Academic Writing is tough

Torrance, Thomas, Robinson (1994: 379) claimed:

Academic writing is difficult. It requires a complex combination of generating ideas, selecting the ideas that are appropriate to the writing task, translating these into text and polishing the text to produce a presentable document.  In doing this the writer has to attend not only to his or her own thoughts, but also to the content and style conventions of the community for whom the piece is being written.

Torrance, M., Thomas, G. V. and Robinson, E. J. (1994). The writing strategies of graduate research students in the Social Sciences. Higher Education, 27(3), 379.

Dreaming of my PhD topic

Been struggling for months to synthesize an appropriate scope and topic for my research. The following 3 quotes on Creativity mysteriously compelled me to articulate them somewhere, somehow.

Loemker (2006) posits

It has often been claimed that genuine creativity is largely if not entirely a matter of inspiration- the sudden, involuntary, and inexplicable outpouring of innovative ideas and action. In many expressions of this thesis, including Plato's, the sacred instance- a spirit or muse- while in other versions it is the unconscious mind. The antithesis to such inspirationist theses is the rationalist doctrine that all creativity is ultimately reducible to a form of calculation or more or less deliberate problem-solving.

Aristotle "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing."

Amabile et al (1996) "Creativity is a starting point for innovation, the first is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the second."(http://www.grouppartnerswiki.net/index.php?title=Innovation)


SO... the overarching question is....
What does Creativity - Teacher & Learning - Teachers' Self-Perception - efficacy of students' learning all have in common?

Possible Topic 1 (1st July 2010):

The focus of study would be to examine teachers' self perception of their creativity based on their own pedagogical skills, knowledge and experience. My proposed intervention would be to study the effects of training and implementing a curriculum design model based on Torrance Incubation Model (Torrance & Safter, 1990) that fosters creative thinking skills and thereafter study how the experience of the subjects (teachers) reflect on their own creative learning process and their ability to infuse more creative teaching skills in their classrooms.

Possible Topic 2 (1st July 2010):

 To study the qualitative affordances of how teachers can apply creative thinking skills in the following three domains that are adapted from Swartz & Parks (1994, p.9) approaches to teaching thinking :

a. Teaching of Creative Thinking: Direct instruction in creative thinking in non-specific subject discipline context. Eg. Interdisciplinary Project Work                          

b. Teaching for Creative Thinking: Use of creative teaching methods (i.e. pedagogy) which promote creative thinking in curriculum contexts.

c.  Infusion Approach: Direct instruction in thinking in subject-specific content. Eg. Science.

                              

References:
Amabile, T. M., R. Conti, H. Coon, J. Lazenby, and M. Herron. "Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity." Academy of Management Journal 39, no. 5 (October 1996): 1154-1184.

Loemker, L.E. (2006). Encyclopedia of Philosophy. USA: Macmillan Reference.


Swartz, R.. & Parks, S. (1994). Infusing the teaching of critical and creative thinking into content instruction. CA: Critical Thinking Press & Software.

Components of Creativity

As we were mulling through some of Torrance's thoughts, we came across a similar idea. This adaptation of a diagram provides a fairly clear explanation of the components of creativity.