Lisa's Books

I've been checking out a lot of books in connection with this research, so below is a list of the books and maybe one piece of information I've gleaned out of each so far that seems worth following up on.

The Courage to Create by Rollo May
-Love this book, should be required reading for MFA students
-Address the artist's struggle and desire to be immortal.
-Informed by everyone from Einstein to Camus to Picasso. Fun to read.
-Often quotes Carl Jung, especially on artistic breakthrough... a process by which the consciousness gives-way to the unconcious
Teaching for Thoughtfulness: Classroom Strategies to Enhance Intellectual Development by John Barell
-at first I was rejecting any books that dealt with high school classrooms, but then I remembered that our students are not so far removed from high school and reading about what high schools are doing wrong can help us understand how to help these students.
-Barell reminds us that any strategy must lead to a clear goal (the premise of our study!) Thinking + Feeling = Thoughtfulness. This is very Jungian.
Archetypes for Writers by Jennifer Van Bergen
-This is brand new and the author teaches at New School in NYC.
-"In this book you will learn how to find your own character archetypes. Character archetypes contain the action-principles of particular human behavior." She calls this "doing arkhelogy" and her book contains lots of exercises to "develop the skills needed to do arkhelogy work." Hmm.
Evaluating Creativity: Making and learning by young people edited by Julian Sefton-Green and Rebecca Sinker
-Reminds that the word "value" exists in "evaluation," so in order to fairly evaluate any creative product, values must be established.
-"If art is about personal growth and development all that you can evaluate is the student, rather than the work, and is that a proper role for a teacher? However, students do seem to accept and appreciate this role" (Gilbert, 1989).
Teaching for Creative Endeavor by William B. Michael
-Mostly addresses teaching creativity to children, but there are some interesting models in here.
100 Ideas for Teaching Creativity by Stephen Bowkett
-some of these are downright silly, but some could work...

Relevant Philosophy

I had an interesting conversation with Steve Schlow about the other end of the creativity debate, which lies in philosophy. He introduced me to the concept of the "Aesthetic Transaction" as described by Friedrich Schiller in his essays "On the Aesthetic Education of Man." His ideas were informed by Kant's idea that "a man of feeling" has a divine impulse to create. In his "Critique of Judgement" Kant wrote "when you sit down to do a thing, the thing becomes you... you yield to the thing." Anyway, this aesthetic transaction, according to Schiller, is not necessarily knowable, but can be observed. The transaction itself drives the artist and its byproduct is the work of art. Because film is a collaborative art within an industrial system, room for the aesthetic transaction is very narrow. I'm not exactly sure how this relates to our study but I find the philsophical notion of all of this fascinating. I've got Schiller's book on reserve in the library. I've also reserved Theresa Amabile's book The Social Psychology of Creativity as recommended by Steve. Apparently he knows her and has spoken with her about this while working for Disney.

Applicable Theories?

I had my PERC appointment with Richard and that was very helpful because it determined nobody has tried to do exactly what we are doing. Richard always asks good questions and a good one was, "have you determined that there just aren't any good theories in film that would apply to this research?" The answer was no, so I went back and took at look at film theory. I then read some articles he found for me and did a little more research online. The following represents a simple list of some theories we might want to use as a foundation for our research. I've included Wikipedia links here just as an introduction, knowing that we must go to more reliable sources for citation.

1). Film Theories: Auteur; camera stylo; introduced to the US by Andrew Sarris, but originated with the French New Wave critics/directors. Some helpeful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auteur_theory
http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/publications/16+/auteur.html
http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/publications/16+/potter.html
2). Social Psychology Theory: There are many, but I like the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) Model developed by Osborn and Parnes in the 1950s-60s:
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/Creative/Brain/cps.htm
3). Education Theory: Our research seems to fall under the broad category of Constructivist Learning Theories. The father of this seems to be Jean Piaget, who did research on the fact that learners construct knowledge out of their experiences (play):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(learning_theory)