manolis dafermos university of crete. what is creativity?

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Manolis Dafermos University of Crete

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Page 1: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Manolis Dafermos University of Crete

Page 2: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

What is creativity?

Page 3: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Two types of activity

Page 4: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Creative activity –future oriented activity

Human creative activity “...makes the human being a creature oriented toward the future, creating the future and thus altering his own present” (Vygotsky, 2004a, p.9).

Page 5: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Science constitutes as a highly complex form of labour activity

Science constitutes a highly complex form of labour activity. On one side science is an objective process that relies on the previously accumulated knowledge of scientific community, The accumulated knowledge is a result of accumulated labor of scientific community.

Science is carried out by concrete subjects embedded in a specific cultural, historical, and social context.

"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." (Karl Marx)

Page 6: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

“The first wave of creativity research, from the 1950s through the 1970s, was heavily influenced by personality psychology, and focused on developing psychometric instruments and identifying the component traits of creativity in different domains. By the 1970s, the personality approach was largely thought to have reached its limit” (Sawyer, 2003a, p.5). In 1980s -1990s a shift in focus occurs from the investigation of creative products to creative process.

Page 7: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

A.V. Zaporozhets focused on creativity as the main Vygotsky's quality:

“If you were to ask what was Vygotsky's dominant quality as a scientist, i.e., the quality that made the greatest impression on those around him, the answer might be his extremely creative capacity for productive synthesis, the ability to put things together in a creative way. One can say that this creativity was no extraordinary episode in Vygotsky's life: it was in his blood, it was the permanent mode of his everyday scientific life and activity. Whenever I was with him, my invariable impression was that of a firebelching furnace always erupting with new ideas, new notions, new hypotheses, and new original experimental designs”

Page 8: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Τhree turning points of Vygotsky's creative life course

1. The transition from subjectivism and idealism to objectivism and materialism under the influence of October Revolution (1919-1920)

2. The transition from reflexology and behaviorism to cultural historical theory (1927)

3. Criticizing his own previous intellectualism, Vygotsky elaborated concepts such psychological system, meaning, unity of the affective and intellectual processes, perezivanie, etc. as a part of his project to found an integrative, monistic, materialistic and dialectical theory of consciousness (1932)

Page 9: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Social commitment and production of new knowledge

Vygotsky' project is presented by Stetsenko and Arievitch (2004, p.58) as “a collaborative project unique for its practical, political, and civic engagement and ideological commitment to ideals of social justice, equality, and social change”.

An non-conformist and active life stance enhances sensitivity to new ideas, even they are unpopular or marginalized. Scientists with a non-conformist and active life stance can challenge mainstream scientific discourse and promote new creative ideas that remain unrecognized in scientific community.

Page 10: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Social commitment and production of new knowledge

Vygotsky wrote in a letter (15-4-1929) to his disciples: “A sense of the vastness and the scale of contemporary

work in psychology (we are living in an epoch of geological upheavals in psychology) overwhelms me. But this makes the situation of us few who are pursuing a new line in science (especially in the sciences of man) infinitely responsible, deeply serious, and almost tragic (in the best and concrete, not the abstract, sense of the term). One must try oneself, test oneself, thousands of times, and withstand temptation before taking a decision, because this is a difficult path that demands the whole person” (Vygodskaya, & Lifanova, 1999b, p.70-71).

“purpose of creative thought is what it gives in itself, not cheap recognition and success” (Vygodskaya, & Lifanova, 1999d, p.46).

Page 11: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Crisis and creativity

Vygotsky wrote in his letter to R.Levina:“Crises are not a temporary condition, but the way of inner life” (Vygodskaya, & Lifanova, 1999b, p.25).

Vygotsky's life as a developmental process.Vygotsky's life and the development of his

research program as an optimistic tragedy that includes both various crises and painstaking endeavors to overcome them

Page 12: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Crisis and creativityAdaptation and creativity "The first such factor is always, as psychological analysis

has established, the human need to adapt to the environment. If life surrounding him does not present challenges to an individual, if his usual and inherent reactions are in complete equilibrium with the world around him, then there will be no basis for him to exercise creativity. A creature that is perfectly adapted to its environment, would not want anything, would not have anything to strive for, and, of course, would not be able to create anything" (Vygotsky, 2004a, p.28-29).

Vygotsky's life course is penetrated by creative, a future oriented activity, that ...makes the human being a creature oriented toward the future, creating the future and thus altering his own present"(Vygotsky, 2004, p.9).

Page 13: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Collaborative activity

Page 14: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Collaborative activity

collective creativity: “According to everyday understanding, creativity is the realm of a

few selected individuals, geniuses, talented people, who produce great works of art, are responsible for major scientific discoveries or invent some technological advances... However, as we have already stated, this view is incorrect. To use an analogy devised by a Russian scholar, just as electricity is equally present in a storm with deafening thunder and blinding lightning and in the operation of a pocket flashlight, in the same way, creativity is present, in actuality, not only when great historical works are born but also whenever a person imagines, combines, alters, and creates something new, no matter how small a drop in the bucket this new thing appears compared to the works of geniuses. When we consider the phenomenon of collective creativity, which combines all these drops of individual creativity that frequently are insignificant in themselves, we readily understand what an enormous percentage of what has been created by humanity is a product of the anonymous collective creative work of unknown inventors” (Vygotsky, 2004a, p.10-11)

Page 15: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Scientific school “troika”: Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria, Alexei

Leontiev “pitiorka”: Lidia Bozhovich, Alexander

Zaporozhets, Natalia Morozova, Rosa Levina, and Liya Slavina.

Vygotsky personal network: Leonid Solomonovich Sakharov, Zhozefina Il’inichnaShif, Liya Solomonovna Slavina, Boris EfimovichVarshava, Solomon Grigor’evich Gellerstein, Eisenstein, Mandelstam,

Internal conferences

Page 16: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

Toward unity of theory and practice

N.G. Morozova provides evidence that Vygotsky “was not an armchair scientist. His thoughts, theories, and plans were born in the hospital, in the school, in the laboratory, in the team of his students, and during analysis of individual children”. (Vygodskaya, & Lifanova, 1999b, p.74).

Participation in social practice serves as the deepest foundation for the development of psychological knowledge and the supreme judge of theory (Dafermos, 2014b)

“Практика выдвигает постановку задач и служит верховным судом теории, критерием истины; она диктует, как конструировать понятия и как формулировать законы” (Vygotsky, 388).

  “Диалектическое единство методологии и практики,

с двух концов приложенное к психологии” (Vygotsky, p.393).

Page 17: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

From Classic to romantic science

“Classical scholars are those who look upon events in terms of their constituent parts. Step by step they single out important units and elements until they can formulate abstract, general laws. These laws are then seen as the governing agents of the phenomena in the field under study. One outcome of this approach is the reduction of living reality with all its richness of detail to abstract schemas. The properties of the living whole are lost, which provoked Goethe to pen, "Gray is every theory, but ever green is the tree of life."

Romantic scholars' traits, attitudes, and strategies are just the opposite. They do not follow the path of reductionism, which is the leading philosophy of the classical group. Romantics in science want neither to split living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the wealth of life's concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves. It is of the utmost importance to romantics to preserve the wealth of living reality, and they aspire to a science that retains this richness” (Luria, 2010, p.174).

Page 18: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

From Classic to romantic science

Windelband distinction between nomothetic and idiographic science.

Nomothetic approaches attempt to formulate general laws and theories.

Idiographic approaches are based on the assumption that the ultimate goal of science is to explain individual events.

Page 19: Manolis Dafermos University of Crete. What is creativity?

From Classic to romantic science

Cross-fertilization between different disciplines is one of the most important dimensions of advances in the history of science (Sawyer, 2006). Field-switchers have made significant contributions to the development of psychology (Freud Piaget, Freud, Vygotsky, etc.). Freud came from biology and neuroanatomy to psychoanalysis. Piaget specialized as a biologist. Pavlov turned from physiology to the study of conditional reflexes (Valsiner, & van der Veer, 2000).

Dialogue between art and science (in the particular case, psychology) as an dimension of “romantic science”