Module 8: Synthesis
James Frye
James Frye
Tweet: Campaign for Creativity
Testing the life out of students? Want originality in schools? Get playful: Creativity is the answer. http://t.co/8WjizWlDKP #NCed #edchat
— Mr. James Frye (@mrjamesfrye) December 12, 2013
Elevator Pitch
Ever wonder why it seems like most students crave nothing but a multiple choice test when they're inside your classroom? Because their capacity for creativity has been tested out of them. Students don't know how to create, play or imagine anymore because society tells them their worth is defined by a number on a scale of 0 to 100. If we want any hope at all of preparing our students for the unpredictable future, we must jump without abandon into implementing creativity across the curriculum. We must believe in perceiving concepts through new lenses, patterning the frameworks of ideas to transform them and apply them to new ones, abstracting general concepts into new forms, embodied thinking through ideas with our senses, modeling new ways of understanding traditional ideas, and playing with ideas to use our senses--God forbid--for the fun of using them to take learning to new heights. So what are you waiting for? Get creative.
The White Paper
Creativity is largely in the eye of the beholder. By definition, creativity is the pairing of two things that normally would not be associated with each other to achieve a novel result. Much too often, though, legislature casts the impression based on their actions that creativity is a waste of instructional time. By casting off creativity in the classroom as something that is a waste of time, potential for student engagement through hands-on activities that lead to new thoughts and ways of thinking is lost in the shuffle. In the English classroom, creativity can and should be a measure of accountability for students to exercise their freedom to learn in new ways that are all their own. Teachers can guide students to academic creativity by implementing novel curricular strategies such as perception, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, and playing.
One of the first elements of academic creativity, according to the Root-Bernsteins’ Sparks of Genius, is Perception (Root-Bernstein, 1999). Perceiving is the subjective action of interpreting what is seen in the mind of the beholder. In an English curriculum, analyzing song lyrics are an excellent manner by which a student can creatively prove mastery of standards, especially in a poetry unit. For example, the song “Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe is a nostalgic and remorseful reflection on the speaker’s younger days. It is a reflection both in its form (written rumination) and in its meaning (coming to terms with the author’s past). As I listened (the primary sense for my observation) to the song, my initial observation struck me not only in the word, or lyric, but in what my auditory sense could appeal to my feeling through the melody as well. This modified my interpretation of the song because it changed the tone and mood in ways lyrics alone would not have. This universal appeal to (and, therefore, analysis by) the senses is creativity at work.
In William Blake’s poetry, one novel Pattern that can be identified abreast of the traditional is a random series of capitalized words throughout many of the poems. What new patterns can be detected in such an analysis of written reflection? What does a textual-level evaluation of grammar and syntax have to tell us about what devices more traditionally associated with evaluating poetry, such as metaphor and symbolism mean? How are letters and words parts metaphors and symbols in and of themselves, separated from the whole? In his poem “A Divine Image,” Jealousy (Blake 2) and Secresy (Blake 4) are two words that are atypically capitalized, giving them a hidden meaning and a new pattern of significance. These grammatical nuances call the reader back to reflect on the individual metaphorical significance of chosen words, and holistically, the words’ significance to the larger reflection within the poem. This makes them vital in both form and content (capitalization of structural letters signifying metaphysical importance).
If one does not perceive these patterns as significant and ignores them, then their discovery and recomprehension of the words allows for a completely new level of understanding. These are, essentially, the “diverse surprises” we need to make good patterns (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 135). Prior to a creative activity that I shared with my class explaining the idea of reflection, I developed the following pattern:
One of the first elements of academic creativity, according to the Root-Bernsteins’ Sparks of Genius, is Perception (Root-Bernstein, 1999). Perceiving is the subjective action of interpreting what is seen in the mind of the beholder. In an English curriculum, analyzing song lyrics are an excellent manner by which a student can creatively prove mastery of standards, especially in a poetry unit. For example, the song “Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe is a nostalgic and remorseful reflection on the speaker’s younger days. It is a reflection both in its form (written rumination) and in its meaning (coming to terms with the author’s past). As I listened (the primary sense for my observation) to the song, my initial observation struck me not only in the word, or lyric, but in what my auditory sense could appeal to my feeling through the melody as well. This modified my interpretation of the song because it changed the tone and mood in ways lyrics alone would not have. This universal appeal to (and, therefore, analysis by) the senses is creativity at work.
In William Blake’s poetry, one novel Pattern that can be identified abreast of the traditional is a random series of capitalized words throughout many of the poems. What new patterns can be detected in such an analysis of written reflection? What does a textual-level evaluation of grammar and syntax have to tell us about what devices more traditionally associated with evaluating poetry, such as metaphor and symbolism mean? How are letters and words parts metaphors and symbols in and of themselves, separated from the whole? In his poem “A Divine Image,” Jealousy (Blake 2) and Secresy (Blake 4) are two words that are atypically capitalized, giving them a hidden meaning and a new pattern of significance. These grammatical nuances call the reader back to reflect on the individual metaphorical significance of chosen words, and holistically, the words’ significance to the larger reflection within the poem. This makes them vital in both form and content (capitalization of structural letters signifying metaphysical importance).
If one does not perceive these patterns as significant and ignores them, then their discovery and recomprehension of the words allows for a completely new level of understanding. These are, essentially, the “diverse surprises” we need to make good patterns (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 135). Prior to a creative activity that I shared with my class explaining the idea of reflection, I developed the following pattern:
The above patterns are consistent in a typical reflection, but what happens if we create new patterns by rearranging the order of events? How does it alter the reflective process? In the table above, I have altered what might be considered traditional patterns of reflection into new patterns. These patterns require the writer to shift from thinking back to an event, to thinking forward in anticipation instead. In the Sparks of Genius text, a reference to Virginia Woolf on forming patterns in writing says that “. . . in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what” (Woolf in Root-Bernstein, 128). Where experiencing, remembering, perceiving and creating traditionally belong to reflective writing, my re-patterning asks this question: What if anticipation prior to experience belonged to reflection in writing?
New RE-Pattern of Reflection:
Step 1: Anticipating/Creating (thinking/writing about the event or instance before its occurrence)
Step 2: Experiencing
Step 3: Remembering
Step 4: Processing/Perceiving (thinking about the initial perception of the event, and reevaluating said perception post-experience).
The end result of an anticipatory reflection is different from a post-experiential reflection because it requires one to think about what they think will happen when writing before it actually happens. This allows the writer to create a new kind of reflection: one that calls upon pre-assessment and, depending upon the event, a great deal of imagination. This new pattern of reflection would help students to grasp the idea of reflecting more clearly because it asks them to think critically enough to both embrace and separate themselves from their subjectivity at different stages in the writing process. This gives traditional reflection on past experience in writing a clearer identity segregate from writing a reflection on subjective pre-conception about something that has not happened yet. Providing students with the opportunity to engage with the new type of reflection can lead students through new avenues of creativity, as well—leading to reflections on experiences that students may never get the opportunity to have, and encouraging thorough creative work out of the imagination.
The next creative strategy, Abstracting, occurs when one intangible principle or tangible thing is broken down into all its aspects, and a single one of those aspects is analyzed as an entity in and of itself. By abstracting the process and entity of any element for our students in the classroom, we are able to set aside the big idea for the steps of it. While reflecting myself on Sparks of Genius, I realized that in essence, abstraction can be understood as the “single most important thing about the room” (Root-Bernstein 90).
Abstracting concepts bestows upon an individual the ability to make greater use of the content they manipulate; for example, if I were reflecting on a lesson I taught, applying the idea of abstraction to examine parts of the whole, such as student behavior, the quality of one activity, approach, and the like. I teach the concept of abstraction to my students in hopes that it will help them to hone in on exactly what it is they need to say in their larger writing assignments.
On to another aspect of effective creativity, Embodied Thinking, is best defined by JJ Gibson in his article, The senses considered as perceptual systems: "The sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body" (Gibson, 1966).
The process of body thinking and empathizing can also be examined in the context of student reflections, or recall of prior knowledge for future assignments. One example of how this concept works with reflection is related to person-to-person contact, or touch. For instance, if we contract the muscles in our hands while holding someone else’s, it can serve as a non-verbal, physical indication that the moment is particularly important to the other person for one reason or another and should be remembered for later reflection—or, perhaps more accurately, reminiscing. Done enough times, squeezing that person’s hand can become a signal for the importance and/or significance of any given situation two people share at any point in time because the squeeze becomes, in a Pavlovian manner, associated with significant experiences. Through touch, the significance of the moment is signaled through haptic sensations.
Haptic perception occurs when people or objects that evoke ideas are recognized through touch. Haptic perception relies on a fusion of somatosensory perception (recognizing variations such as texture, etc. in objects and people) and proprioception (hand position and conformation in relationship to the person/object). The concept of haptic perception maps well to writing exercises and reflections in the English classroom, because it provides definition for the relationship between physical, body-and-muscle-initiated experiences that can be reflected upon by touching or feeling those same things again following those experiences.
Body thinking is a great way to engage students (adults and children alike) into thinking about their experiences in new and profound ways. If they utilize haptic perceptions to re-envision their memories for a journal entry or an activity that requires application of prior knowledge, this has the potential to aid the process and narrow down ideas behind their experience that were not obvious before a sensory-specific analysis.
Modeling is the process of taking an idea, or an abstraction of that idea, and molding it into an alternative form that is different than the original and provides a new way of understanding the original concept/idea.
New RE-Pattern of Reflection:
Step 1: Anticipating/Creating (thinking/writing about the event or instance before its occurrence)
Step 2: Experiencing
Step 3: Remembering
Step 4: Processing/Perceiving (thinking about the initial perception of the event, and reevaluating said perception post-experience).
The end result of an anticipatory reflection is different from a post-experiential reflection because it requires one to think about what they think will happen when writing before it actually happens. This allows the writer to create a new kind of reflection: one that calls upon pre-assessment and, depending upon the event, a great deal of imagination. This new pattern of reflection would help students to grasp the idea of reflecting more clearly because it asks them to think critically enough to both embrace and separate themselves from their subjectivity at different stages in the writing process. This gives traditional reflection on past experience in writing a clearer identity segregate from writing a reflection on subjective pre-conception about something that has not happened yet. Providing students with the opportunity to engage with the new type of reflection can lead students through new avenues of creativity, as well—leading to reflections on experiences that students may never get the opportunity to have, and encouraging thorough creative work out of the imagination.
The next creative strategy, Abstracting, occurs when one intangible principle or tangible thing is broken down into all its aspects, and a single one of those aspects is analyzed as an entity in and of itself. By abstracting the process and entity of any element for our students in the classroom, we are able to set aside the big idea for the steps of it. While reflecting myself on Sparks of Genius, I realized that in essence, abstraction can be understood as the “single most important thing about the room” (Root-Bernstein 90).
Abstracting concepts bestows upon an individual the ability to make greater use of the content they manipulate; for example, if I were reflecting on a lesson I taught, applying the idea of abstraction to examine parts of the whole, such as student behavior, the quality of one activity, approach, and the like. I teach the concept of abstraction to my students in hopes that it will help them to hone in on exactly what it is they need to say in their larger writing assignments.
On to another aspect of effective creativity, Embodied Thinking, is best defined by JJ Gibson in his article, The senses considered as perceptual systems: "The sensibility of the individual to the world adjacent to his body by use of his body" (Gibson, 1966).
The process of body thinking and empathizing can also be examined in the context of student reflections, or recall of prior knowledge for future assignments. One example of how this concept works with reflection is related to person-to-person contact, or touch. For instance, if we contract the muscles in our hands while holding someone else’s, it can serve as a non-verbal, physical indication that the moment is particularly important to the other person for one reason or another and should be remembered for later reflection—or, perhaps more accurately, reminiscing. Done enough times, squeezing that person’s hand can become a signal for the importance and/or significance of any given situation two people share at any point in time because the squeeze becomes, in a Pavlovian manner, associated with significant experiences. Through touch, the significance of the moment is signaled through haptic sensations.
Haptic perception occurs when people or objects that evoke ideas are recognized through touch. Haptic perception relies on a fusion of somatosensory perception (recognizing variations such as texture, etc. in objects and people) and proprioception (hand position and conformation in relationship to the person/object). The concept of haptic perception maps well to writing exercises and reflections in the English classroom, because it provides definition for the relationship between physical, body-and-muscle-initiated experiences that can be reflected upon by touching or feeling those same things again following those experiences.
Body thinking is a great way to engage students (adults and children alike) into thinking about their experiences in new and profound ways. If they utilize haptic perceptions to re-envision their memories for a journal entry or an activity that requires application of prior knowledge, this has the potential to aid the process and narrow down ideas behind their experience that were not obvious before a sensory-specific analysis.
Modeling is the process of taking an idea, or an abstraction of that idea, and molding it into an alternative form that is different than the original and provides a new way of understanding the original concept/idea.
One example of a potential modeling assignment in the English classroom would be to analyze pieces of artwork or photography, looking for symbolism that corresponds with a chosen text. Above is an example with credit to the work of Tom Hussey.
Coming back to the idea of reflection, this photo was taken in a nursing home where an elderly woman is looking at herself in the mirror in a moment of reflection; having a photo of a much younger nurse in the mirror instead of the woman's actual reflection serves to highlight several different layers of reflection to this reflective model. We can see role reversal because the woman has become the patient we can assume she has always cared for, recall and memory of being in that nursing role years prior, and a LITERAL, PHYSICAL reflection in a mirror of an INTANGIBLE, METAPHYSICAL reflection on the woman's past. This is a very multi-faceted model of my topic, as the photo is loaded with symbolism and highlights every step of my process of reflection indicated above (Experiencing, Remembering, Processing/Perceiving, and Reflecting/Creating/Sharing). Modeling is an excellent way to encourage students to think originally, build up their critical analysis skills, and engage deeply with symbolism and metaphor in any mediums.
Lastly, and arguably the most controversial, Play is the employment of the senses to carry out their own work; in other words, to let the body and mind wander in a manner that is not defined and that uses that wander to learn more about something within a certain topic or boundary. Therefore, it is also able to be defined as a lack of restriction within a confined space.
This activity is developed with all three types of play in mind. First, Practice Play, or “enhancing skill through practice” (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 248), is an aspect of play that builds up understanding by engaging in activities that are both recreational and meaningful, synonymously. Activities such as acting out scenes from books embody this because they allow the bodily kinesthetic and creative thinker to merge and create an evidence of learning.
Second, Symbolic Play, or “analogizing, modeling, play acting, and synthesizing” (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 248) is an additional aspect that is quite obviously represented by the acting medium of presentation for a memory. Finally, Game Playing "teaches the making of rules within externally bounded situations that define how we may behave or think, as well as the breaking of those rules" (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 248). The ability to manipulate the standard rules for reflection on a novel or play (seen in earlier graphic) by not prescribing a set pattern before creating the scene that will be acted out leaves it entirely up to the playwrights to represent the novel in a process that can either stick to a standard pattern/representation, or completely change the structure/format of a traditional reflection. The creation and its application is in the mind of the beholder - and sometimes, it is better to give fewer directives so as to encourage authentic, deep play.
Because the activity fits into all of these three dimensions of play in some manner, it makes an acting activity, as aforementioned, not only playful, but also meaningful.
From birth, we are taught to see. What is not learned until later is the ability to communicate what we see. As an English teacher, I pride myself on my ability to help my students learn to glean the messages and feelings that hide in books, poems and plays that make them great. In turn, my students show me that they can trust their own feelings about that message by expressing, clearly and convincingly, what they think (or “perceive”) when they “see." That perception comes to us all in different ways. Creativity is an underestimated component to unlocking the multivalent importance of all objects and elements of this life. The importance of creativity to the teaching of English is largely underestimated, and its impact can be noted in a contrast of students who think critically “outside the box,” and students who say, “what box?”
Coming back to the idea of reflection, this photo was taken in a nursing home where an elderly woman is looking at herself in the mirror in a moment of reflection; having a photo of a much younger nurse in the mirror instead of the woman's actual reflection serves to highlight several different layers of reflection to this reflective model. We can see role reversal because the woman has become the patient we can assume she has always cared for, recall and memory of being in that nursing role years prior, and a LITERAL, PHYSICAL reflection in a mirror of an INTANGIBLE, METAPHYSICAL reflection on the woman's past. This is a very multi-faceted model of my topic, as the photo is loaded with symbolism and highlights every step of my process of reflection indicated above (Experiencing, Remembering, Processing/Perceiving, and Reflecting/Creating/Sharing). Modeling is an excellent way to encourage students to think originally, build up their critical analysis skills, and engage deeply with symbolism and metaphor in any mediums.
Lastly, and arguably the most controversial, Play is the employment of the senses to carry out their own work; in other words, to let the body and mind wander in a manner that is not defined and that uses that wander to learn more about something within a certain topic or boundary. Therefore, it is also able to be defined as a lack of restriction within a confined space.
This activity is developed with all three types of play in mind. First, Practice Play, or “enhancing skill through practice” (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 248), is an aspect of play that builds up understanding by engaging in activities that are both recreational and meaningful, synonymously. Activities such as acting out scenes from books embody this because they allow the bodily kinesthetic and creative thinker to merge and create an evidence of learning.
Second, Symbolic Play, or “analogizing, modeling, play acting, and synthesizing” (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 248) is an additional aspect that is quite obviously represented by the acting medium of presentation for a memory. Finally, Game Playing "teaches the making of rules within externally bounded situations that define how we may behave or think, as well as the breaking of those rules" (Root-Bernstein, 1999, p. 248). The ability to manipulate the standard rules for reflection on a novel or play (seen in earlier graphic) by not prescribing a set pattern before creating the scene that will be acted out leaves it entirely up to the playwrights to represent the novel in a process that can either stick to a standard pattern/representation, or completely change the structure/format of a traditional reflection. The creation and its application is in the mind of the beholder - and sometimes, it is better to give fewer directives so as to encourage authentic, deep play.
Because the activity fits into all of these three dimensions of play in some manner, it makes an acting activity, as aforementioned, not only playful, but also meaningful.
From birth, we are taught to see. What is not learned until later is the ability to communicate what we see. As an English teacher, I pride myself on my ability to help my students learn to glean the messages and feelings that hide in books, poems and plays that make them great. In turn, my students show me that they can trust their own feelings about that message by expressing, clearly and convincingly, what they think (or “perceive”) when they “see." That perception comes to us all in different ways. Creativity is an underestimated component to unlocking the multivalent importance of all objects and elements of this life. The importance of creativity to the teaching of English is largely underestimated, and its impact can be noted in a contrast of students who think critically “outside the box,” and students who say, “what box?”