Last week, I started a series that reexamines educational ideas/buzzwords. Creativity is another such word, in that many try to ‘tame’ creativity into a simple definition and/or formula. At the same time, artists and creatives know that while creativity might benefit from process, there is no formula.
Forgive me for telling you what you probably already know, but, contrary to what some people think, constraints are not the enemy of creativity. You may have told your students this, that constraints can be a catalyst for creativity. In this wonderful post by Annie Murphy Paul (whose book, The Extended Mind, deserves a post of its own), the author highlights this theory of constraints, citing the example of Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham (“Write a children’s book using 50 words or fewer.”), as well as research on constraints in creativity.
From a pedagogical perspective, I want to examine creative limits in relation to another educational idea: scaffolding. Scaffolding is the process of providing helpful supports for student learning, focused on the long-term goal of independent learning: what can students do now, with assistance/support/structure, and how does this help them operate independently later on? When learning chess, for instance, it might help to start with smaller problems that don’t involve thinking about the whole board. When I teach improvisation, I often start with students playing just the black keys on the piano. We can build from there, but limiting the ‘problem’ is one way to stimulate creativity within prescribed boundaries.
How do we find the ‘right-sized’ framing for a problem? I wish there was an easy answer here, but your experience is as good a guide as any. We can start with a smaller version of the ‘problem,’ work on a single piece of the puzzle, or use creative self-limitations: these can be either exclusionary (no color, for instance) or focusing (focus on nuances/shades in blue). In the words of jazz legend, bassist Charles Mingus: “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.”
I could go on, but I limited myself to 350 words.