Creativity has proven to be highly resistant to conceptualization, which poses a fundamental problem for creativity in education: Without knowledge of what drives the process, it is difficult to foster creativity. This difficulty is reflected in the tendencies of current research. Creativity is often defined in terms of a set of separate qualities that make it difficult to distinguish creativity from processes of learning and problem solving. The aim of the article is to contribute to the understanding of the creative process and to develop a strategy for fostering creativity. To this end, the article draws on the social-analytical theory of creativity understood as Bildung, the German concept of formation of the personality. According to this theory, creativity is the interplay of the sensuous forces of imagination, transcendence, and judgment. Thus, fostering creativity is a matter of cultivating these forces and their interplay. The article builds on this idea to develop a strategy for fostering creativity that involves an educational journey inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. Finally the article attempts to identify the dominant processes of creativity at different levels of the educational system and suggests that these are “imaginary play” in kindergarten, “produce play” in primary school, “positioning humour” in secondary school, and “personal expression” in upper secondary.
Few concepts have proven to be as resistant to conceptualization as creativity. This is, however, not due to a lack of research or consensus on the subject. In the literature there is consensus on how to define the creative product, on which traits and abilities are characteristic of creative persons, on where creative processes usually occur, and even on how to nurture creativity: The creative product is commonly defined as being both novel and appropriate or useful (Boden, 2004, Robinson, 2011 and Sternberg, 1999); typical personality traits and abilities described include sensitivity to problems, playfulness, willingness to shift course, and synthesizing ability (Gardner, 1994 and Guilford, 1950); places where creativity often occur may be in bed or the bath or on a trip (Boden, 2004 and Poincaré, 1908); and ways to nurture creativity include encouraging imaginative activity, curiosity, risk-taking, and conveying the importance of time and space (Craft, 2005, Cropley, 2001, De Bono, 1985 and NACCCE, 1999). But a consensus on how to define and conceptualize the process of creativity remains elusive. Questions such as, what processes result in the creative product, why certain traits or abilities are useful in the process, why creativity occurs in these places, or why certain ways of nurturing creativity actually work remain open to debate. Several competing theories of the creative process have been put forward. These include the incubation process ( Poincaré, 1908), the bisociative act ( Koestler, 1964), the state of flow ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), and the transformation of conceptual spaces ( Boden, 2004). Meanwhile other approaches, such as the prevailing psychometrical approach to creativity, simply reject the task of theorizing beyond what can be observed and measured ( Guilford, 1950).
Finally, what are the implications of the developed arguments for the question of how to cultivate creativity in the educational system? In order to answer this question, a framework for the cultivation of creativity in kindergarten, primary and secondary school, and upper secondary school will be proposed in the following. This framework is developed on the basis of the theoretical perspective on creativity as a question of Bildung, the pedagogic strategy for the cultivation of creativity and the identification of the dominant creative processes at different levels in the educational system. I use the term “cultivation of creativity” to indicate that it is a question of fostering and directing the self-action in the transcendence process of the educational journey and in the development of taste and judgment. In this respect it differs from those other kinds of teaching for creativity that consider the fostering of creativity to be a question of skill and competence development through learning.6
