Ingar Brinck

Creativity is a notoriously evasive concept, and it is used to cover a lot of different phenomena. Different methods and a wide variety of angles have been used in the striving for a clear-cut conception. The focus has been on alternatively the personality of creative people, their childhood, the conditions that a society must fulfil to support a creative atmosphere, works of art contra the discoveries of science, changes in pedagogy to give rise to or improve creativity, computer models, intuition, and so on. Consequently, the resulting picture of creativity varies substantially depending on the goal of the inquiry as well as on the constraints that are set from the start, not only by the scope of the investigation, but also by the discipline that the investigator belongs to and the method that is used.

How should the development of creativity be approached? Many accounts of children’s creativity focus on the relation between creativity and pretend play, placing make-believe and the mental exploration of possible scenarios about the world at the fore. Often divergent thinking and story-telling are used to measure creativity with fluency, originality, and flexibility as indicators. I will argue that the strong focus on conceptual processes and higher-order thought leaves procedural forms of creativity in the dark and hinders a proper investigation of the development of creativity. Creativity involves both strategic and procedural elements and the mental and physical manipulation of ideas are equally important. Sahlin’s notion of rule-based creativity might serve as the starting-point for an approach to the development of creativity that is neutral as to the underlying nature of creativity and that permits investigating creativity independently of language. On this approach, creativity is characterized by the violation and subsequent replacement of a rule or norm that underlies a given activity with a novel strategy or procedure. When, where, and how children will manifest creativity is conditional on the kind of rule or norm that is violated.