To Create is to Learn

How many times have you heard someone lament their lack of drawing skills or give some minimizing comment about an artistic “bone” implying that creative skills are inherent or not? I’m deeply suspicious of these statements as they treat creativity as something other people do—not you. What I hear instead is someone who has spent their life believing that what they make isn’t valuable. Maybe it was someone in their life dismissing their efforts. Maybe it was themselves. Thankfully, creativity is not really a skill, rather, it’s what thinking looks like when it becomes visible—it’s also not exclusive to the Arts.

 

Perhaps creativity is better thought of as a process akin to the scientific method where an idea grows through repeated cycles of observation, experimentation, reflection, and revision. Someone can be creative, then, if they are willing to ask questions about the world and test their assumptions. This also implies that someone is creative when they are willing to be wrong about those assumptions and reflect on why they initially held those beliefs. Creativity, then, is not something we have, but something in which we participate. 

 

We understand the world through making things within it. It is important to remember that failure is always a possibility during experimentation, and often the most instructive outcomes come from experiments that don’t go as planned. Learning is not what happens after failure—it is what failure makes possible. Each creative endeavor asks us to confront uncertainty. Our willingness to make mistakes is often a reflection of our willingness to think creatively. This willingness is vulnerable as it requires us to make our unfinished thinking visible.

 

I say l’ve taught “every age from 4 to 40” throughout my time as a K-12 art teacher as well as collegiately,  and the biggest hurdle I’ve seen that deters people from a creative endeavor is the weight of anticipated difficulty. Children, thankfully, have fewer expectations of what an end result is supposed to look like—they’re just excited to try something new. Adults often see only the distance between where they are and where they hope to be. When adults inevitably encounter difficulty or even failure, all too often they are quick to react with frustration that the image they had in their head doesn’t match their initial results. Children, conversely, are quicker to play through the struggle thrilled when they’re able to produce anything at all. That’s not to say that children are more creative or better at learning, but the most creatively successful adults have hung on to their willingness to experiment and try new things well beyond their childhood.

 

The art classroom is a uniquely supportive place to practice creativity both individually and collectively. Every student enters my classroom with a range of experiences and confidence, so it’s important that I modify the constraints to make those creative challenges meaningful for each learner. Working alongside each other, we learn by observing how others solve similar problems—I include myself among the group. I intentionally participate in the projects as it can be beneficial for a student to see their instructor struggle or even fail alongside the class to demonstrate how to recover and solve problems similar to the students.

 

The Arts provide one of the clearest environments in which people can practice learning itself. I see my role as an art educator as helping others understand that because everyone is capable of learning, everyone is capable of creativity. The only thing "inherent" about creativity is that everyone is born with the capacity to learn about the world and test their assumptions about what they observe.  The purpose of Art education, then, is not to produce more artists. It is to produce people who are unafraid to observe, test, make, revise, and try again.