Sharpening A Point
Or… why any of this even matters
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Listen to this audio version of Sharping A Point, or read below.
When my doctoral dissertation came on the scene, I could not find a single researcher, who had investigated creativity from the teenage point of view. For decades, all the research on teenagers and creativity began with the adult researchers defining creativity.
In other words, these researchers were only interested in asking questions to confirm, or deny, their adult point of view. A teenager’s point of view wasn’t even a pin prick on the horizon. A teenager’s point of view didn’t exist.
Since every one of these researchers were aware that the mental abilities of teenagers foreshadowed adult thinking abilities, I kept pouring over research after research because I couldn’t believe the entire field of developmental psychology, with thousands of practioners and researchers, had fallen prey to such a blind spot.
Finally, in frustration at finding nothing, I asked the head of my dissertation committee hoping she could point me in the right direction.
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so I can offer you more!When I told her, Professor Shallcross looked at me in disbelief. Well, she said, barely hiding her irritation with me, I’m sure Dr. Torrance has researched this. You just aren’t looking hard enough.
To give you some context: at this time Prof. Torrance’s research on gifted high school students already spanned over thirty years, beginning in the early 1960s through the early 1990s.
When he began his research, the field of developmental psychology conflated gifted with creative. But, as Prof. Torrance continued his work, he realized that gifted was a subset of creative, and expanded his research into the broader field of creativity.
The stature of his work is staggering: including 88 books; 256 contributions to other books; 408 journal articles; 538 reports, manuals, tests, etc.; 162 articles in popular journals or magazines; 355 conference papers.
Besides all of that, in an era where a controversy raged over whether or not creativity and intelligence were connected (His research results? Sometimes, but not always), he devised the authoritative, standard creativity test: the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking.
Out of 149 entries in my dissertation bibliography, Torrance has eleven; all others rack up, at the most, three entries—including developmental-psychology heavy weights such as Piaget.
Confident that I’d looked everywhere I could, I decided to write Prof. Torrance and ask him to direct me toward research he, or anyone else, might have conducted that included the teen point of view.
What I’m looking for, I wrote him, focuses on the adolescent point of view: How does creativity influence the internal life (the self in relation to the self) and the external life (the self in relation to others) of adolescents?
Because I was still fuming over being told I wasn’t “looking hard enough,” I read Torrance’s return letter to me in class.
Probably the single, most politically incorrect thing I did in graduate school: prove to the head of my dissertation committee that she was wrong and I was right, in class, with other students.
Professor Torrance wrote:
The particular problem that you are interested in doing has not been pursued directly. There are a number of studies that involve adolescent creativity, but they were not trying to answer the questions that you are asking.
Did the reigning expert in creativity just concede that, for decades, no one had bothered to ask a single teen, never mind 195 of them, what they thought of creativity?
Did the reigning expert in creativity just concede that, for decades, no researcher of teens had pointed to a connection between creativity and identity formation?
Oh, wait… I’m getting ahead of myself. We are still riding around in a standard shift, four-door sedan. The luxury, baby-blue convertible of creativity hasn’t yet wheeled into view.
When A Paradigm Shift Glimmers, The Groundwork Matters
Remember a couple of posts back, where I referenced the self-reports I gave high school juniors?
The post where you discovered that out of 195 individual self-reports, 143 high school students said “Yes, I feel I am a creative person.” Instead of “No, I feel I am not a creative person.” ?
Because I only had one chance to conduct this research, and because it was the backbone of my entire dissertation, the Self-Report had to talk and chew gum at the same time.
I wanted it simple and easy for the teens to fill out. At the same time, for the sake of my research I needed each word to lift above its weight.
For example, even though our thinking and feeling processes are constantly weaving back and forth as we move through life, I assumed that cognition would dominate the self-report answers because, at 16 and 17, the brain is being rewired for complex thinking.
Sidebar moment: my take on when teens argue…
And like any new function, which needs exercise for the brain to become proficient, teens are wired to see how many thinking-wheelies they can do in the mental parking lot.
A good portion of what most adults assume is a teen trying to awkwardly wield power over adult authority (I win, you lose!) is actually a teen cutting their new cognitive teeth.
They are exercising this newly-forming mental ability to think like an adult with the adults they trust the most and feel safest with (I know, when the argument is raging, it sure doesn’t feel this way!!).
Instead of getting your adult hair on fire, try asking questions that give your teen even greater license to “think” their way out of a request/demand, or having to comply with some rule.
This does not mean you give up the rule.
Engaging in a lively debate, where you call out a good point in their favor, helps them navigate how to think. And this debate/challenge can always be ended with the rule/request restated, making it clear that winning in logic does not mean you’re backing down.
Unless, of course, their logic persuades you.
In that case, bravo! You’ve done a magnificent job of helping that teen’s brain exercise a new skill.
Okay… let’s swing back to the Self-Reports…
… so you see the layers behind what, at first glance, seems to be simple questions.
Do you feel you are a creative person? If Yes, why. If No, why not?
First, I wanted to limit the wording so it was easy for the teens to grasp while accomplishing two things for me, the researcher:
1) The wording needed to carry a subliminal reference to identity formation, which I accomplished by asking, directly, for their personal identification of creativity (Do you feel that you are a creative person?), and…
2) I wanted to offer teens an open-ended question that elicited their point of view (If Yes, why? If No, why not?).
Second, I wanted to pair an emotional component with the new, fired-up teen thinking ability.
Given teens’ new, brain focus on mental gymnastics, I assumed that the word thinking would carry too much weight, and support a kind of self-reflection that was detached from their original experience with creativity. On the other hand, the word feeling would bring their self-reflection back into their original experience with creativity.
So, I used “feel” instead of “think” to balance teen’s developing mental inclinations with an emotional connection: Do you feel you are a creative person? Not, Do you think you are a creative person?
Even The Word “Creative” Needed Reflection
I selected “creative person” over other possibilities because I needed a direct connection to their sense of personal identity.
Words like creative, by itself (Do you feel you are creative?), were too abstract and I was worried it lacked the necessary emotional connection I wanted.
Or a question like, Do you like creativity? made creativity into an object of personal taste: you like it or you don’t.
One of the most fascinating results of the Self Reports was a couple of unexpected caveats.
To begin with, I didn’t anticipate any teens responding beyond my qualifiers of Yes or No. And yet, 25 responded with sometimes they felt they were a creative person. And… they went further than that: they told me why.
Their enthusiastic explanations leaped off the pages. I assumed this was because an adult, somewhere, was listening.
My next big surprise was the No respondents.
81% of the teens who responded No included detailed explanations about why not. Even though they identified themselves as not feeling creative, they had something they wanted to say about creativity that was valuable enough for them to take the time to do so.
What fascinated me was how every explanation showed that they understood what creativity was, and could lay out a range of creative expressions to back that up.
As validating as the Self Report findings were—that, unlike the assumptions of the majority of adults, teenagers both valued and thought about creativity—it would be my 1:1 interviews that would impact decades of developmental psychology research.
Or would it?
What’s Next?
Valuing your real world experience as a teenager, without the collective negative filter, is essential to whether or not you step into the radical, creative potential of your Inner Teen, an aspect of Self who lives with you, all day and night, for as long as you live.
Recognizing the real world value of teenagers, and their abiding connection to creativity, is essential for how you value your historical experience as a teenager, how you revitalize your Inner Teen, and the potential magnitude of your creative visions.
In the next Post #19—Collective Consciousness, Individuality, and the Outsized Impact of Teen Creativity: when a hunch turns into pure gold—we’ll keep chipping away at the popular and academic adult assumptions that obscure the pure gold of our teen years.
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3. Discover why Inspiration changed from a what to a Who.
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