Creativity and creative thinking for university students.pdf

Skill development and enabling one to think outside the box. quite useful for university students

1. Creativity & Creative
Thinking

2. Introduction
The focus of teaching and learning is on the mind
•To create a particular mind
•A particular mental attitude, disposition to think in a particular manner
•To create a mind with a particular consciousness
•learning of every subject should culminate ultimately in a particular consciousness
•The purpose of this unit is the creation of a creative consciousness anchored upon
your subject specific consciousness

3. Context
Situate the discussion of creativity and creative thinking within the context;
•Education 5. 0 with its emphasis on innovation and industrialisation
•Critical consciousness and the creation of a particular mind/mental
disposition/consciousness
•Of the search and quest for a creative consciousness as the basis for
Education 5.0
•The search, quest for and creation for creative national consciousness/mind

4. Purpose
•To examine the concept creativity
•To highlight the characteristics of a creative person/mind
To show that a creative mind is a prerequisite for;
•creativity
•Innovation and industrialisation

5. Theses/Claims
Current challenges and problems facing Zimbabwe in general and individuals
in particular require people/individuals;
▪who are not merely alive/conscious but people with a critical consciousness
▪With the patience and capabilityleof getting to the root causes of a problem and
makes a distinction between causesand symptoms
▪Who are not adapters or participators but actors
▪Prepared to live not as objects but as Subjects
▪Who are creative and have a creative mindset/consciousness

6. Nature of Creativity
•For Edward de Bono creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in
order to look at things in a different way.
•Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else
has thought.
•Being creative involves making ordinary things exquisite and extraordinary.

7. •Theprocessincludesbeingresourcefulinhandlingsimplethings,
transformingitintosomethingmeaningful,andbreakingtheboundariesof
convention(CarloMagno2009:16)

8. A creative mind
•Is one that has the ability to use imagination/ original ideas to create
something.
•It can bring something into existence/it can produce, cause something (new)
into existence

9. Creativity and the child
•Best example of creativity and a creative mind can be seen in a child at play
•When a child has needs he/she solves them creatively
•A child does not run short of toys
•He/she can transform anything into a toy to address his/her needs
•Transform a brick into anything
•Transform a cob into a child

10. Environments/Conditions for creativity
▪Freedom of thought, speech and action
▪Problematic
▪Challenging
▪Not oppressive
▪Open
▪Accept change
▪Promote divergent thinking.

11. Characteristics
•Let’s take a look at Guilford’s (1950) view on creativity. For him, creativity is a pattern of several primary
abilities that are characteristic for creative persons. Such traits or abilities include the following:
•1.thinkingoutsidethebox
•2.Wildness
•3.Sensitivitytoproblems.Creativepeopleseeproblemswhereothersdonot,abilitypossiblyrelatedtocuriosity

12. •4. Fluency. People who produce large number of ideas are more likely
to have significant ideas.
•5. Novel ideas. Creative people have unusual but appropriate ideas.
•6. Flexibility. Creative people should be able to easily change set.

13. •7. Synthesizing and analysingabilities. Creative thinking requires the
organisationof ideas into larger, more inclusive patterns and symbolic
structures must often be broken down before new ones can be built.

14. •8. Complexity. It refers to the number of interrelated ideas an
individual can manipulate at once.
•9. Evaluation. At some point, the value of new ideas must be
determined.

15. 10. Imagination
•the ability to form mental images, or the ability to spontaneously generate
images within one's own mind.
•It helps provide meaning to experience and understanding to knowledge;
•it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of the world
and it also plays a key role in the learning process.

16. Creativity &Education 5.0
•Education 5.0 Model, which ensures production of goods and services, has added two
more areas of focus, Innovation and Industrialisationto Teaching, Research and Outreach.
•It directs universities and tertiary institutions to be focused on programmesthat lead to
goods and services.

17. •Creativity is at the heart of education 5.0
•the importance of creativity need not be overemphasized.
To facilitate and succeed in the production of goods and services organizations need to be able to
•adapt to the fast-changing environment,
•to develop new products,
•to improve customer services, etc.

18. Innovation
• A new idea, more effective device or process.
• Innovation can be viewed as the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated
needs, or existing market needs.
• This is accomplished through more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are
readily available to markets, governments and society.
• The term innovation can be defined as something original and more effective and, as a consequence, new,
that “breaks into” the market or society

19. Problems/challenges in developing
creativity
•There are several factors that hinder a person to become
creative.
•These factors range from the self to others and environment.

20. The factors stemming from the self includes
•lack of potential,
•negative affect, and
•physiological

21. the social and environmental factors include
•lack of resources,
•social limitation,
•thwarted goals, and
•time pressure.

22. Lack of potential involves aspects of the self that is unwilling to use necessary
resources to become creative. Examples are
•lack of self-confidence,
•self-esteem, unwillingness, uneasiness, laziness, and dependence on others,
•mental block, not using skills, lack of motivation,

23. •Negative affect involves
•emotions and states that are difficult to regulate.
•Examples of negative states are stress,
•busyness,
•pressure,

24. •Physiological factors
•include situation when one is hungry or lacks sleep.
•Lack of resources
•includes the unavailability of money and other resources to become creative.

25. •Thwarted goals
•include people that stand in the way and fear of rejection.
•And time pressure
•involves time factor and when one is bombarded by academics and becomes
exhausted.

26. Creativity, Innovation & Unhu/ubuntu
•Philosophy of Zimbabwe (MoPSE, 2015)
•Need to be tamed
•Needs to be domesticated
•Creativity should be considered the context of chivanhu/isintuand
unhu/ubuntu

27. Conclusion
Challenges /problems currently being faced in Zimbabwe individually or collectively
require;
▪creative solutions
▪Creative consciousnessesat both macro/micro levels
▪The creation of a national critical consciousness as well as national creative
consciousness
Innovation & industrialisation should be anchored upon creativity and crative
consciousness at both individual and collective levels