Constructive Creativity

In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers wrote the following set of conditions for “constructive creativity” (rather than destructive creativity.) BTW, Carl Rogers is considered one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology…

1) Openness to experience, which he called “extensionality.” This is the opposite of psychological defensiveness and it implies a tolerance for ambiguity.

2) An internal locus of evaluation. “The final evaluation lies in the person’s own organismic reaction to and appraisal of the creation.” In other words, it is “right” when the process is satisfying and you feel authentic in what you’ve done.

3) The ability to toy with elements and concepts. For example, the ability to play spontaneously with ideas, colors, shapes, relationships; to translate ideas and principles from one form to another; and so on.

Having been immersed in writing a book about teaching and learning, I would have to say that this is the learning process as well:

a) we need to be open to learn;

b) the only way to really learn anything as an adult in this world is to have your own internal locus of evaluation (otherwise, you’re just receiving endless streams of information and you have no way to filter or process this information); and

c) we have to be able to “play” to learn, because learning as an adult only happens when we follow our own natural interests and enthusiasms. You could say that learning is a process of remembering what you’re interested in.

(Note: this post was inspired by a more detailed explanation of Roger’s work in the book, Higher Creativity by Willis Harmon.)