Publications in Creativity Research – serie

More than 40 years ago, E. Paul Torrance undertook to study creativity in students and study whether it would predict their creative achievements as adults. He and his colleagues wanted to determine what other factors influence, predict, encourage or sustain their creativity over time. There has never been a longitudinal study of creativity of this magnitude. Its findings will be useful to, and have implications for, several audiences: parents, teachers, counselors—especially vocational counselors—university and college instructors, and educational administrators.The Manifesto for Children was developed on the basis of the responses of 215 young adults who had attended two elementary schools in Minnesota from 1958 to 1964. They had been administered some creativity tests each year, and they were followed up in 1980. On the basis of their questionnaire responses, the Manifesto was developed to describe their ongoing struggle to maintain their creativity and use their strengths to create their careers and to provide guidance to children. In 1998, they were followed up to assess their creative achievements and to validate the Manifesto. Some of the participants had attained eminence, while others had attained only mediocre careers.

Reactions to children's artwork have varied throughout different times and places. Donna Darling Kelly is calling for a more joyful appreciation of our youngest artists. She presents the dichotomy of the Mirror and Window paradigms. First, she explains the Mirror paradigm, which art educators, psychologists, and art historians use; it is a psychological focus on children's art. It can be defined as the ability of the child to represent images of something other than the object itself. Psychologists who believe in this theory are interested in the self-reflective qualities of children's drawing as they relate to language, intelligence, and cognitive development. The opposing Window paradigm is an aesthetic perspective followed by people working in the arts. The subscribers to this theory see children's art as an objective reproduction of reality that carries all of the meaning with the image. The act of representation is the ultimate goal in this model, not the truth behind the goal. Darling Kelly would like to see the interested parties in the field of children's art placing less emphasis on the prevailing Mirror paradigm and embrace the Window paradigm.Art educators often feel sidelined because subjects such as science and mathematics are requisites, while art remains at best, an elective. Art is often classified as a sub-discipline concerned primarily with therapeutic areas. An unwanted effect of the Mirror paradigm is the stereotypical, psychological model of the artist as a hopelessly neurotic or troubled soul. This volume is a call to arms for the aesthetic Window paradigm, so that art as an autonomous discipline can gain stature in the curriculum of all children's schools.

There is a gap between the enormous need for counseling services and research about the counseling needs of gifted individuals, on the one hand, and the limited availability of such services and knowledge on the other. This book is designed to give counselors, classroom teachers, gifted education specialists, and parents an understanding of the academic and social-personal needs of gifted and talented students, awareness of ways that they themselves may help these children, and an introduction to the available guidance strategies and materials. This book highlights the role of regular classroom teachers and teachers of the gifted in counseling; provides teachers, counselors, and parents with information about the wide variety of approaches to enrichment and/or acceleration; emphasizes the major role of parents in the development of their gifted children; stresses career education and guidance. Four chapters are devoted to important topics that have received very little attention to date-gifted girls, preschool gifted, disadvantaged gifted, and learning-disabled gifted. Finally, a unique feature of the book is a chapter in which fictional portraits of gifted and creative children are presented and analyzed.

Current conceptualizations of children's thinking tend to be unneccesarily narrow, and to focus on what might be called convergent thinking. As a result, invention and innovation are often underemphasized in schools. This text aims to encourage a broad understanding of intellect, and attempts to help teachers to recognize and foster more varied forms of intellectual activity in their students. It offers a review of recent theory on creativity, conceptualizing this as a matter of getting ideas, trying the new, branching out and the like, rather than of producing artistic or scientific products. It discusses the factors in the classroom which block this more divergent kind of thinking and suggests practical ways through which teachers can promote bolder and more innovative intellectual activity in their students. This involves not merely cognitive factors (thinking, remembering, reasoning) but also motivation (courage and willingness), personality (openness to the new, self-confidence), and social factors (nonconformity, ability to communicate ideas). The text is applied in orientation, contains a large number of examples and case studies, and aims at providing practicing teachers with guidelines.

Many individuals studying problem solving consider creativity a special type of problem solving. On the other hand, many individuals studying creativity view problem solving as a special type of creative performance. What is truly the role of creativity in problem solving? What is the role of problem solving in creativity? And how are problem solving and creativity related to problem finding? This book addresses these questions, and fills an obvious need for an overview of the research on problem finding.

Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health brings together key past and present cutting-edge papers in the hot area of creativity and mental health. Included are major papers that have attracted interest in the international press (including the New York Ties, Japan's Asahi Weekly, and New Scientist in England). Other emphases include creativity and unhappy childhoods, coping with adversity, and immune function and health. Nowhere else is all this material available in one place, together with helpful integration and synthesis. For anyone interested in creativity and health, this book offers a one-stop shopping approach.

Never has there been a longitudinal study of creativity of this magnitude. This book describes the original sample of students from two Minneapolis schools in 1958 and the longitudinal study envisioned by Dr. E. Paul Torrance, then director of the Bureau of Educational Research at the University of Minnesota. It explains two follow-up periods with the students in 1980 and 1998, with the view of measuring their adult creative achievements. The author in collaboration with Dr. Torrance has selected a sample of ten individuals, for case studies who serve to illustrate the predictive validity of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and the factors that support and sustain creativity as individuals mature.The case studies describe the individuals' school years, the first and second follow-up periods and an in-depth interview covering topics such as early influences on creativity, career paths and transitions, creative accomplishments, validation of the Manifesto for Children, and reflections on creativity. The study will be of great interest to psychologists, college and university teachers, counselors, educators and parents. Themes are derived from an examination of the case studies, and key messages for creative living are proposed.