:09:50]:
So you take this transdisciplinary approach to creativity and looking at people from all different disciplines, looking at research that they’re interested in, and you’re housing this under creativity at the University of the Arts, but not focused on the arts. Here’s where I’m struggling. I’ll just tell you, Jonathan, where I’m struggling is making that connection between creativity and the arts, helping at least give us some words to describe it, because it’s hard to say. You can’t describe it because you’re researching it. So I think right now you’re sort of really pushing me outside of my boundaries because I’m trying to attach it to something and it’s floating out there and I can’t attach it to something. So as your perspective as an artist, as well, and having this huge history in the arts, how do you see that playing a role in the work with these doctoral students?

Jonathan Fineberg [00:10:43]:
All right, well, first of all, I just did to you what I do to the students, which is to get you to try and make sense out of something you don’t have an explanation for. But let me answer your question directly, and that is in the last chapter of my modern Arthur border mind and brain. I started to speculate on what happens in the brain when we’re trying to solve a creative problem. And I realized that if you want to get great abs, you do a lot of sit ups. And if you want to try and be a creative thinker, you need to exercise the capacity to build the new connections in the brain for solving problems, and in particular, problems that can’t be solved. So one of the things that interested me very much in that book were the late paintings of Dubafe, where he made these. They look like gestural paintings. They almost look like a Jackson Pollock drip painting.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:11:35]:
When you look at them, you can’t possibly resolve the spatial ambiguities in those paintings. They’re unresolvable paintings. And Dubafe was wonderful because he talked about what was going on in his head as he made these things. So we have a lot to work with, but it’s that issue of trying to get somebody to step out of the known, so to speak, to exercise the ability to put things together in a different way. And one of the things, I work with a group of postdocs at the medical school at Penn in neuroscience, and I’m really interested in what happens in the brain. What does creative problem solving really require? The brain is extraordinarily complex. There’s just billions of cells involved, and there are these networks that are called up. And when you look at something, if you think of something really simple, like the eye, for example, when you and I look across the room and I’m looking at that cat behind you on your shelf and thinking, you and I are going to look at that.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:12:35]:
And there are certain things we’re going to see in common, which is kind of a miracle, because the eye has about a billion and a half cells on the retina, but the optic nerve has half that number of cells, which means that by the time what you see gets into the brain, where it’s processed, there’s already begun to be a transformation of information and recombination of experience. And it happens very fast, and it happens in the brain. When you look at an fMRI of the brain looking at a visual problem, and I’m mostly interested in visual things, so that’s why there’s a lot to work with there. But it applies to other areas, too. So if you look at the brain in an fMRI solving, trying to figure out something visual, what you realize is that it’s not just the visual processing centers which are in the back of the head. And we’ve mapped the brain pretty well, but actually the brain calls up everything you see. The brain light up in little bits on the parietal lobes and everywhere in the brain. And I think what’s happening is that the brain is trying to solve a problem, trying to understand what it is in front of you.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:13:45]:
What is it you see? Probably less than 20% of what you see is coming from the eye. Most of it’s coming from cortical processing, in which it’s calling up memories of things you’ve seen before, putting them together and then modifying them based on what you’ve just seen. And if you don’t do that, and this is kind of an interesting thing, think about an animal in nature. If you encounter a predator and you have to start from scratch and figure out what it is, you’re going to get eaten. So you need to move fast, and so you’re going to go to things that you’ve seen before, modify them, and try and put together a picture in your head. And I think that’s why all these parts of the brain light up. So I’m in the world of speculation here. I can’t go into a human brain and prove cell by cell that what I’m saying is true.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:14:35]:
But from everything I’ve seen, that’s where I’ve arrived.

Matthew Worwood [00:14:40]:
To piggyback on that and go back to the question we spoke about. Having an opportunity to showcase your ideas and speak about your dissertation work with people from so many different disciplines. It strikes me that the approach to critique, which, coming back again, is something that is so applicable to the arts. I mean, you take classes in art appreciation, you learn to see things, you learn to try and reflect on how you’re feeling, but then also how you feel that the artist was feeling, what they were trying to communicate, and then compare it to what you’re receiving from that information. That having ten people in the room with ten different backgrounds allows for lots of diversity of thought, diversity of ideas. And I think it is only going to sharpen the individual, the kind of PhD candidate’s creativity, because they’re now being challenged to make sure that the work they’re producing actually can be communicated to all these different disciplines. And it strikes me that actually the artistic approach that is being integrated into the program is the tool to which that is taking place.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:15:49]:
Well, you’re right on. Absolutely right. I mean, that’s why I’m doing this. In an art school. Nonlinear thinking is frowned upon in many PhD fields, but it’s the center of the arts and so is group critique. If you look at a painting class, all the students get together, one person hangs up all their work and they all talk about it. And those are things that come from an art school which are applicable to everything we do in the university, actually in all education. And I think that you’re absolutely right.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:16:20]:
I mean, it sharpens everybody. It’s really productive. Everybody gets new ideas from doing that. I found it really works.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:28]:
And then of course, you bring in the iteration design by making them recreate their dissertation or their problem statement in response to all of these different feedbacks that they’ve got. And I can only imagine how time consuming and frustrating that must be. But at the same time, again, I would argue that that is also a kind of experience that I would associate with the arts and the artistic process as well.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:16:52]:
No, you’re absolutely right. And I have to tell you that I don’t think these students are finding it frustrating and I think they’re finding it very exciting.

Cyndi Burnett [00:17:01]:
So this process that you take them through, and I appreciate you pointing out that my little shake there of going, I really don’t understand what I can attach this to, is part of the process which I find fascinating and funny. So thank you. But I’m curious, what happens throughout those two weeks? Do you give them any specific tools? What kind of provocations do you give them? And how could we do more of this leading up to this education? Like what can we do beforehand? I think this is amazing in the PhD level, but there are things that we can do for our listeners who are k through twelve, teachers or undergraduate students. What are things that we can help our students do to really let go of their points of contact, that they can let go of these hierarchies of understanding, to really make sense of the world in different ways?

Jonathan Fineberg [00:17:53]:
There are a couple of questions you just asked me. One of them is about the program itself. And one of the things, just to give you a sense of what I did, for example, right off the bat, I put the students into a morning class with a guy who’s just an extraordinarily talented theater director in town who does a kind of improvisational, improv theater, in a way, with them for the morning. Most of them have never experienced anything like that. It’s very challenging because it really puts you out on the line. He has them invent a character out of their own personality and then perform it in the afternoon. So that’s pretty great. And then those things that are very physical like that, I try and intersperse them also with these seminars where we do readings that are challenging, and I give them readings that they’ve never seen before.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:18:41]:
One of the things I usually give them is a book about the brain itself. I don’t know if you know Antonio DiMasio’s work. I’m a great admirer. He just did a new book called Knowing and feeling, and he talks about what he thinks is going on in the processes of the brain. So we have that conversation. I’ll also give know. Do you know a book called Field Guide to getting lost by Rebecca Solnett? It’s a great book. She’s a terrific writer.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:19:10]:
She’s a feminist writer from California. She’s very anti hierarchical. And this book has lots of different pieces that go together, and it’s very hard to put it all together in a linear way, but it’s very impressionistic. It’s almost like reading poetry, which in fact, I also have them do that. I give them readings that are challenging, that are not familiar. And we have these conversations about what happened, what’s going on here, and how does that affect the way we know the world. The other part of your question had to do with what does this say to a K through twelve teacher? I think the K through twelve teachers are probably more familiar with how to handle this than those of us who’ve been in universities for a long time, because kids ask completely unpredictable questions, and you have to honor the question with them, and that is part of the process. But I want to encourage more of that.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:20:09]:
I think it’s really important for teachers of young children to really try and enable them rather than train them. You can train a kid to do anything, but if you can enable what they natively want to do, you’ll teach them to be better. So one of the things, again, to come back to yet another question of yours, which is about children’s know, if you look at the, everybody thinks Picasso was a genius because he could draw a perfectly rendered academic pigeon at the age of nine. But that’s not what’s great about Picasso. His father taught him to do that, and you can teach any kid to do that perfectly. What was extraordinary in those very same drawings by Picasso is you flip him on the other side and you find him doing drawings that a kid would make. It’s obviously by a nine year old. But what’s so amazing is that you can already see that Picasso has the capacity to see multiple things at the same time in different ways, which is the nature of cubism.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:21:05]:
It’s the nature of his genius. What his training, in a way, enabled him to do was to do anything he wanted so that he was able to do that better. So I would say for the k through twelve teachers, keep it up, keep being a sympathetic listener to help a kid get, solve the problems they want to solve, see what they’re interested in, and encourage them to do that. You know, the famous remarks. Somebody asked Jerry Truman one time, he said, I never tell my daughter what to do. I ask her what she wants to do, and I tell her to do that. Which is right. That’s the right approach.

Matthew Worwood [00:21:42]:
Going back to the very first question where I was asking you to talk a little bit about the relationship of creativity and the arts, and we spoke about some of the common practices that we see within the art world and how they might be applied to this PhD program. And I think also we can start thinking about how they might be applied to other areas as well. But you also said something else then that I was wondering, well, is this another kind of practice, or dare I say, skill set that’s common in the arts that actually might be of benefit to creativity in other disciplines? And that’s that idea of being able to see things, at least visually, in different ways, is that something that with your background in art and art history, that you do see as something that’s a very important aspect of the artistic process? Because it strikes me that in other disciplines, we’re not always encouraged to see things in different ways.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:22:33]:
Yeah, that’s absolutely at the core of the whole thing. You’re absolutely right. One of the things that works of art do for us, which is, again, back to where we started this conversation, works of art give you an experience which is very deeply felt. If you’re really involved in a work, you really feel it, and you can’t quite put it into words. And it’s, in a way, a little bit, I like to say, a great work of art is like falling in love because you trust somebody else to get into a very private space with you, this place that you would never let anybody else into because you trust them, and because of that emotional investment in them, and because of the positivity of their response to you. It allows you to kind of reorganize yourself to think about things in a different way. And I think it’s not only true of a great marriage, but it’s also true of a great relationship with a painting. You look at a painting, and if you really love that painting, you get involved with it, and it touches you in a way that’s deeply personal, very emotional, and it opens up your way of thinking about things so that you’re available to give things new meanings.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:23:53]:
And that’s critical. I think you hit it right on the head. I think that’s absolutely essential for all this.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:00]:
I have one more question about the doctoral program before we ask you our final question, which is, are you training people to be creative researchers, or are you training people to look at research about creativity?

Jonathan Fineberg [00:24:15]:
No, absolutely. The former. I’m not trying to train anybody to be a researcher in creativity. I’m trying to use what I have learned doing that as a researcher myself in creativity to enable them to become better at whatever it is they really want to do. So they define a project. They have to come to me with a project they want to solve. And usually it’s because they have been working in a field for a while and they realize that there’s something they want to do that their training isn’t adequate for, and they have to make it up themselves, which every good researcher comes to that point at some point or another. And I want to enable them.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:24:51]:
I want to help them be better at that, quicker at it, and more creative and more innovative. The president of the University of the Arts, when he came here, redefined the mission statement of the university down to a simple phrase which was advancing human creativity. And this whole program is, in a way, an embodiment of that idea. I think that’s really what we want to do.

Matthew Worwood [00:25:16]:
We finish up all of our episodes, asking our guests to provide three tips that educators can go and either think about or implement in their classrooms. What would be your three tips?

Jonathan Fineberg [00:25:26]:
Well, one thing is to be a really open listener. So talking to students and listening to what they have to say and trying to understand where they’re coming from and what they need from you. The second thing I would say is that that relationship of trust, the mentorship aspect of teaching, is critical. It’s why online education doesn’t work quite as well. You get into a room with somebody, they get to know you, they feel comfortable, they trust you, and they will take a leap into something they don’t even understand because you tell them to try it. And that of course, is what every child learns from every parent. Or to ask my grandson to do something, he doesn’t have the basis to make a judgment about why I’m asking him to do it or why it would be valuable. But he’ll do it because he trusts me, and in the process, he will learn why.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:26:20]:
So that’s my second thing, is that it’s that mentorship in the relationship is terribly important. What would the third thing be? It’s something about an open mind. Can I tell you a story? Is that okay? I used to teach at University of Illinois. It was a remarkable place, a wonderful. I love state schools. I did it purposely. I could have spent the rest of my life at Harvard and Yale. And I said I went to University of Illinois because I thought I could change people’s lives.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:26:48]:
And I think I did. And we had five Nobel Prize prizes on the faculty when I was there. Mostly they were in physics and related fields and sciences. They were all people I knew very well. But there was one guy who I always think about, a guy named Carl Woz. I don’t know if you remember his name, but Carl was trained in physics, and he shifted into genomic biology. And he said, we don’t understand evolution. It’s not like a tree, he said, it’s like it’s coming up in all places at once, simultaneously.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:27:19]:
It’s unpredictable. Nature never repeats itself. And he know. And furthermore, there aren’t just two forms of life. There are multiple forms of life. And the science community treated him like a pariah. They didn’t take him seriously for years. He was sort of an outlier.

Jonathan Fineberg [00:27:37]:
And then all of a sudden, one year, he discovered the archaea, which is another form of life on the ocean floor, which is neither plant nor animal. It was on the front page of the New York Times. He won the Crawford Prize, which is the Nobel for biology. By this time, he was a pissed off 80 year old because the science community hadn’t treated him very well. But everybody now looks at him as probably the foremost evolutionist of the late 20th century. And I think about him a lot because we all bring to the experience of encountering somebody else’s ideas a whole set of prejudices that we often don’t see. And we need to analyze ourselves in that process and ask ourselves to be more open to things we haven’t thought of before and more receptive to points of view that aren’t like ours. We’re seeing the downside of not doing that in our culture right now.

Cyndi Burnett [00:28:33]:
Jonathan, thank you so much. For this really interesting conversation. If you’re interested in Jonathan’s work, check out his website, which we will put a link to in the bio. And he’s also offering one of his books, art since 1940, strategies of being for free as a digital download right now. So we’ll also put the link to that in the bio. So again, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast. If you like this episode, go and share it with a friend. I think I will be sharing it with many of my friends and colleagues.

Cyndi Burnett [00:29:07]:
And if you have any questions about past episodes or future or present episodes, please contact us at questions@fuelingcreativitypodcast.com my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:29:19]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:29:21]:
This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dabsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Isade.