Nurturing creativity

Early phases of becoming an artist

There have been a few people in my life who have played a significant role in nurturing my creativity. My high school art teacher, Miss Keary, is one of the most important to me. I haven’t seen her in over thirty years, but I do hear about her since my father attends a yearly meeting of retired teachers. One of her friends left a comment on a post I wrote last year, where I just briefly mentioned her, which inspired me to talk about her in more depth.

It isn’t always easy being an artist. Even more difficult is becoming one in environments that are often hostile to expressions of creativity and not designed to nurture artistic or visual skills. I liked school, and was fairly successful in most subjects, but they were all just classes get out of the way so I could attend art class. I remember counting the days until the next one– torture in elementary school when they were two weeks apart.

I decided to attend high school in the town where my father was a teacher instead of the town we lived in since it had higher quality schools. I was the new kid with no friends, and I lived 45 minutes away. I remember walking down to the basement of the big new school to discover the art department that became my oasis for the three years of high school.

The first room at the bottom of the stairs was Miss Keary’s room. I remember her as a fairy godmother. Always so cheery and bright. Salve in the midst of the social struggles of teenage years. And she was a real artist, who painted and showed in galleries. I had never met one before. My family is full of people who do crafts for hobbies, but not for ART.

What I got from my high school art teacher, Marjorie Keary

Marjorie Keary believed in me. She probably believed in all her students, but she had a way of making it feel personal and personalized. She was always supportive and told me I could be an artist and found something positive about everything I did. And it wasn’t because my work was outstanding— my mother still has a pile of it under a bed in her house— it is typical high school art.

Maybe she saw my passion? The tiny little flame of inspiration? She nurtured it and helped it grow.

She opened my eyes, and changed how I see the world forever. Miss Keary loved to assemble still life setups for us to draw with fabric and pitchers. My drawings were always kind of flat and boring. Not that she ever once told me that, but I knew. Then one day I was struggling to figure out what I was doing wrong. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. She leaned over my right shoulder and started pointing out details I wasn’t seeing. Shadows. How the textures contrasted. How the lines interrelated. She gently challenged me to look deeper. After several minutes suddenly the world shifted, and I started seeing differently. Kind of like in the Wizard of Oz when the movie shifts from black and white to color.

I thought I was learning to draw, but she showed me that I was learning to see. The hand can’t begin to reproduce what the eye can’t see. It was a profound moment in my development.

Lessons learned

I don’t think I ever would have become an artist without Marjorie Keary in my life. Much of art training is based on criticism, and the market is a harsh judge. Many, many times over the years I have remembered those early years of support, and drawn on them for strength and inspiration.

My attention has shifted over the years from being an artist who makes stuff to being an artist who facilitates others people’s creativity. I have remembered how important it is to have someone believe in your creativity and see the sparks of inspiration in the early attempts.

I doubt Marjorie Keary was even doing all of these things and making this huge mark on my life so I could go on to make marks on others. I believe it is just the integrity of who she is and how she walks though this world. I hope I have become a better person from the foundation she gave me.

So, thank you Miss Keary, for all you have done for me. For how you inspired and nurtured me when I needed it most. For being a kind generous mentor to young artists. For who you are and how you walk through the world.

Christine Martell

Wrestling with Creativity

I was recently asked to develop a non-credit certificate program on creativity and innovation in business. It’s very early in the process, there aren’t a lot of limitations yet. I started by looking around online for discussions about creativity and asking questions of my network. I’m looking for input from as many people as possible.

The concept of creativity

I started by asking my Twitter network : How do you teach creativity?

hjarche @cmartell for adults, you may have to do a lot of unteaching first
layoutmonkey @cmartell It’s more like ‘facilitating’ the creative thought process.
dramagirl @cmartell Set a ‘problem’ within a set of limitations. Stand back and let students engage.
danielrose @cmartell you want me to tweet a reply? how about a 3 day conference on the subject. how can we compromise. i love, love, love this question
danielrose @cmartell have you read Path of Least Resistance by Fritz? That’s where I start when I want to “teach” “creativity”. Lots of “’s.

Lots of “’s. I noticed this too. And it’s not just in this list of responses, I saw it in other discussions of creativity. Not sure exactly what to think of it yet, but it is a distinct pattern. Could it reflect the elusive nature of the concept? Or it’s amoeba like nature that shifts as soon as you focus on it?

And what is creativity anyway? People sure seem to have a wide range of ideas about it. And lots of ideas about whether they are creative or not. It gets twisted up with art. Some who seem very creative to me, don’t think they are because they don’t express it artistically.

Expressing Creativity

I have used art in facilitation for many years. I used to focus more on the expressive arts, asking people to draw, paint, play music, dance, do yoga. What I noticed was I spent a lot of time on creative anxiety, and helping people get beyond their fear to be willing to engage. I heard story after story of mean art teachers and parents who told kids their trees couldn’t be purple. Layers and layers of lessons that shut down the natural instinct to create.

I had those mean teachers and people who didn’t support my art also. But for whatever reason, it drove me deeper into it rather than away. It’s not that I don’t feel creative anxiety, it’s just that I push through it. So I can be creative on demand. How can other people discover that place?

Giving permission to create

If I am going to facilitate creative expression in others, part of it needs to be creating a safe space and helping to find a place inside that activates permission. To unlearn all the lessons about I am not creative, to foster yes I am creative.

Next, I will look to mitigate the effects of judgment. There is a time and place for assessment in relationship to the quality of our creative efforts. Sometimes I think my ability to create relates more to my ability to suspend judgment for quite a while and produce a lot of total crap. So often I see people give up after only a couple of tries. Yes, people get lucky and hit right away sometimes. But most of the time, its a small percentage of ideas that are exceptional.

Tools and skills are part of it

Certainly there are tools to help us, and skills that can be developed. Just as important are to develop the ability to access when it is the right time to use a particular tool. Which tools do you think are important? Things that jump to mind for me

• brainstorming effectively
• storytelling
• generative divergent methods for idea generation
• mindmapping
• variety of visual tools
• improv

What else?

Tension between divergence and convergence

There is something about the concept of balancing process and task that is critical to creativity. I’ve been seeing it manifest in a variety of ways. With the visual processes I work with I see it in the shift between the divergent generation of ideas and the shift to converging into an action plan. After you generate ideas, there is a moment of possibility where if you look carefully, new patterns and connections can be made. All too often though, it’s a moment where old patterns of thinking and agendas surface and groups are off and running into an ‘answer’. Instead of basking in possibility, a kind of group think surfaces that generates least common denominator solutions. As a facilitator, I’m focusing my attention in this place. Looking for activities and sequences that allow the group to use pattern recognition and ways of reconfiguring. Anyone have any ideas?

In The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about a number of traits that tend to be separate in many people, but in creatives they both exist. Like introversion and extroversion, high energy and sleeping a lot, imagination and reality. I recognize these things about myself, but I suspect it’s my ability to rock back and forth between the opposites that releases the creativity. There is something about being able to tolerate tension?

What else should I be thinking about? Have any resources to share?

Stress, creativity and getting going again

I was reading a post on Katie Kondrath’s get Fresh Minds blog, Being too busy to think is actually an excuse. She apparently has had a Fall like mine where she has been traveling and over-busy. She decided it was only excuses that kept her from doing what needed to be done. I’m not so sure. She goes on to notice a couple of things that have seemed very true to me lately.

• creativity is a mental function that reacts negatively to stress. The more stress someone has in their life, the less likely they are to be creative.
• The more people have on their plate, the less they want to spend time exploring possibilities. It becomes more about getting things done than “seeing what possibilities are out there.”

For Katie, it has been a matter of forging ahead by writing lists. That often works for me too, but I had gotten beyond my ‘will-do-it list’ state. This time, it has been a matter of cleaning up enough of the messes piling up to have the physical and mental space to move ahead.

When I made the choice to do 7 different conference presentations in 8 weeks, I was thinking about them separately. After all , it was just 6 trips, and only 3 were cross country. What I didn’t really figure was the impact of never really adjusting to the time changes, and the accumulation of things that wouldn’t get done when I dropped home for a only few days.

My blogs have suffered the most. They’re the easiest thing not to get to, and the hardest thing to think about when I am overtired. As I attended more conferences, I thought I would have more things to blog about, but what I found is I needed more time between them than I got in order to think. I now understand I need reflection time to process what I am experiencing and learning in order to write about it.

I did help launch a new blog for the Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research (SIETAR-USA). It was the first time I have tried to start a blog in conjunction with an event, in this case, the annual conference. While I have blogged about conference sessions before, it has been my impressions and responses posted after the fact. This time I tried to capture the essence of the sessions as they were happening to convey to other members who did not attend. This was MUCH harder. I have a new appreciation for reporters. It takes a lot more time to take detailed notes and then try to construct something from them that works in the written form.

For those of you who are interested in Intercultural Communication, there were some very interesting sessions you will want to read about listed below, as well as a number of other posts from the conference.

• Keynote with Dr Mitch Hammer The Courage to Converse: The Role of Culture in Conflict and Crisis Events
• Fireside chat with Dr Raymond Reyes
• Beyond Iraq: Intercultural training in the military and the emerging role of interculturalists

I’m slowly returning to my usual routines. I have read most of the posts in my Google Reader. I have finally unpacked and put all the piles of clothes away that got dropped in various locations. I’ve recycled the mountains of magazines and junk mail that waited for me. I wish I had a marked as read button for junk mail…. and a report as spam that would make it all go away.

What else has helped?

• Lots of Heat and Eat food from the health food store (including Thanksgiving)
• Scheduling meetings back to back on certain days so I have uninterrupted time to catch up on others
• Allowing myself to sleep in
• Reconnecting with friends I have been neglecting
• Allowing myself to think and process without jumping to doing

Do you have any other suggestions about how to get going again?

What is innovation in learning? (IIL07)

Innovation in learning was the theme of the Brandon Hall conference (IIL07) in Santa Clara this week. I’ll be writing a series of posts on a variety of sessions I attended, and will start with the one I facilitated.

Facilitating Learning with Photographs

The ninety minute session started with everyone selecting photographs to make an individual image on a piece of paper in response to the question: “What is innovation in learning?”

We then looked for patterns in the images. These visual patterns tend to be repeated over and over by an individual, regardless of the content. So you will tend to use the same ‘visual voice’ regardless of the situation. Knowing what you are most likely to do is helpful, especially when designing since sometimes your particular voice will be effective in conveying your intended message and sometimes it will not.

Conversations about innovation in learning

The participants worked in four small groups of 3-5 people. Each person got a chance to tell the story of their individual image based on the question “What is innovation in learning?”.

Then the members of each group were charged with coming together to create a presentation based on a shared vision of “What is innovation in learning?” for the rest of the participants. Each group had the same photographs to select from and were left to their own devices on on how they would go about the process.

The tape group

This group made sure everything was taped down, and cleaned up all the images at the end and put them back into the packages. They were so good at clean up , that the notes I took about their image got lost in the process. I remember a few key things about it. Perhaps one of the group members will add more to the comments?

• you need to include people who are different
• being on target
• expansive
• wine- the adult carrot
• willingness to climb in unconventional ways
• learning happens in relationship and with others
• needs to be all tied together
• using old things in new ways

3-D Cycle of Learning and Innovation

This group taped the background into a cylinder and made a three dimensional structure.

The foundation is people, who line the bottom. Need people for learning. Move up into building blocks, letting ideas follow. There are boats, fishermen, fishing rods, and the finished product. Going from A-Z, connecting links and ideas. There is measurement and growth. a bridge connecting back to the beginning, it’s never ending, you keep looking for how you can improve.

Labeling for understanding group

This group wanted to make sure everyone could understand the various aspects of their image, so they added labels to the sections. The group members had different ideas, and came from different directions. Having different sections created space for various voices.

• Be Wise
  • bringing in wisdom
• Have Fun
• Come together
• Stand Out
  • be innovative, do your own thing
• Be Free
  • think outside the box, all ideas, inspirations
• Re-Think
  • have other concepts
• Believe
  • extreme goals, but be lighter

With the different ideas, they had to come up with a central common theme, which they could then stem out from. Standing out served as the common ground. Then the other sections were added. At first it was hard for the more linear thinkers, but they kept building on top of things and it started making sense. It became circular and democratized as they started trusting one another.

One image group

This group talked for most of the time. They had two discussions before deciding on their image at the end of the time alloted. First they talked about recurring themes in the individual images:

• Learn in new ways
• Levels of learning – branching
• Growth
• Brain/Mind Burst
• Sharing of innovative thought

The other conversation they had was about going back to why they came to the conference:

• The creative energy
• Bringing creative ideas to life
• A variety of innovative techniques to enhance final productivity
• Learn how to use new products and services to enhance learning experience for learners
• Learning from others who are doing what I am doing

The team talked a lot about growth and mind burst. Kept looking at it to find one strong image that they could branch ideas out from. Some were similar and some different. Thinking outside the box became the visual with tangents. Innovative growth, going where you’ve never gone before. Interaction, with the different branches from different people. Clients and others at different levels enhancing learning experience. Learning from each other. Innovative thought, new ways, diversity of thought. Innovation of ideas.

What did we learn?

Throughout the conference the theme of ‘it’s not about the technology, it’s about the learning’ kept repeating itself. Jay Cross, author of Informal Learning, in his closing keynote speech reiterated this by using his participation in the VisualsSpeak presentation as an example. Jay liked my session, because it was low-tech and because it allowed a group of strangers to get to the underlying issues in an innovative way and in less than ninety minutes.

The VisualsSpeak ImageSet is a low-tech (Alright it’s really a no-tech tool. We’re still in denial.) tool for sparking innovative conversations. Nothing to plug-in, no fancy bells and whistles, and it doesn’t require an advanced degree to operate. It is a great tool, but it is just that; a tool. The real value is that using our tool gets people talking in ways that they normally wouldn’t. Using the tool won’t make you innovative or design better learning, it’s how you use the tool and how you apply the ideas that the process facilitates.

The same holds true for technology. If we don’t design an effective program, no amount of technology is going to make it good. It doesn’t matter how cool or innovative the technology is. The underlying teaching is the important part. Technology is only the vehicle that delivers the learning and makes it available to a wide audience. The high-tech aspects of the tool mean absolutely nothing without the underlying foundation of good course content.

As trainers, course designers, e-learning specialists, etc, we cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into thinking that technology is going to solve the problems for us. A thirty year-old bicycle will get you two blocks down the street just as well as a Ferrari. The real challenge is knowing how and when to use the different technologies to deliver the most impact.

I would love to hear from others about what is innovation in learning.

• How do you go about innovating?
• What have you heard about that you think is innovative?