Democratizing Creative Educational Experiences

Young people always and already have the capacity for creative thought and action. Creativity, therefore, is not something that needs to be taught, like reading. Creativity is also not a “21st-century skill,” nor is it something that can be “killed” by schools or given or taken away. Indeed, as long as there is life, there is the potential for creativity. Moreover, young people can realize their creative capacity whenever they have opportunities to think and act in new and meaningful ways. When they have opportunities and support to engage in creative thought and action, they can not only contribute to their own learning and lives but also make positive, meaningful, and lasting contributions for the benefit of others (Beghetto, 2018).

Creative educational experiences (CEEs) are therefore not about “training” young people “to be creative” but, rather, providing young people with opportunities to generate and realize new and potentially transformative possibilities for their own and others’ learning and lives. “CEEs” refers here to a broad range of learning experiences, which include support for young people in identifying and solving complex problems and issues that matter to them, their communities, and beyond. The kinds of problems, issues, and challenges that young people encounter in CEEs differ from the kinds of routine tasks and problems that students typically face in school (Getzels, 1964; Pólya, 1966) because there are often no clear-cut solutions or pathways for attaining creative solutions.

CEEs, like all creative experiences (Glăveanu & Beghetto, 2021), are grounded in novel and meaningful person-world actions and interactions, which are marked by the principles of open-endedness (i.e., there is a to-be-determined, emergent, and dynamic quality to such experiences rather than predetermined and fixed), nonlinearity (i.e., there are no clear, singular paths), pluriperspectives (i.e., these experiences aim to cultivate an openness to differences rather than privileging sameness), and future orientation (i.e., these experiences provide young people with opportunities to explore new possibilities of what could or should come into being rather than remaining fixed on what is already the case). Moreover, CEEs can complement academic learning by providing opportunities for young people to put their learning to work in making creative contributions in and beyond schools and classrooms.

Providing young people with opportunities to engage in CEEs takes on added importance under conditions of uncertainty (Beghetto, 2021) because uncertainty can render routine and habitual ways of thinking and acting irrelevant, obsolete, and even harmful to oneself and others. This is not to say that creative expression requires the complete abandonment of prior ways of knowing and doing but, rather, that creative expression opens new and emergent possibilities for thought and action. CEEs, unfortunately, have been limited in schools because schools have typically focused on making sure children learn the predefined curriculum, follow the predefined rules, and acquire the predefined social norms. Creative expression, in many ways, goes against the pedagogies of sameness and predetermination that have historically underwritten the logic of schooling (Beghetto & Yoon, 2021). Thus, few schools have traditionally provided opportunities for children to demonstrate their creative capacity. Instead, schools inadvertently and sometimes overtly stifle creativity in their pursuit to make sure children comply with rules and acquire what they are supposed to learn.

CEEs have not featured prominently in important education policies, either. Even in educational documents of historical significance, CEEs are rarely mentioned as an important aspect of formal education efforts. For example, in the National Defense Education Act of 1958—the first federal education bill aimed to improve U.S. education to compete with the Soviet Union in science and technology—CEEs were not considered an important aspect of the curriculum. Likewise, the influential report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) did not emphasize CEEs as a valuable goal but, rather, focused on the rhetoric of boosting academic achievement as a means for competing against Japan, Germany, and a host of other countries deemed as threats to the United States. CEEs have been further overshadowed by the narrow and intensified emphasis placed on academic achievement in international education assessment programs. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the two most widely used assessment programs in the world, focus on measuring academic performance. Indeed, most writings in education concerning international comparisons focus on assessment results in math, reading, and science.

Likewise, CEEs have not been a major topic in education research. Despite nearly a century of concentrated research on creativity (Runco & Albert, 2010), the majority of studies on creativity have been in the domain of psychology. Education research has not touched on the many aspects of CEEs in schools. Very rarely have education research publications or conference presentations treated CEEs as a serious topic for inquiry in schools. This is not to say that CEEs have been completely absent from education but, rather, that opportunities for young people to engage in CEEs have historically been positioned in narrowly segmented and privileged curricular and extracurricular programs and activities. This is troubling given that all children have the capacity to think and act creatively. The opportunities for all children to engage in CEEs have been curtailed by what might be called a “sort-and-separate” approach, which perpetuates inequities and injustices by systematically limiting CEEs to a tiny fraction of students who have been identified as having “high creative potential.”

This approach was codified in Marland’s (1972) influential report to the U.S. Congress on the education of gifted and talented students. Marland stressed the importance of including “creative and productive thinking” as one of six possible indicators of giftedness. Marland’s report made the case for the establishment of specialized and separate educational experiences for students who exhibited high potential or achievement, a category that included students who were viewed as having high creative potential. In the decades that followed Marland’s report, educators and policymakers focused on implementing sort-and-separate policies and practices, which ultimately serve to instantiate and reinforce the unsound and unjust belief that only certain students are capable or worthy of having opportunities to engage in CEEs.

The inequities that accrue from limiting opportunities for all students to engage in CEEs are manifold. They pertain to who typically has access to creative educational curricula (i.e., students whose parents can leverage their power, privilege, and social networks so their children can access and are selected to participate in CEEs), what kinds of experiences typically are offered to those students (i.e., experiences aimed at enhancing student voice and agency vs. prototypical school experiences aimed at conformity and compliance), where those experiences typically are located (i.e., in the privileged and scarce spaces of gifted and selective education programs), when those experiences typically occur (i.e., outside of the mainstream curricular experience, in afterschool or pull-out programs, on weekends, in summertime), and why only “select” students receive CEEs (i.e., because of long-standing social and educational inequities in power, privilege, access, and selection; inequities in educator and administrator preparation and experience with CEEs; and deficit paradigms influencing CEE selection and access policies and practices).

In recent years, interest in creativity has grown beyond specialized programming and curricula in gifted education and toward inclusion in policies and practices informing the broader project of P–20 education. Still, creativity tends to be narrowly conceptualized as an educational outcome rather than as a capacity inherent in all students and teachers that can be expressed through CEEs. This narrow conception of creativity is evident in proposals that conceptualize creativity as a core 21st-century skill (Trilling & Fadel, 2009) even though creative thought and action have been core features of the entire human historical condition. Other examples of narrow conceptualizations of creativity include viewing it as an economic indicator (Florida, 2002, 2012) and a skill to be developed in government-sanctioned curriculum frameworks such as the Common Core (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2011) in U.S. and Australian curricula (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2020). When creativity can be specified as a particular skill or outcome, it can then be measured using standardized assessments, which can be seen in PISA’s efforts to develop creativity assessments to be implemented in schools to make comparisons around the world (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019).

Alternatively, there are examples of educators and researchers who have taken a different approach aimed at broadening, disrupting, and replacing overly narrow conceptions of creativity and exclusionary CEE opportunities by working toward the democratization of such experiences. Many schools, educators, and researchers have begun efforts aimed at cultivating the creative capacity of all students as part of everyday educational experiences (Beghetto, 2013, 2018; Zhao, 2012; Zhao et al., 2019). Democratizing CEEs involves ensuring that all students have opportunities to develop and demonstrate their capacity to successfully navigate uncertainty and to productively respond to the challenges, problems, and issues of a changing world. Democratizing CEEs requires rethinking and reimagining the nature, spaces, and opportunities of CEEs, including “re-cognizing” the premise that students and teachers always and already have the potential to think and act creatively (rather than viewing creativity as a hidden “gift” of particular students that needs to be “identified” and nurtured).

Democratizing CEEs also includes ensuring that opportunities for all students to participate in CEEs are infused throughout the everyday curriculum and introduced in professional development for practicing teachers and teacher preparation programs for prospective teachers. Given that CEEs are transdisciplinary, they can be incorporated into everyday curricular experiences and supported through partnerships with existing home- and community-based assets.

As interest in democratizing CEEs grows, it seems certain that there will be policies and practices in education that focus on broadening all students’ opportunities to demonstrate and develop their creative capacity. It also seems certain that there will be an increase in education research concerning creativity development and contrasting perspectives on what CEEs can and should be. Indeed, claims about CEEs are not neutral. Such claims occur in and across different sociocultural and historical contexts. Consequently, judgments about the value of and opportunities for CEEs can and will change across different times and contexts. Moreover, judgments about CEEs can result in both positive and negative experiences and outcomes for those involved in and impacted by such creative endeavors. This is, therefore, an important moment to conduct a review of research on democratizing creative educational experiences.

Given that creativity thrives in difference, not sameness, the contributors to this volume represent diverse conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and research traditions. Their contributions offer education researchers a broad array of perspectives aimed at mapping out a plurality of possibilities for conceptualizing, studying, documenting, and broadening our understanding of efforts that resist sameness and move toward the democratization of CEEs. In this way, the contributors to this volume do not represent a singular voice or identity but, rather, offer new, different, and even contrasting perspectives that illuminate and interrogate the promises and potential pitfalls of CEEs in and across diverse P–20 education settings.

The volume opens with a chapter from Mariana Souto-Manning, Abby C. Emerson, Gina Marcel, Ayesha Rabadi-Raol, and Adrielle Turner focusing on racial justice in creative educational experiences in early childhood. In “Democratizing Creative Early Educational Experiences: A Matter of Racial Justice,” the authors conclude, after a thorough and systematic review of the literature, that CEEs still tend to operate in a “Eurocentric onto-epistemological realm” despite historical evidence showing the abundance of creativity and imagination in Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. The authors argue that CEEs will remain trapped within a Eurocentric onto-epistemology until educators and researchers disrupt inequitable early educational and schooling experiences that have a long-standing legacy of racism and trauma.

Diego Román, Juan Miguel Arias, Quentin C. Sedlacek, and Greses Pérez, in “Exploring Conceptions of Creativity and Latinidad in Environmental Education Through the Lens of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy,” focus on the creative educational experiences of Latinx in environmental education. They find that the markers of creative experiences—open-endedness, nonlinearity, pluriperspectives, future orientation—can be applied to the conception of Latinidad itself to reflect the dynamic, shifting, ever-changing nature of being Latinx, which is a constant process of constructing and reconstructing identity at both the individual and communal levels. As the world continues to be affected by complex human and environmental uncertainties, the authors believe that all youth, not only those identifying as Latinx, should recognize the multitude of creative, cultural forms of environmental literacy if we want them to be better prepared to teach and act in creatively and environmentally just ways.

Lori D. Patton, Toby S. Jenkins, Gloria L. Howell, and Anthony R. Keith Jr. showcase creative educational experiences of Black students in their chapter, “Unapologetically Black Creative Educational Experiences in Higher Education: A Critical Review.” With the definition of Black creative educational experiences (BCEEs) as participatory and performative cultural experiences created either by or for students centering Black artistic expression and aesthetics, the authors demonstrate that BCEEs manifest in various forms within higher education. The authors argue that BCEEs have played a critical role in honoring the roots of Black aesthetics, challenging Eurocentric views, promoting belongingness, promoting cultural agency and community building, and encouraging future research aimed at inquiring into and documenting the tremendous benefits of BCEEs to Black students and campus communities.

Rohit Mehta and Danah Anne Henriksen coauthored the chapter “To Democratize, First Decolonize: Approaches Beyond Eurocentric and Colonial Epistemologies in Creativity.” In this chapter, the authors report results of a thematic analysis of scholarship on creativity and decolonization. They raise concerns about dominant paradigms in creativity theory and practice, namely, Western, Eurocentric, and masculine. They stress the importance of Indigenous, Black, feminist, and non-Western epistemological perspectives on creativity being taken up consistently and credibly in contemporary creativity theory and practice.

In “Black Brilliance and Creative Problem Solving in Fugitive Spaces: Advancing the BlackCreate Framework Through a Systematic Review,” Lauren C. Mims, Lisa DaVia Rubenstein, and Jenna Thomas report findings of a broad and systematic review of literature examining Black students’ CEEs. Based on the review, the authors propose a framework for understanding BCEEs anchored on the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST). They argue that effective BCEEs create fugitive spaces for creative expression and education.

In the chapter “Transdisciplinarity: Re-Visioning How Sciences and Arts Together Can Enact Democratizing Creative Educational Experiences,” authors Pamela Burnard, Laura Colucci-Gray, and Carolyn Cooke examine the interactions of sciences and arts education as a way to provide democratization of creative educational experiences. They present evidence across projects of new, future-making transdisciplinary ways of entangling subject disciplines with the potential to make a real difference in one’s life and one’s community. These projects, the authors maintain, are not simply about acquisition of knowledges and skills but are important activities—not of production but of creation. The authors also highlight the role of subjectivity in learning, not restricted to individuals or subject silos but rather as a cooperative transspecies effort that takes place transversally, displacing binaries.

Amy Whitaker and Gregory C. Wolniak take on the issue of social exclusion in the arts in their chapter, “Social Exclusion in the Arts: The Dynamics of Social and Economic Mobility Across Three Decades of Undergraduate Arts Alumni in the United States.” Their analysis of the social and economic mobility of U.S. undergraduate arts graduates over three decades suggests that the arts suffer from complex problems of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic exclusion. The analysis suggests that these problems are likely rooted in colonial histories and taste-making hierarchies maintained and exacerbated not only by continuing structural racism but also by structural economic precarity in the arts. Although artists have desired more business and entrepreneurial preparation, resistance to business within artistic identities and projection of economic disinterestedness as part of artistic personae have made it difficult.

Maciej Karwowski, Aleksandra Zielińska, and Dorota M. Jankowska coauthored “Democratizing Creativity by Enhancing Imagery and Agency: A Review and Meta-Analysis.” This chapter, based on a literature review and meta-analysis, aims to untangle different ways of democratizing creativity in educational settings. It focuses on two particular aspects of this democratization, as suggested by the recent Creative Behavior as Agentic Action model of creative action. First, it explores the possibilities of strengthening and developing a vital aspect of creative potential: creative imagery abilities. Second, it explores the opportunities to create conditions that support creative self-beliefs and creative self-regulation, understood as ways to make creative activity more likely.

“Connected Arts Learning: Cultivating Equity Through Connected and Creative Educational Experiences” also explores issues of equity and equality in arts education. Authored by Kylie Peppler, Maggie Dahn, and Mizuko Ito, this chapter argues that a connected arts learning framework can sharpen our focus on how CEEs can cultivate equity and social/cultural connection for all youth. The authors believe that the connected arts learning framework helps to underscore the ongoing value of CEE in the arts in the 21st century and benefits of CEE such as new understandings around lifelong learning, upward economic mobility through employment, and cultivation of a more socially just society. This chapter also addresses the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic in arts education.

“A Critical Review of Assessments of Creativity in Education,” authored by Haiying Long, Barbara A. Kerr, Trina E. Emler, and Max Birdnow, is a careful review of creativity assessments in education. Although the review comprehensively discusses the various types of assessments used in education, it mainly finds a number of significant issues such as lack of progress; lack of consideration of socioeconomic issues; lack of consideration of gender, race, and ethnic background; lack of consideration of long-term developmental trajectories; and lack of classroom connections.

Mirka Koro and Lene Tanggaard coauthored “Creative Methods for Creativity Research(ers)? Speculations.” In this chapter, they explore a new territory of CEEs: methods. Guided by the questions of how used and documented methods in leading creativity journals are limiting produced knowledges and how produced knowledges limit the used methods, the authors explore evidence about the extent to which epistemological and political expectations of academia and the dogma of scientific knowledge guide scholarship across disciplines. They also explore what could be lost when methodological knowledge is bounded by the knowable rather than the possible and potential. Another issue of exploration in this chapter is what might be gained when discipline-specific knowledges are designed to cross discipline boundaries intentionally and creatively.

Ryan Ziols, Natalie Renee Davis, Teri Holbrook, and Sarah Bridges are the authors of the next chapter: “Creativity as a Racializing and Ableizing Scientific Object: Disentangling the Democratic Impulse From Justice-Oriented Futures.” This chapter argues that creativity studies have suffered from racializing/racist and ableizing/ableist discourses but are often presented as well intentioned, inclusive, and democratizing. The authors present their analyses of the necessarily partial aspects of the scientization of creativity to showcase the tensions and contradictions resulting from social and mind sciences. They assert that actions to include, reconceptualize, and democratize may also inadvertently marginalize, conserve, and exclude.

The last chapter, by David Rousell, Daniel X. Harris, Kit Wise, Abbey MacDonald, and Julia Vagg, further expands research on CEEs from a theoretical perspective. In “Posthuman Creativities: Democratizing Creative Educational Experience Beyond the Human,” the authors review historical trajectories and the current state of play in posthumanist studies of creativity, focusing specifically on examples of how such work reconceptualizes creative experience within diverse educational contexts. They offer a diverse set of entry points for addressing the democratizing potentials of creative educational experience by extending creative education scholarship through multiple perspectives in critical posthumanism. The chapter maps a range of posthuman ecological approaches currently being used to study and engage with creative experience across education contexts.

Taken together, the contributors to this volume offer new ways to invite and challenge researchers to reconceptualize, study, and document CEEs. We hope that the volume serves as a CEE in itself by offering education researchers a plurality of perspectives, open-ended and nonlinear possibilities, and more promising futures for research aimed at studying, documenting, and developing insights into the “plural worlds” (Lagemann, 1989) of creative educational experiences.