ON HOWARD GARDNER AND CREATIVITY
Preface Links:
“Switch! – Cross-Disciplinary Learning“
“Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight” –PloS Biology
“Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Coherence“
“Csikszentmihalyi the Pseudoscientist?“
““Extraordinary Minds” by Howard Gardner: Notes…“
“The tdaxp Interview of Thomas PM Barnett“
I’m finishing up Harvard Professor Howard Gardner‘s Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century . As with his Extraordinairy Minds, Intelligence Reframed has much to recommend it alongside sections that appear to me to be inadequately considered or less well expressed relative to the stronger parts of the book. On the plus side, Gardner’s evident willingness to reconsider, amend or improve MI theory in light of the findings of brain research is commendable and an indicator that Gardner’s books are more like steps along a journey than they are final destinations in themselves. That is a positive strength, not a weakness, in a theorist.
I take issue however with Dr. Gardner’s section on creativity, which for me was most interesting yet also intellectually frustrating -hence this post. Gardner’s work will be in bold, my comments will be in regular text:
” My definition of creativity has revealing parallels with, and differences from, my definition of intelligence.”
Puzzlement begins with this premise. Having acknowledged earlier that brain research has produced evidence of the modular nature of cognition, something that supports Gardner’s MI conceptual framework, Gardner now seemingly ignores research on creativity that has a physiological-modular link, such as that on insight. I’m not really seeing why creativity would be less an aspect of intelligence than ” kinesthetic” or, as Gardner speculates ” moral” categories of reasoning.
“People are creative when they can solve problems, create products or raise issues in a domain in a way that is initially novel but is eventually accepted in one or more cultural settings…The acid test of creativity is simple: in the wake of a putatively creative work, has the domain subsequently been changed?”
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