A NEW Approach to Defining and Measuring Creativity
-an interview with my little sister-
I interviewed my younger sister, Costa. She’s in high school and very involved with band and music. She is a great singer, piano player, and percussionist for the high school marching band. I chose to interview her with the intention of comparing her opinions to those of my brother who, also a musician and a percussionist, has his own known opinions about creativity.
My sister was sold on the idea that creativity is about expressing yourself whether or not it is pleasurable to someone else, because creativity is unique to you and who you are. This in her mind makes creativity completely subjective because each person gets to define for themselves what creative means to them. Therefore, creativity cannot be taught, but the basic skills of the content area must be present in order to create a path for creativity. We discussed her ability to make music her own because she has learned the structure of music and understand the notes and the ways to play them. According to Costa, as long as you feel what you have created has expressed something, then it doesn’t matter what someone takes away from it, which means that a rubric cannot be created to define the level of creativity. If the goal of a musician was to play music the exact way a composer wanted it, the musician could be a great player but not necessarily creative. She said that was what the great thing about music, in relation to Charles Mingus’s quote, “creativity is about more than just being different – anyone can play [music] weird, that’s easy,” because music is often about being “lost in translation because there are so many different ways to interpret it,” allowing musicians to be very creative with how they represent themselves through what they are playing, even if the notes themselves are the same.
In contrast to my sister’s definition that creativity is a way of expressing yourself or your feelings or thoughts in a way that is unique and special to you, my college-aged brother’s opinion of creativity is taking materials and changing it to do something new with it (he overheard my conversation with my sister and, of course, had to throw his opinions in there even though he wasn’t fully aware of what we were discussing). I chose to include this in the paper because I found it fascinating how different their views were.
My sister was sold on the idea that creativity is about expressing yourself whether or not it is pleasurable to someone else, because creativity is unique to you and who you are. This in her mind makes creativity completely subjective because each person gets to define for themselves what creative means to them. Therefore, creativity cannot be taught, but the basic skills of the content area must be present in order to create a path for creativity. We discussed her ability to make music her own because she has learned the structure of music and understand the notes and the ways to play them. According to Costa, as long as you feel what you have created has expressed something, then it doesn’t matter what someone takes away from it, which means that a rubric cannot be created to define the level of creativity. If the goal of a musician was to play music the exact way a composer wanted it, the musician could be a great player but not necessarily creative. She said that was what the great thing about music, in relation to Charles Mingus’s quote, “creativity is about more than just being different – anyone can play [music] weird, that’s easy,” because music is often about being “lost in translation because there are so many different ways to interpret it,” allowing musicians to be very creative with how they represent themselves through what they are playing, even if the notes themselves are the same.
In contrast to my sister’s definition that creativity is a way of expressing yourself or your feelings or thoughts in a way that is unique and special to you, my college-aged brother’s opinion of creativity is taking materials and changing it to do something new with it (he overheard my conversation with my sister and, of course, had to throw his opinions in there even though he wasn’t fully aware of what we were discussing). I chose to include this in the paper because I found it fascinating how different their views were.
From doing the reading and talking to my sister, I was thinking about the difficulty of defining creativity because the point of creativity seems to be that there are no boundaries or limitations, making it challenging to pinpoint a definition, which should also not have restrictions. Is there really a wrong answer for what creativity is if for so many people there is not a wrong way to be creative. In relation to my professional life, I can see how difficult it is to create expectations for creativity. As a teacher that is often one of the first things that I put on a rubric for a project-based assessment – Creativity. But can you ever really take points off for that section if the student themselves believes that their work is creative? As far as my personal life is concerned, I too am musically inclined, having played the violin since 4th grade. I know the notes and I know how to play what is written on the page, but whenever we would play fiddle music in orchestra I always struggled. When the instructions were given to play anything you want in a certain section as long as it contained the correct few notes (in any orders) and was played in a fiddler, twangy style, I always froze up and wasn’t sure how creative to play or what it should look like. According to my sister and her definition of creativity, to be more creative myself, I need to be ok with expressing myself in a way where I don’t care what others say about my creativity because it should be all about and for me anyway.