I posted earlier on the topic of creativity verse being artistic and what the differences are. The more I considered the idea that people misuse creativity in instances where artistic is more appropriate, the more I desired concrete evidence to support that idea. In one of my smaller classes that only has about 25 people, I did a presentation on gifted and talented children. During this presentation I posed this question to the other students in the class: what is the most creative thing that you ever done? Of the 25 students in the class, 21 answered with some form of the arts and in a context that I would use artistic rather than creative. The other 4 answered with acts that involved innovative thinking such as starting an organizaiton, club, or business and creating a game. I was amazed at how many people seemed to be unable to differentiate between the words artistic and creative. In the end, I defined creativity as it is defined in our book and people realized that they perhaps misidentified artistic acts as creative. I thought about why this confusion might take place and I think that as children the words “create” or “creative” are used primarily in conjuction with the arts. This leads me to pose this question to you: Is it necessary to correct this misuse of the word creativity and if so, how can that be done?
This is fascinating, Lauren. Good for you for doing a small investigation about it. You raise a good question. I think one thing is ofr those of us who have had training in creativity theory to be sure we speak up. I wonder what other ways there are to help people better understand? Maybe the media? This is an interesting thing to think about!
Stacy
Hey good job puttin those noobies in their place! Like, hey take that, Ha! I’ll show you artistic! But anyway, I think it’s ridiculous how easy it can be to offer someone a little corrective insight about creativity, and that you can take that project on in many different ways, depending on how big of a difference you want to make and how willing people are to listen to you. Some people will definitely appreciate learning your perspective on creativity, and may thank you for the insights! Other people may not respond, but you’ll never know how big of an impact you may have had on their creative developement.-ben