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CREATIVITY AS RESEARCH PRACTICE

IN THE VISUAL ARTS

Graeme Sullivan
Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S.A.

Creativity has a long tradition as a “doing” or “making” practice and is a continuing

focus of research by arts and educational researchers, and discipline specialists. Yet
the informing contexts and desired outcomes that characterize creativity as a valued
human capacity remain elusive. Consequently the use of creativity in constructing and
critiquing new knowledge remains obscure and mostly undervalued. To redress this
misunderstanding about its individual, institutional, and cultural value, this chapter
critiques creativity as a research construct and explores the contexts that inform cre-
ative practice. There are three premises on which the arguments presented here are
based. First, creativity refers to the individual capacity to see and understand things in
new ways that others also find important. Second, creativity is a site beyond the self
whereby creativity takes place in public – it is not just a habit of the mind, but is char-
acterized by individual agency and social action. And finally, it is argued that creativ-
ity is a cultural practice that has an important role to play in advancing our critical
understanding of artistic, educational, social, and technological issues of the times.
The thesis being advanced is that creativity is an individually directed and culturally
mediated practice upon which models of inquiry can be developed that give rise to new
insights. Consequently, “creative-led” research involves practices that both create and
critique new knowledge and has the capacity to transform human understanding.

Conceptions of Creativity in Research

To understand how creativity can be conceptualized as a research practice there is
a need to review ways in which creativity has been studied as a human disposition and
a cultural construct. Three basic questions drive studies of creativity and ask, What is
creativity? When is creativity? and Why creativity? The first two have been part of the
creativity research landscape for some time and will only be briefly covered as a back-
drop for the more pressing question that involves reassessing why creativity remains
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L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, 1181–1194.
© 2007 Springer.
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important in the image-blitz world that individuals confront today. There is also a need
to locate this discussion within educational debate because of the current reactionary
retreat to a functionalist regime of research that threatens to limit future advances in
how educational research is carried out and to what it is expected to achieve.
To study creativity, researchers have generally moved from asking questions about
“what” creativity is, which is seen as a biological construct or a desirable disposition of
the mind, to questions about “when” creativity becomes manifest, which explores it in
relation to a convergence of social and contextual factors. Studies into the features of cre-
ativity are based on the idea that creativity is a valued, if somewhat rare, human trait and
has been the subject of considerable investigation and debate for a long time. In describ-
ing the creative process as a series of stages that included preparation, incubation, illu-
mination or inspiration, and verification or elaboration, early creativity researchers set in
place a model that dominated ways to operationalize the study of creativity for over a cen-
tury (Martindale, 1999). What differed among creativity researchers was the underlying
explanatory thesis and this determined the methods used to study it (Sternberg, 1997).
Over the years research strategies have varied considerably and include methods such as
biographical and historical approaches (Gruber, 1981; Simonton, 1999), clinical inter-
ventions (Runco & Sakamoto, 1999; Smith, Ward, & Finke, 1995), psychometric meas-
ures (Guilford, 1950; Torrance, 1974), correlational studies (Amabile, 1983; Barron,
1963; Sternberg & O’Hara, 1999), applied strategies (Adams, 1986; Perkins, 1981), sys-
tems approaches (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Gardner, 1993; Gruber, 1989), developmen-
tal studies (Feldman, 1982; Feldman & Goldsmith, 1991), case studies (Wallace &
Gruber, 1989; Weisberg, 1993), cross-cultural inquiries (Lubart, 1999), and computer
modeling (Boden, 1994).
The identification of creative individuals has long been a psychological and social
motivation for research, with a peak period being during the mid-twentieth century
when it was believed that creativity was central to be able to harness new technologies
to get to the moon or to the new shopping mall. Explaining creative thinking as a
causal process that could be used to predict human capacity was a highly valued if elu-
sive goal. By the latter decades of the twentieth century, creativity researchers under-
stood that testing for creativity on the assumption that creative behavior was composed
of discrete human abilities was at best an impoverished conception. As a result
researchers expanded the domain of inquiry and looked more closely at the conditions
and contexts that influenced the way creativity was enacted, encountered, and medi-
ated by social and cultural forces.
For some, examining the outcomes of creative behavior involved investigating what cre-
ativepeopledid.Anargumentmadewasthattherewasmeritinlookingattheprofilesofpeo-
ple seen to be creative as we get a better sense of how they work within particular settings,
contexts, and times. Early case histories sought a psychoanalytic explanation that saw cre-
ativity as an expression of the unconscious (Freud, 1910/1964). Creative behavior was
believed to sublimate or “channel” undesirable unconscious conflicts or neurosis into more
socially acceptable forms.Although a link is suggested between certain pathologies and the
behaviorofcreativepeoplethereislittlefirmevidencetoindicatethatthesubconsciousdoes
all the work. Other researchers who promote biographical case methods see creativity as
more of a unique individual disposition that is multicausal and interactive and evolves in