thoughts from thought leaders: creativity in science and the arts

Hubert Dyasi, PhD

Rob Horowitz, EdD

The Collaborative’s Research Thought Leaders help provide the strong research foundation upon which the Collaborative’s work rests. Each Thought Leader is nationally and internationally recognized in their own field and brings an extensive depth of experience and expertise. They also are adept at working across disciplines.

In our previous newsletters, we brought you interviews with each of our Thought Leaders and also examined ways to apply their important ideas in STEAM learning. This new series showcases conversations between various Thought Leaders around an important and relevant topic. The spring and fall, 2022 newsletters featured a conversation about creativity and innovation between Neuroscience Thought Leader Sandi Chapman, PhD, and Creativity Thought Leader Bonnie Cramond, PhD. Sandi Chapman is Founder and Chief Director of the University of Texas at Dallas Center for BrainHealth. Bonnie Cramond is Professor Emerita of Educational Psychology and Gifted and Creative Education at the University of Georgia.

This article builds on those conversations between Chapman and Cramond. It is an interchange with important observations about creativity from the Collaborative’s Science Thought Leader Hubert Dyasi, PhD, and Arts Thought Leader Rob Horowitz, EdD, both of whom are leaders in their own fields. Hubert Dyasi is Professor of Science Education, the City College, City University of New York (CUNY) – retired. He is known for the teaching and learning of science in pre-college education in the US and in Africa (see newsletter for information about him and his recounting of how curiosity led to science centers across Africa). Rob Horowitz is Executive Director, ArtsResearch, and Associate Director, Center for Arts Education Research, Teachers College, at Columbia University. He is well-known for his arts education research that demonstrates the important relationships between in-school arts learning and cognitive, social, and personal competencies (see newsletter article for resources and information about him). In this interchange of ideas, you will see important commonalities between science and the arts in relation to the use of creative thinking.

Hubert Dyasi: 
One of the major aspects of all science is the creation of science-based mental models that successfully explain and predict events in nature. Yet science lessons in schools seldom provide multiple rich opportunities for students to engage in meaningful development and critique of mental models. That is unfortunate.

I believe the impulse to create mental models is an integral part of human development and the desire to understand the world. In other words, all humans, including children, cannot help but create mental models in efforts to explain and understand their worlds. If we consistently use that impulse as a motivating factor in teaching and learning, we will have a firm foundation for cultivating understanding and creativity in students’ learning regardless of the school subject. The challenge in science education, specifically, is how to make students’ creation of mental models a staple of science learning for all students. 

Rob Horowitz:
As Hubert and I often have found in our conversations, there is more commonality between the work of scientists and artists than differences. Developing mental models – and testing and revising them – is inherent to the artistic process, although the medium might be aural, sensual, visual, or kinesthetic, rather than linguistic and logical. These are processes inherent to our humanity, and not just the domain of those who are defined by the presence or absence of “talent". Children – and adults, for that matter – make meaning and understanding of their world through engaging the senses, seeking patterns, adding to previous knowledge through adjusting their mental models, and then seeking to express their understanding, ideas, and feelings. Their ensuing representation is “art”, for want of a better word.

Hubert Dyasi: 
Building upon students’ impulse to create mental models also implies utilizing it to cultivate their creative capacity to raise questions that interest them, refine them in a manner that makes them scientifically investigable, and to design ways to answer them; for example, creativity about what data to collect, how to collect them, how to organize and interpret them, and about how to communicate them clearly and interestingly. If students grapple with their own thoughts and ideas to perform these tasks, they engage in creative activity. From banks of data analyses they have done, they learn to see patterns from which they create testable mental models — models they can use to explain and to predict events in specific aspects of their worlds. In other words, they learn to develop mental models based on data that meet standards of evidence in science.

Rob Horowitz:
I am still seeking to find differences between the artistic and scientific modeling processes — perhaps Hubert’s notion of testable mental models that can predict events can lead me to an answer. I will have to adjust my own mental model of artistic creation to consider this.

Hubert Dyasi:  
By their very nature, mental models created from data based on science practices have “successes” and “failures.” As students encounter more events and generate more data, they might find discrepancies in their models; the discrepancies invite them to design ways to revise and refine the models. The resulting mental models are creative to the extent they are new to the students, and/or combine objects and ideas in ways that are new to them; it doesn’t matter that grownups might already know them.  

Rob Horowitz:
The mental models are revised as the learner stays open to new information. That “resistance to closure” and task persistence is an asset as children develop and revise their models. One difference with the performing arts is the temporal quality, where revisions are made quickly, in real time, as rhythm and phrasing, dance steps, improvisations, or actor’s delivery are adjusted in real time in response to their community of fellow performers (and audience). Perhaps this is a key difference between the arts and sciences: the need to adjust the communication and artistic representation in response to others. Although I suspect Hubert will summon a parallel process in scientific exploration, such as the need to establish safe and nurturing classroom environments – or laboratories – that support open exploration and representation.

Hubert Dyasi:  
It is important to note once again that embedded within creating mental models are other elements of creativity, e.g., self-created ways to represent and to communicate the models, and design of model-testing situations and devices. In these activities, students also gain a useful insight into science that it is a self-correcting system of studying phenomena of the world. None of these levels of creativity, however, can occur in classrooms without satisfying preconditions such as a psychologically safe classroom environments where students are comfortable expressing their ideas and creativity, and supportive curricula and assessments. 
​
A special thank you to Hubert and Rob for these enlightening insights that help us see that the boundaries between the sciences and the arts are transcended in many important ways.