Consider the Brain by Les Schofield
Learning and Teaching Creativity
By Dan Hunter
Radio Ranch Press
296 pages
Fifth-grade science class. Utterly boring. Then came that day when Miss K sat the cardboard box down on her desk. Her bony fingertips drummed the lid until her cryptic smile and roguish gaze smothered our usual cacophony. She allowed the silence to build until it screamed and then lifted a cow’s heart out of the box. She slowly wiggled her bloody fingers through the severed arteries. “What do you suppose these thingies do?” Her smile warmed enough to melt our frozen faces. “Why don’t you come here and let’s find out?” The class exploded with responses as we instantly focused on mastering anatomy … from the inside out.
In his new book, Learning and Teaching Creativity, Dan Hunter invites us to take our brains out and play with them from the inside out. It is a masterful guide in learning how these “thingies” work. Every page in this inspirational handbook is a passionate exposition of the enabling connection between a teacher’s curiosity-fueled imagination and their students’ ability to learn to grow theirs. Citing current neuroscience, credible exemplars, and his work with students, Hunter interweaves his assertions with practical exercises that help us experience the delight in imaginative growth.
Hunter begins by making a crucial distinction between imagination and creativity. “Imagination is internal and applied in all areas of life. Creativity is external … We need to study what happens inside the brain—imagination. And we need to appreciate why the world designates some ideas creative and others not.” Imagination is essentially problem-solving. When a problem is solved in a unique manner or is perceived by others to add value beyond usual expectations, then it is considered creative. He insists “… we need to eliminate the self-defeating myth of creative and non-creative people.” He convincingly argues that the road to creativity leads through our ability to imagine well.
Hunter’s passion for teaching “effective imagination” is the lifeline he uses to pull the reader through the depths of understanding metacognition—necessary insights into the way human beings learn and gain expertise in problem-solving. His title reminds us that learning precedes teaching and so he focuses on teachers in the first section of his book. The second section provides teaching strategies aimed at engaging students in the process of learning how they learn with ample opportunity to practice using their imaginations. The book concludes with an array of student exercises supplemented by his well-designed online platform, H-IQ.com. For a modest fee, students have access to additional exercises and opportunities to develop their imaginations as far as possible. Learning and Teaching Creativity deservedly invites expansion as an online professional development course.
Dan Hunter’s respect for teachers is evident in the way this book is designed. The chapters are substantive while being short enough to fit a teacher’s harried schedule. His prose is pithy yet personable. Technical ideas are presented clearly with accessible terminology. The documentation is substantial, allowing for deeper research into the sources undergirding his work. Above all, Learning and Teaching Creativity insists that effective imaginations require information that teachers have dedicated their lives to providing their students. Teachers and teaching matter.
Reading this book has been one of the delights of my life. I have spent years teaching in various roles while being fully immersed in the “creative world.” I have often expressed to others my surprise at seeing an unexpected solution to a problem in artwork, stage design, woodworking, and hundreds of other venues. Dan Hunter’s explanation of how such a wonderment happens has improved the way I teach my students through the application of his ideas. My woodshop/scene shop has become a major selling point for the admissions recruiter to use in the effort to entice prospective students. After their parents listen to a short speech I have crafted from this book, many have enrolled. Best of all, my students are thriving because of this book.
Learning and Teaching Creativity is worth every minute spent in its pages. Your fingers will wiggle in imaginative delight. I guarantee it.
Les Schofield is writer and artist living in North Carolina. For the past several years, he has taught theater arts, traditional woodcraft, and set design. He has studied art, philosophy, classical languages and holds an MFA in Creative writing. He was raised in the southwest and southern California before moving to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina where he married his wife, Kathy who is a professional folk artist. He is a member of the North Carolina Poetry Society and the North Carolina Writer’s Network. His current work in progress is entitled “Hominy Creek” which is an historical novel of the American Revolution as it played out in the Carolinas. He was recently interviewed in Southern New Hampshire University Online MFA Newsletter, Issue 10, Spring 2023.