s- creatively figure out how to include creativity as a kind of learning (though where in KSA? )(john)
NOTE to JOHN – I think creativity is more like an expression or outcome of a specific set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes rather than a type of learning… In other words, IMHO, your creativity is an expression of what you know. You don’t learn “creative” you learn the knowledge of words and then creatively apply them; you learn concepts and then connect them together in creative ways to express that knowledge of concepts in new ways. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy actually has creativity as one of the categories within knowledge domain. (Bethany)
NOTE to BETHANY: I appreciate the explanation of creativity as you conceive of it. You of course may be right, and I may just be too stupid or lazy to understand the material. Or we may be saying the same thing and I haven’t figured that out yet. Or it may be that I learn by thinking “my own way”, not accepting or integrating what others think? But giving me the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to plunge ahead here.
I think creativity is something different, which may be at the heart of my problems with this taxonomy. Despite appearances of a discrete unit operating in our heads that goes through steps such as described by taxonomies, I would posit that we simply don’t understand what is going on “up there” enough to come to such conclusions. My guess is that when we do eventually have the capability to understand what is going on in the brain, and how we experience that process as consciousness, a lot of theories will have to be redone. Which btw, has pretty much been the fate of all “brain theories” and “consciousness theories” so far. Which is the problem I have with psychology. Each new theory is now the true one, and we should just forget about all the ones that came before that “didn’t work out”.
Since, in my recently humbled opinion, no one really knows, I prefer to posit my theory of creativity as being a learning process. I would not know how to break it down into one of three learning types. But, from my experience, all parts of my awareness, and parts of the unconscious mind, in all flavors of cognitive, affective and psychomotor and perhaps other categories as well are involved in the creative “act” which produces a “learning product”. I would argue that a painting by Picasso for example, is something learned by Picasso in the act of painting it.
On a more personal level, my experience of creativity and learning, is that I approach a new situation, such as a lesson assignment, or life circumstance obliquely. I don’t know exactly what the way in is. So I hang with it, and pick up whatever I can by somewhat random acts of learning. A “door” opens, I start to gain a general set of connections and patterns and facts and the web between “elements”. The web between is a key, because it is not something that can be “brought into consciousness” as a whole. Yet it’s the essential part that makes learning work. It’s not a “rational” process, it’s some kind of absorption into an environment. After enough exposure, which may be lengthy, or short, pleasant or disagreeable…..
I somehow create my own version as a whole, my painting as it were, and can then, having learned that whole, make deductions and inferences and projections from it. Or I may find out what I have learned by talking or writing, with the learning product/objective unconscious, but acting as the source for “spin off” of learning bits. (john)
