When Creativity is Dangerous

Chaz Pugliese, France

The Creativity group

Being creative in education is a risky business, it’s a well-known fact. Meet Alexander Coward. A brilliant mathematician, Oxford graduate, he’s been recently fired by his department at UC Berkeley (CA) for not sticking to the norms and for not teaching in more ordinary ways. When he asked what all this meant this is what he was told: ‘…it was made very clear to me what is meant by the norms of the department. It means teach from the textbook, stop emailing students with encouragement, handwritten notes and homework problems, and instead assign problems from the textbook at the start of the semester. It means stop using evidence-based practices like formative assessment. It means micro-manage the Graduate Student Instructors rather than allowing them to use their own, considerable, talent and creativity…’ Dr Coward told the dinosaurs in his department that attendance to his classes was 95%, as opposed to a mere 20% on average for the other professors in his same department. But they wouldn’t have it.

So, in other words, Dr Coward was fired because by using his creatvity and by tapping into his students’ own creativity, he taught in ways that are judged to be unorthodox, and thus he disturbed the status quo. He was fired, basically, for being a good teacher. Upon hearing the news, hundreds of students (not just his own students) took to the streets to manifest their discontentment. Dr Coward himself is hanging in there and won’t go quietly, determined to fight for his post.

What lesson can we draw from this? Apart from the fact the creativity can get you into trouble, it shows that being creative in an environment that is unsupportive is hard work and doesn’t always pay off. Which is why so many people sadly give up. The other lesson is that Dr Coward is doing what anyone interested in creativity does and that is, persevere. Examples abound: Take the jazz great Charlie Parker, arguably the greatest improviser in the history of jazz. When he first played in front of an audience (age 16) his stuff was so original that the house drummer threw a cymbal at him and he was mercilessly booed off the stage. It’s the sort of experience that could clip anyone’s wings. Not his. He stuck to his guns and the rest is history.The art gallery where Edvard Munch’s famous ‘The scream’ was first shown removed it after only three days, because it was too new. It’s rather paradoxical, but we just have to fight for our creative ideas, but that’s because people expect you to conform, in the arts, as well as in other domains, including education. But fight is what we must do, if we believe in a pedagogy of possibilities versus a senseless pedagogy of conformity.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.