journal1#Connecting creativity to understanding

Knowledge is crucial—
but it’s not enough to
prepare students for
productive citizenship
in a complex, fast-
paced, and rapidly
changing world.
Lois Hetland
S
tudents walk into their 7th
grade history classroom where
they’ve been studying the
colonial period in America. But
what they see in class today
looks more like an art studio than a place
for research. Desks and chairs have been
pushed aside, and a sheet covers a lumpy
mound in the center of the room. Colored
pencils, oil pastels, watercolors, and art
papers are arrayed on the floor, like place
settings around a centerpiece. As students
enter, their teacher invites them to find
a spot where they’ll be comfortable for
45 minutes, because once class begins,
they won’t be able to move—not even to
sharpen a pencil or go to the bathroom.
Once they’re settled in, the teacher gives
an intentionally vague directive:
Under this sheet is a group of objects that go
together somehow. For the next 45 minutes,
while staying in your place and not talking,
your job is to represent what you see, using
the materials at your place. How you do that
is up to you.
The teacher removes the sheet, turns on
music, and begins timing.
I used this experience to develop stu-
dents’ appreciation of perspective in his-
torical texts. The still life hidden beneath
the sheet was stacked on stools and tables
ASCD / w w w .ascd .o r g 65
Connecting
Creativity to
Understanding
© deenphoto/shutterstock
Hetland.indd 65 1/9/13 6:24 PM

66 Ed u c a t i o n a l Le a d e r s h i p / Fe b r u a r y 2013
and was covered by a patterned
tablecloth. It was composed of
ingredients for apple crisp—
apples, a lemon, butter, oats,
cinnamon, and sugar—as well
as a recipe card and baking
equipment, such as measuring
cups, a pan, spatulas, and mixing
bowls. But the students could
only see the side of the mountain
of objects that faced them (the
recipe card, for example, could
only be seen from two or three
spots), and they didn’t know that
the mound was composed of all
the elements needed to make
apple crisp.
Students had to interpret what
they were seeing, as people do
when they observe a historical
event. Observers see an event
unfolding around them, but they
have only partial knowledge of
what it means. They may only
see what’s happening near them,
get sidetracked by irrelevant details, or
be too close to understand the event in
full.
In the same way, students, with
their partial knowledge and limited
viewpoints, had to choose what to rep-
resent and how. Rather than assuming
that I wanted them to depict the entire
array of objects (a default assumption
common in beginning drawers), they
had to decide what “represent what you
see” meant to them.
One student drew a single apple; one
focused on the pattern of the tablecloth;
one drew an apple pie, choosing to rep-
resent the still life as its implied finished
product. Later, the students compared
their work with that of their peers,
viewing the artifacts as documents
describing something that happened
on this day in this place—as primary
sources.
As students reflected together
about their drawings, they began to
see primary documents and historical
texts anew. Texts didn’t tell the “truth”;
instead, they told stories from unique
“positioned” points of view. These
primary documents became pieces in
a puzzle. Students experienced how all
interpretations are inherently biased and
can only be understood in the context of
those who created them. One or another
of my former students occasionally
finds me and tells me that the subject
“history” changed for them that
day—from memorizing dates
and names to creating and inter-
preting stories of the past on the
basis of careful comparison of
multiple documents.
Educating—For What?
Are these students developing
new ways of thinking about
and understanding history?
Are they acquiring creativity
of the sort worth developing,
either in general or for budding
historians—and who decides?
These questions go to the heart
of what education is all about.
Let’s begin by tackling the
term itself. Creativity can be a
confusing topic because people
address many different ideas
with this single word. Lately,
“the creative economy” is in
common parlance, but creativity
traditionally evokes other asso-
ciations, including creative genius,
creative insight, creative classrooms, or
references to God the creator. The broad
use of the term makes it difficult to
focus conversation about creativity as it
relates to schooling.
Thankfully, Kozbelt, Beghetto, and
Runco (2010) summarized research
on creativity and identified four ways
it’s been studied—in terms of creative
products (the iPhone or Google); persons
(Steve Jobs or Maya Lin); processes (the
collaborative, iterative process of design
thinking); and places (Silicon Valley or
an artist’s studio). My own interest in an
education for creativity centers on three
of these four ways: on nurturing creative
persons through creative processes in
creative places.
Tying such an education to a creative
economy is fine with me, as long as
the tail doesn’t wag the dog. Educa-
tion’s purpose is not just to produce
workers, even though it used to be;
There’s a big difference
between educating
for creativity and
educating students
for factory work.
© deenphoto/shutterstock

many schools were designed during
the Industrial Revolution to fill factory
jobs and keep workers’ children off the
streets. But schools have the potential
to serve as incubators for creative and
ethical people who can shape our
futures, such as the “good workers”
whom Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and
Damon (2001) describe in their work.
There’s a big difference between
educating for creativity and educating
students for factory work. It’s a serious
endeavor to shift the weight of school-
ing’s work-related legacy and reframe
schools as places to aim for the higher
cognitive processes of creative and
critical thinking.
Defining Understanding
Schools often seem to default to a vision
of education as knowledge acquisition,
which the fervor for testing has only
exacerbated; students “succeed” when
they can reproduce knowledge on
demand from memory. No one should
belittle the importance of knowledge—
it’s an essential component of wisdom
and raw material for constructing what
society needs and values. But if edu-
cation focuses primarily on knowledge
acquisition, students are unlikely to
learn to behave as democratic citizens
must—that is, as active, informed,
ethical participants in shaping our col-
lective futures.
If students are to emerge from their
educations with those qualities, then we
must shift away from knowledge acqui-
sition as the measure of success. But
should we move toward educating for
creativity—or something else?
From 1989 to 1996, Project Zero
and the Harvard Graduate School of
Education conducted research around
the development of disciplinary under-
standing as education’s goal, a legacy
from Jerome Bruner’s work from the
1950s (Bruner, 2006). The definition of
understanding developed in that project
leads us one step closer to educating for
creativity.
Understanding and Performance
Understanding—defined by this research
as performance—is the capacity to use
what you know flexibly in response
to novel circumstances (Blythe &
Associates, 1998; Wiske, 1998). That
definition harbors two advantages
over knowledge acquisition as edu-
cation’s goal. First, understanding
so defined activates knowledge. For
example, history is not just historical
facts—dates, sequences, names, and
events—but, rather, a set of lenses
for interpreting multiple and complex
causes and effects to explain past and
present conditions. Second, by aiming
schooling toward understanding,
learning takes on the character of
being for something. Students must
learn to use knowledge to achieve an
intention—for instance, to address the
challenges of an unknown future in a
time of rapid change.
The researchers found that the per-
formance view of understanding is what
most people mean when they say they
really understand something. Although
it’s easy to lapse into a sense that under-
standing is something to have rather than
something to do, genuine understanding
suggests a more dynamic set of higher-
order relationships with the world.
Understanding and
Thinking Dispositions
Understanding and thinking are closely
tied. Thought builds understanding—
and people can aim thinking at some
intention. But when the researchers
looked at previous findings about skill
in thinking, the findings showed that
teaching thinking skills, such as logical
approaches to problem solving, is
not enough to create understanding;
skills taught in isolation are as inert
as their knowledge-fragment cousins.
Students who learned such approaches
or strategies rarely used them when
confronted with unfamiliar challenges.
There’s a transfer problem—a problem
of application to novel circumstances.
In response, Perkins and colleagues
developed the idea of thinking disposi-
tions (Perkins, Jay, & Tishman, 1993;
Tishman, Jay, & Perkins, 1993). Skill
in thinking needs to be tied to attitudes
that motivate and connect thinking
to purpose. Otherwise, skill spins its
wheels without going anywhere. So, to
educate for understanding, educators
have to nurture two other elements
of dispositions beyond skill: incli-
nation—the drive, need, or passion that
pushes people to use their skills—and
alertness—the sensitivity, awareness,
or recognition of connections among
the bits of information that constantly
stream past us.
That begins to sound something
like creativity, does it not? Under-
standing, in the performance sense,
uses knowledge for a novel purpose,
with thinking dispositions as the engine
and fuel for getting there. Perhaps edu-
cating for understanding is educating for
creativity?
Students come to use error as opportunity;
it gives them permission to explore broadly
and without negative self-judgment.

Understanding vs. Creativity
As I began pondering connections
between understanding and cre-
ativity, I talked with David Perkins
about it. “Creativity,” Perkins said,
“is transgressive.” On the other hand,
understanding—that is, performed
understanding using disciplinary
knowledge and thinking dispositions—
is what experts do within accepted
domain boundaries.
Developing such expertise and under-
standing in the various domains is
certainly a rigorous and worthy goal for
education. But that’s not educating for
creativity. Educating for understanding
doesn’t expect or require boundary
breaking; it merely requires the use of
knowledge and skills in new situations.
For example, when addressing
the problem of slow elevators in tall
buildings, an expert (and expensive)
solution might involve understanding
the mechanisms that move the cars
to improve their efficiency. But by
breaking the boundaries of the problem
and seeing it not as an engineering
problem but rather as a perception
problem, we might come up with the
solution of installing mirrors outside the
elevators. People tend to be distracted
by their own reflections and, as a result,
may not even notice how long they have
to wait for the car to arrive.
Creativity, at its core, pushes against
the edges of the known and bursts
open new perspectives, shifting the
sense of what is possible or even real.
I am reminded of the creative legacies
of Paulo Freire (1996, 2005) and bell
hooks (1994), who envisioned trans-
forming education’s role to a tran-
gressive intent: to oppose oppression
and move toward liberation. Creativity
makes new things and makes old things
new—new problems, new solutions,
new realities—things not conceived
before. It is, as Perkins (1981) defined,
“adaptive novelty.”
In today’s world of instantaneous
global communication and change,
the unknown is always showing up.
Schools that aim to prepare students for
that world educate students to respond
wisely in the face of the unfamiliar and
new.
Enter the Studio Habits of Mind
Although the arts are in no way the sole
repository of creative practices, they are
a rich archive of all four categories of
creativity—processes, persons, places,
and products—that can be mined to
educate for creativity in any subject
area. My research with colleagues
from Project Zero (Hetland, Winner,
Veenema, & Sheridan, 2007) produced
a representation of the artistic mind that
we call the Studio Habits of Mind. These
eight studio habits that artists engage
in are to (1) Develop Craft, (2) Engage
and Persist, (3) Envision, (4) Express,
(5) Observe, (6) Reflect, (7) Stretch
and Explore, and (8) Understand Art
Worlds. Artists and educators have used
these eight habits across all disciplines,
most recently in conjunction with the
Common Core State Standards.1
All the studio habits work together. For
example, take Stretch and Explore, one
of the habits most readily associated with
creativity. We define Stretch and Explore
as “learning to reach beyond one’s
capacities, to explore playfully without
a preconceived plan, and to embrace
the opportunity to learn from mistakes
and accidents” (Hetland et al., 2007,
p. 6). Combined with Develop Craft,
for example, which focuses on learning
to use tools and materials, Stretch and
Explore highlights playful exploration
of implements and mediums. When
students combine this habit with Engage
and Persist, they stretch to find work
they’re passionate about and novel ways
to persist in its resolution.
Stretch and Explore:
A Closer Look
To see how the lens of Studio Habits
highlights creative practices—and to
clarify what this would look like in the
classroom—let’s consider three ele-
ments of Stretch and Explore—play,
learning from mistakes, and embracing
opportunity and taking risks.
Play
Exploring playfully emphasizes the
importance of learning experiences that
encourage what may appear as oxy-
© theromb/shutterstock

moronic—habitual divergent thinking.
Building in low-stakes and low-
judgment formats frees students to play-
fully explore by enabling them to have
fun, wonder, follow feelings, improvise,
and work from intuition.
The opening example of the history
lesson drew on the playful element
of Stretch and Explore by bringing
unfamiliar materials into the history
classroom (paints, colored pencils,
food, baking equipment); removing
some expected materials (books,
desks); setting up a mystery or game
with new rules (“I’ll sharpen your
pencil for you—but you have to stay in
your place”; “The objects go together
somehow”); and using open-ended
directions (“Represent what you see”).
It’s easy to use play as a way to
regenerate enthusiasm for inquiry in
any subject with students of any age.
I’ve seen kindergartners play with “how
many ways” they can alter cardboard
in an art class, high school students
play with mirrors and lenses in “what
if” scenarios in science classes, and
middle school students role-play dia-
logues around the qualities of literary
characters. In museums, too, I’ve seen
people role-playing with a partner, with
one speaking as the viewer of the work
and the other speaking from the work’s
point of view. Playful! When we relax,
we see novel possibilities to explore and
develop.
Learning from Mistakes
Ask a student about making a mistake,
and he or she is likely to look silently at
the floor. Mistakes in school are viewed
as shameful and to be avoided—people
might think you’re dumb.
But in the arts, mistakes have an
entirely different role. First, artists
know that mistakes are inevitable. How
can people avoid error when they’re
pushing deliberately beyond what they
know and can do? Second, mistakes are
valuable. Reflecting on mistakes often
leads to useful insights that signal what
went wrong and that suggest a different,
more effective, approach. For example,
when drawing a face, a student might
get the proportions wrong and then
notice that when one side of the face is
larger, the face appears to turn to the
side. A mistake in representation then
becomes a tool for modeling expression
by using distortion deliberatively.
Finally, mistakes are a potential
source of ideas for new projects and
investigations. A mistake may expose
unusual juxtapositions, surprising meta-
phors, or tacit knowledge. For instance,
when making a collage, an artist noticed
that a magazine photo of meat looked
like the texture of wood. She then used
images of food to construct a series of
architectural interiors in collage that
were puns about consumption.
In the apple crisp lesson, “mistakes”
were the norm. Remember that student
who drew a single apple? Or the one
who focused on the pattern of the table-
cloth? These works showed what each
student saw and chose to draw from
his or her perspective; a traditional
drawing class might consider these
representations as errors, as though the
task were to accurately depict the entire
arrangement. Some students worried
about “not being able to draw,” but
when we shared the works, which were
unfinished (further lowering the stakes),
the students got to say what they were
trying to do and point out places they
felt good about and areas that “bugged
them.” Success wasn’t about drawing—
it was about gaining insight into history
through an artistic game.
“Make 50 visual art mistakes”: This
is what John Crowe, a professor at
the Massachusetts College of Art and
Design, tells students to do in his studio
course. This “50 losers” assignment
gives students power over error and
freedom to explore without worry.
What happens? They play! After giving
students plenty of time to follow that
direction, Professor Crowe extends the
challenge: “Now, elevate one of these
mistakes to the level of art.”
For example, when cutting wood
imprecisely with various tools, an artist
noticed how interesting the random
chunks of wood were that had fallen to
the floor. He combined selected scraps
into a prototype for what became a line
of beautiful table lamps in a rough,
Japanese aesthetic. Students come to use
error as opportunity; it gives them per-
mission to explore broadly and without
negative self-judgment.
Embracing Opportunity
and Taking Risks
Combining play and the value of
error leads to greater confidence in
approaching problems without fear and
taking the risks needed in the search for
new ideas. Artists often embrace risk
by setting up constraints on their skill,
such as using brushes attached to three-
foot dowels or mixing weeds or chunks
of wood into their clay. This habit of
building in chance and randomness
emerges from a confidence that
emphasizes serendipity and recognizes
Combining play and the value of error
leads to greater confidence in
approaching problems without fear.

that previously developed skill may
hold back exploration and that using
only proven methods may limit oppor-
tunities. Artists know there’s usually
time to refine their work, so the risk
isn’t really dangerous. Taking a chance
is safe when the work is held lightly,
tossed about, investigated freely—and
not seen as precious or fragile.
The apple crisp lesson used this
element of Stretch and Explore by
assigning the risk: It didn’t matter what
students could or couldn’t do; they just
had to take on the chance and represent
what they saw. No, this work wasn’t
graded. Students had to engage and
do something. Then we used the expe-
rience to learn from the effort.
Similarly, artists may spend hours on
a drawing and then cut it up into parts
that they reassemble as another work.
Writing teachers may have students cut
out descriptions of characters, objects,
or settings from early drafts to combine
in odd juxtapositions or metaphors that
catalyze new insights.
It’s also a risk to show work to peers
or teachers, especially before it’s com-
pleted. But public critique is common
practice for artists. Mid-process cri-
tiques might ask others to describe what
they see in the emerging work while
the artist says nothing and takes notes
to reflect on later. Ultimately, exhib-
iting a finished work to the public—to
classmates, online, on a city street, in a
gallery, on the radio, in a newspaper or
publication—provides a sense of letting
the work go to live its own life, sepa-
rating the maker from the made and
allowing a more objective appraisal of
the work’s quality. Such practices must
not be limited to art classes.
The Ultimate Exploration
We turn, finally, to the idea of trans-
gression. That’s the ultimate exploration
and stretch—to push past what we
know to be quality, to be right or
worthy, to trample those boundaries in
search of new connections, possibilities,
insights, and perspectives.
The apple crisp lesson modeled
thinking outside the boundaries of
what students thought of as history. It
transgressed the discipline, but it wasn’t
a revolution—just a nudge beyond
the expected. In contrast, the works
of Paulo Friere and bell hooks lean
toward a fundamental transformation
of schooling as the mechanism for
reforming society’s inequities. So the
transgression of creativity can be as
simple as pushing the desks and chairs
aside, having students draw in a history
class, and suggesting that the textbook
may not be the final word or that “truth”
is not the goal of history, but rather an
interpretation based on evidence. Or it
can be as profound as turning education
inside out.
Whichever tack toward transgression
educators take, we need to help stu-
dents recognize that what’s now the rule
was previously invented by other people
and that they, the students, can begin to
participate in the process of creation
themselves, practicing how to shape
their own destinies. And that’s what an
education for creativity is for—creating
the creators who, from the present and
past, make the future. EL
1
The foreword to the second edition of
Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual
Arts Education (Teachers College Press,
2013) explains the connection between the
studio habits and the Common Core State
Standards.
References
Blythe, T., & Associates. (1998). The
teaching for understanding guide. San Fran-
cisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bruner, J. M. (2006). In search of pedagogy:
Volume I. The selected works of Jerome S.
Bruner. London: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed.
New York: Penquin.
Freire, P. (2005). Education for critical con-
sciousness. New York: Continuum.
Gardner, H., Csikszentmihalyi, M., &
Damon, W. (2001). Good work: When
excellence and ethics meet. New York: Basic
Books.
Hetland, L., Winner, E., Veenema, S., &
Sheridan, K. (2007). Studio thinking: The
real benefits of visual arts education. New
York: Teachers College Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Edu-
cation is the practice of freedom. New York:
Routledge.
Kozbelt, A., Beghetto, R., & Runco, M.
(2010). Theories of creativity. In J. C.
Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.),
The Cambridge handbook of creativity
(pp. 20–47). New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Perkins, D. N. (1981). The mind’s best work.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Perkins, D. N., Jay, E., & Tishman, S.
(1993). Beyond abilities: A dispositional
theory of thinking. Merrill-Palmer Quar-
terly, 39(1), 1–21.
Tishman, S., Jay, E., & Perkins, D. N.
(1993). Teaching thinking dispositions:
From transmission to enculturation.
Theory into Practice, 32(3), 147–153.
Wiske, M. S. (Ed.). (1998). Teaching for
understanding: Linking research with
practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lois Hetland is professor and chair
of art education at the Massachusetts
College of Art and Design, Boston, and
senior research affiliate at Project Zero,
Harvard Graduate School of Education.
She is coauthor, with Ellen Winner,
Shirley Veenema, and Kimberly Sheridan,
of Studio Thinking 2: The Real Benefits
of Visual Arts Education (Teachers
College Press, 2013).
When we relax,
raw material arises
as novel possibilities
that we can explore
and develop.

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