My Rant On Teaching and Learning Creativity

People are creative. It's their natural state. All sorts of things people do are creative. Every time you figure out a new way to get to work, adroitly avoiding a traffic jam, you are being creative. Every time you figure out how to dodge doing anything you don't want to do, you are being creative. So in a sense one doesn't need to learn how to be creative. So why do so many people believe they aren't creative? Because they've been taught that they aren't and so they believe it.

If creativity is narrowly defined as art, and art is narrowly defined as drawing and painting, well certainly most people aren't "creative". It's rather like defining math ability as intelligence and declaring that anyone who isn't good at math is just not intellligent. So let's leave the analogy behind and go back to the original question.

How do you teach and learn creativity?
You learn it by allowing yourself to be creative, and you teach it by allowing and encouraging others to be creative. You teach it by defining creativity and it's cousin, art, to be anything that is artful. Artful is knowing lots of ways to do something and picking the one that seems most effective in the current situation.

So teaching creativity is about allowing for many possibilities, for freedom of choice, for acceptance of less than perfection in the pursuit of new ideas, and for defining success in its own terms, not in terms of a perfect result. My goal is to teach a fairly simple and accessible craft - knitting - in a way that encourages people to take it and make a creative endeavor out of it - so they personally can enjoy it and be creative with it.

Therefore I bring you a few articles and teaching patterns for you to use to learn to design for yourself. This is really basic design. I'm not going into form-fitting clothing or details of shaping. If you are at that point, get Maggie Righetti's Knitting Design in Plain English. The purpose of this material is to encourage beginners to design a little. You can find a little more on the subject of design in the spinner's section where I talk about designing with handspun yarns.

copyright cjwyche, 2000-2006 These patterns and documents are essentially learning tools and I favor free access to knowledge on the internet, I have placed them on this web page under Copyleft|GNU Free Documentation License (version 1.2 or any later version). This means you have permission to freely download, ocpy and use content from this web site under the same License. Any creative changes you make to this source material cannot be copyrighted, but must also be freely distributed under the License.

Modified: 2006-02-01