The document discusses the decline of creativity in American society, highlighting an analysis by Kyung Hee Kim showing a drop in creativity scores since 1990, despite rising IQ scores. It suggests potential solutions, including interdisciplinary activities and teaching creative thinking across all domains, as well as specific community engagement projects like the Youth Art Expressions Program. Additionally, the text emphasizes the importance of understanding creativity as both a novel and culturally determined process, encouraging acceptance of diverse creative behaviors.

1. Big-C and Little-c: The Creativity Crisis in the U.S.?Cynthia Bickley-Green, PhDRobert D. Quinn, PhDSchool of Art and Design East Carolina University

2. The Problem?Newsweek, July 10, 2010, The Creativity Crisis. For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it?Kyung Hee Kim, College of William & Mary, May, analyzed almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.

3. Runco RE: KimMark Runco was not overly concerned about Kim’s work. He pointed out that the decline that Kim found occurred on two of the four cognitive processes of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Although the findings were significant; the effect sizes were small.However, some issues related to creative production continue to trouble us as general visual culture observers.

4. Our Troubling ObservationsFluency: Less interest in abstract imagery and lack of ability to inquire in terms of “why” or “what it is”?Originality: Conformity in dress to emulate stars in popular TV shows.Flexibility: Political/religious systems’ inability to compromise.Elaboration: Short attention span of students who work on projects.

5. What Might We Do?Csikszentmihalyi: Loosen the boundaries of domains and content areas for more interdisciplinary activities.Runco: Teach to develop creative thinking,Give opportunities for creative production,Provide appropriate support,Model creative behaviors.

6. What More Might We Do?Runco (cont.)Student’s personal creativity (little/mini –c)Interest, intent, and motivationStudent’s cognitive ability to construct an original interpretation of experience synthesized into behavior or product.

7. What More Might We Do?Runco (cont.)Discretion (when to use conventional/unconventional behavior) Ego-strengthArt is a good place to teach creative thinking, not withstanding the “art bias”. Creativity or creative thinking should be taught in all domains.

8. What is Creativity?Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both:Novel (i.e., original, unexpected), andAppropriate (i.e., useful, effective, adaptive concerning task restraints)(Sternberg & Lubart, 1999).

9. Another Definition of CreativityCreativity may be thought of as a culturally determined process dependent on:What a social, cultural, or ethnic group perceives as novel, original, or unexpected, andWhat product or action the group determines is appropriate and useful.

10. Systems-Oriented Models Cognitive scientists, art and design educators, and business researchers have developed systems-oriented models that consider situational factors in the environment as well as the creative factors of an individual person’s cognition and behaviors

11. How Can We Encourage Acceptance of Creative Behaviors?Consider Pitt County as a SystemYouth Art Expressions Project (YAEP) Theme: Community Problems/Community Solutions

12. Youth Art Expressions ProgramGoal: To encourage youth to enter into civic dialog and action by imagining and artistically visualizing ways to address current problems related to substance abuse, youth violence, and related social issues.However, students have also identified many other problems that they want to address so we accept all entries.

13. From Little-c to Big-CBy linking creative thinking to community problems, we can encourage students to use their personal creative process in the broader community.We invite any school to participate in the YEAP exhibition.

14. For More Info. on the YAEPNovember 30, 2010, Tuesday, 5:30 pm, in Room 1327 Jenkins Fine Arts Center.Materials and information for the Youth Art Expressions Mall Exhibition will be distributed at this session.Contact Us for More Information: Cynthia Bickley-Green- bickleygreenc@ecu.eduRobert D. Quinn- quinnr@ecu.eduJane Austen Behan- jbehan@pitt.k12.nc.us

15. P.S.Runco prefers not to simplify creative production to Big-C - Little-c categories.Instead, he prefers to consider the internal cognition or neurobiology of creative thinking as a mental process that can be developed over the life span.