Student illustrations, oral and written presentations of STEM solutions (science-centered language development), to storybook fables and fairy tales, all afford students a measure of creativity that can be combined with skills from science, art, mathematics, language arts, design, and engineering. They can also make a claim to be proven or disproven with evidence-based solutions. By applying art and design, students can produce a model of their problem-solving inventions that changes the final outcome of the story.
One of the most extraordinary human traits is our ability to create — design, engineer, and manufacture — an indescribably diverse inventory of problem-solving tools, from respirators to battle axes to PET scans. Human beings were engaged in STEM enterprises well before we ever referred to them as “STEM.” Everywhere on the planet, people devoted significant portions of each day tinkering, experimenting, and thinking their way through a myriad of challenges, working creatively and collaboratively for survival. Early dreamers, designers, and builders crafted tools, instruments, and strategies for problem-solving.
By engaging in language, complex social structures, tool-making, and problem-solving, Homo habilis experienced exponential brain growth, enlarging both the cerebral cortex and a modified cranium to encase and protect it. Within a brief evolutionary period, our Homo sapiens brain doubled in size to 1350 cm-squared, where its distinguishing features were a new brain (1) that was extremely large relative to body mass, (2) that possessed the cognitive abilities to create tools, to reason and to plan, and (3) with the ability not only to adapt to a wide range of environments, but to create its own, rather than merely adjusting to the limits of one’s natural surroundings.
Although we have long entered the “innovation age,” creative thinking still takes a backseat to “standardized” thinking in our schools. Professor Yong Zhao and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor recently reported an inverse relationship between high international test scores and entrepreneurship/creativity. However, creativity remains three times stronger than IQ as a predictor of individual lifetime success and accomplishment.
Almost 500 years after his death, Leonardo Da Vinci still tops most lists of the greatest scientific minds in world history. A “renaissance man” of insatiable curiosity and determined innovation, Da Vinci became an accomplished inventor, scientist, mathematician, painter, sculptor, architect, cartographer, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, and writer. Da Vinci left us the following seven Da Vincian principles to guide the pursuit of scientific discovery:
- Curiosità: An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.
- Dimostrazione: A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
- Sensazione: The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
- Sfumato (literally “going up in smoke”): A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.
- Arte/Scienza (art and science): The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination (“whole-brain” learning and thinking).
- Corporalità: The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.
- Connessione: A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena.
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties,” as psychologist Erich Fromm once said. Our test-centered schools may be unwittingly constraining student imagination by insisting that all thinking must conform to a preordained “correct” answer, rather than allowing for multiple solutions, multiple avenues to reach them, and more than one suitable answer to the same problem. The world may be in constant motion, and the future increasingly uncertain as 2075 approaches, but human ingenuity will always be an unbridled force, prepared to match whatever the future has to offer.
Kenneth Wesson is a former faculty member and administrator in higher education. He works with educators and administrators throughout the U.S. and overseas. He delivers keynote addresses to educational organizations and institutions on STEM, ST2REAM, and the neuroscience of learning.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2014 issue of Brain World Magazine.
