Small steps

In what may be a growing trend in higher education, colleges across the United States are seeking new ways to teach creativity to their students. Stanford University now requires that freshmen satisfy a creativity requirement, indicating an increased appreciation for the practical, societal and personal benefits of creative thinking. While creativity is an inherently valuable attribute and a central tenet of liberal arts education, it is extremely difficult to integrate creativity into curriculum.

We believe that Duke largely succeeds in fostering creativity among its undergraduates, but a number of major programs could better sequence their courses in order to ensure that students learn the skills that will allow them to challenge and expand the boundaries of the field.

In the context of an undergraduate liberal arts education, creativity refers to students’ capacity to generate original ideas and solutions within the framework of a given discipline. Creating something new does not necessarily mean totally rejecting established paradigms. After all, in order to assess progress within an intellectual sphere, professors must be able to determine whether or not a student’s project reflects his or her knowledge of the subject. Even without transgressing the boundaries of existing academic paradigms, students can augment disciplines in a meaningful way. They can employ inherited tools to create something new, develop problem solving skills that transcend reductive methodology and imagine novel solutions that deviate from the status quo.

Perhaps the greatest value of creative thinking lies in its ability to promote mental flexibility. Real-world problems rarely mirror those encountered in the classroom, and a rapidly changing society produces issues that cannot be resolved by conventional methods. Students trained to think creatively can devise solutions to these problems.

Some students appeal to creative license as an excuse for intellectual laziness, and we should take care never to divorce creativity from effort or academic rigor. Indeed, because creativity requires hard work and a willingness to take chances, students often avoid seeking creative or novel solutions in order to avoid risk. Fearing the consequences of diverging from the most direct path, many students forgo the creative solutions in favor of the conventional ones.

To avoid producing both intellectual indolence and a stifling aversion to risk, undergraduate major programs should better sequence their courses to ensure that students receive the requisite skills to make novel discoveries in a field. While introductory courses should focus on teaching skills, later courses should encourage divergent thinking. In this model, students seeking creative approaches to their field’s questions are guaranteed to possess an adequate understanding of their discipline and a wide enough tool kit to tackle its deeper issues. In the process, they will acquire an appreciation for the field’s subtleties as well as the confidence that accompanies a broad base of knowledge. This, in turn, will help students become more comfortable taking risks, allowing them to approach problems in ways that may not have been initially obvious.

We have endorsed more rigorous course sequencing in the past and, although we believe that Duke often teaches creativity well, maintain that slight curricular changes could significantly increase students’ opportunities to engage in creative thinking.