Creative Expression, Creative Education

Forgoing the popular maxim, I begin this review approaching Creative Expression, Creative Education by way of its cover.Juxtaposed against a background of diagrammatic doodles, improvised musical compositions, and impromptu screenplay edits, birds plot variegated lines of flight.Over the course of Creative Expression, Creative Education's 22 essays, the imagistic concept of the cover insists: this collection captures creativity in the act of composing itself.In other words, this collection is not simply about creativity as a thing one can know, master, and put to use.Rather, the multiplicity of artists' narratives comprising this collection creates ways of thinking about the character of creativity as it emerges in the middle of things.As birds take flight across the cover's unfolding compositions, a second key concept of this collection is brought into play: creativity is not a noun, but rather a verb.Creativity is not a passive object to manage, but an active potential that takes flight, productively escaping the mechanisms of habit in the composition new social, political, and identitarian forms.It is in this vein that Creative Expression, Creative Education successfully avoids a post-Renaissance fetishization of creativity by situating it within the practical problems faced by its contributing poets, playwrights, artists, authors, composers, and performers.As the contributors to this book elucidate through specific examples, vignettes, and works-in-progress, creativity does not emerge ex nihilo.Rather, the creative act requires concepts, ideas, and images-albeit unfettered from their orthodox constraints.The project of Creative Expression, Creative Education extends from this task of concept creation, the intent of which aims at snatching the notion of creativity back from obscurity while accentuating its critical importance for education today.An emphasis on the creation of new concepts for thinking is palpable throughout the book.Organized into three sections, the myriad authors and artists of this collection investigate and experiment with the notion of creativity immanent to artistic practice.Robert Kelly opens the first section by providing a brief topography of psychological and qualitative research on creative thought and production.In this opening gambit, Kelly aims to demystify the familiar rhetoric of creativity by reorienting the reader to the social, historical, Jason Wallin is an assistant professor of curriculum studies in youth and media education in the Department of Secondary Education.His teaching and research engage with the areas of visual culture, curriculum theory, post-psychoanalytic theorizing, and post-human studies.

Creativity · Expression (computer science) · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Computer Science · Creativity in Education and Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Psychology