The Missing Alphabet: A Parents' Guide to Developing Creative Thinking in Kids

By Susan Marcus, Susie Monday and Cynthia Herbert

Austin, TX

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Oct 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781608323791

Book preview

AUTHORS

Introduction

Nothing’s stable in the world. Uproar’s your only music.

—Keats

There are no passengers on spaceship earth—only crew.

—Buckminster Fuller

Now that we’re into the second decade of the twenty-first century here on spaceship earth, this is the big picture. Change is constant and seismic on all fronts—from the weather to the economy, from food supplies to cyber attacks, from institutional meltdowns to global shifts in policies, politics, and power. On the other hand, new kinds of collaborations are leading to thrilling discoveries and inventions in many fields. It seems there is much to look forward to.

Still, assailed on all sides by such deep and relentless change, parents are rightly worried about how their children will cope with the uncertain future. Parents are caught between calls for action and conflicting messages of what to do, between hopeful new models and discouraging entrenched realities. To be sure, it’s a curious time on planet earth right now.

What we do know is that this scale of change, largely driven by technology, is unprecedented in human history. And it is the change itself, this reordering, this inventing of the new world that will occupy our children’s future. We are entering a time that calls for dedicated innovation across the board. This call will echo through all fields; in fact, it has already started. The child’s counterpart to innovation is creative thinking, and creativity is our children’s next essential literacy.

The subject of creativity, unfortunately, comes embedded with many out-of-date notions. It is often linked exclusively to the arts, or their first cousin, crafts—and then marginalized in favor of science and math, not seen as worthy enough to take up children’s time in school. Ironically, while creativity is seen as a silver bullet to many future challenges, children’s creative thinking skills are largely undervalued.

In the last decade, creativity has become the darling of the business world as it wrestles with the realities of the ever-changing waves of technology. Adult education has seen a surge of courses in various forms of creative thinking, and a best-selling collection of books has emerged as business leaders recognize the power of creative thinking to enable people to effect needed change and innovation.

Many parents, who are also business people, notice and worry over the disconnect between their business world and their child’s school culture, which is most often still linear, abstract, and expository. This book is written to connect the dots between the innovation we need for the future and the creative thinking and working skills that we can give our kids now.

When the goal is to create a literacy in creativity, there is much that can be learned and taught. What was once a mysterious territory that belonged to artists or those who were lucky to have been born talented, has given way to a great deal of exploration and excavation in the past few decades. Now is the time, we believe, to make the case for creativity as part of basic education for all children. To this end, we will report on some of the persuasive findings that have been brought to light in recent years in the fields of cognition, metacognition, psychology, and neuroscience. This converging evidence supports the power of creative thinking to equip children to get in the game of making the future

Will the institution of education deliver the next literacy? Will it be added to the traditional three Rs as a new basic for the new times? We don’t know. Most of the conversation about education at this point still focuses on the how part of school—the mechanics of how we move students through the system, how we hire, fire, and pay teachers, how we test kids. Missing is the what part of education—what thinking skills and content will best equip our children to be twenty-first-century creators and inventors. Although there are some hopeful initiatives such as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and programmatic models like Project-Based Learning and Challenge-Based Learning, widespread acceptance of creativity as a mainstream goal could be precious decades away. This is a deeply frustrating fact of life for parents whose own child’s most potent learning years are quickly slipping away. These skills may well be up to parents to teach.

Creative potential is our human heritage. Every child begins life with a natural curiosity, an innate desire to learn, and an infinite potential for creative thinking and action. The ability to analyze and solve problems, to imagine and create, to explore new viewpoints and to operate in new modes of thinking and behaving is basic to us all. We all have this creative potential.

In addition, each of us has a unique set of creative strengths, with a very personal way of thinking and working that remains consistent over time and across media. This individual potential can flower most fully when it is operating with the resources that best fit each unique imagination. We believe that the greatest contributions and the deepest personal satisfaction will spring from the exercise of this creative potential.

This book is designed to help parents put their children on a path to real creative literacy—in the context of everyday life—with fun and play at the heart of the action. It is a handbook on creative thinking, a kind of Creativity 101 for parents who want their children to be able to cope and thrive in the kaleidoscopic landscape of change we live in.

The following describes the basic organization of this book.

Part 1 begins by addressing the what and the why of creative thinking—calling attention to the part of the national conversation about education that isn’t often being heard: the creative thinking skills for our children that common sense tells us we need to focus on now. What this means is we begin with our goals in mind: We want our children to be able to act creatively, to see each experience as an opportunity for invention, to be skilled at giving form to their ideas, and to have many options for communicating their ideas to other people. When our children grapple with problems, we want to see them generate not one but dozens of possible solutions. We want them to have the abilities, experience, and confidence to work from their unique constellation of strengths. We want them to know the deep satisfaction of giving their best gifts to the world. What better mental tools could we want for our kids—and for our collective future?

In part 2 we will dive into the two key concepts that make up our approach to basic creative literacy. First, we introduce the Sensory Alphabet, the building blocks for the thinking skills associated with visual, aural, and kinetic ways of learning and knowing. This alphabet, now largely missing from our cultural awareness, is just as fundamental as the ABCs and numbers—and just as powerful. It is another symbol system you will want your children to know for expressing their ideas, innovating, creating, understanding the world around them, and even understanding themselves as thinkers and learners. The Sensory Alphabet is the foundation for creative literacy.

The second key concept is individual creative potential. Children will need to know early on what they are good at and where their natural fluencies are. Brain research and studies of multiple intelligences support the idea that we all think and learn differently and that we think and learn best when we take our brain’s most natural path. It is important to bring this knowing front and center now, because soon problem solving and creative work will happen most often in teams. The complex and systemic problems of the adult world need a collaborative approach. This way of thinking and working will require individuals to know what they bring to the table, what areas they are particularly creative with, and what they can do best. This is no longer an issue that can be put off until after schooling. A child’s unique brand of imagination is often correctly intuited by parents, and they are in the best position to identify these qualities early on and to provide media, materials, and experiences to feed their child’s creative potential. We’ll show you how.

In part 3, we’ll show you how to put these concepts to work in the context of everyday life. Loaded with practical advice and enriching activities, this section of the book will comprise a resource that you will want to return to again and again as you plan your child’s everyday experiences.

This part of the book is developed in four sections. In the first we explore the creative process—a way of thinking and a method of working long known by artists and scientists, choreographers and chefs, coaches and poets, just to name a few. And we will use this process as a guide for ways of interacting with children and structuring open-ended activities that will feed young imaginations and bring out unique creative responses.

In the second section we revisit the Sensory Alphabet, presenting a field guide for exploring each of its nine elements—line, rhythm, space, movement, texture, color, shape, light, and sound—in its various natural habitats in the everyday world. The zoo, museum, and even just the backyard make fertile hunting grounds and ensure that your child playfully and thoughtfully encounters this enriching alphabet.

The next section will help you identify your child’s unique brand of creativity from several different vantage points. Using the Sensory Alphabet as a lens to review several case studies documented here, you will see how an individual child’s strengths shine. Ideas for making observations, asking questions, and taking inventories give you resources to begin to characterize your child’s distinct set of creative strengths.

The final section is about putting it all together—how to manage for creativity in the ongoing context of everyday life. Here we take the 30,000-foot view and reflect on the elements we have available to support a child’s creative growth in the midst of the bustle of the everyday. These are resources we all share: time, materials, people, spaces, and interactions.

This book is designed to inform and engage parents. After all, parents are a child’s first teachers. Parents teach language, including the traditional alphabet and numbers—how to be a friend, how to approach problems, what’s important and what’s not, the manners, mores, and other rules about how our culture works—the list goes on and on. Parents create (although not always consciously) the blueprint of values, habits, and attitudes their children live by. Children get their first indelible impressions of themselves through their parents’ eyes. And so, as parents, we must recognize that it’s time to enlarge our own sense of what is important now, what is to be valued and practiced, and what should be carried forward by the next generation.

It is the authors’ aim as parents (and now grandparents), educators, and researchers to share the fruits of our experience with the next generation of parents. This book has grown out of decades of applied research with children, examining creativity, media, cognition, and individuality. Our work began at the Learning About Learning Educational Foundation, a future-oriented research and development institution in Texas.

Over the years, as colleagues, we worked with children, parents, teachers, schools, and educators of all kinds; created programs and materials for local, national, and global markets; and ran an influential laboratory school. We continue to work in educational settings, with schools, with after-school programs, and in museum education.

In all our years of working together, our inquiries have been based on the assumption that each child, each individual person, has abundant, powerful, and unique resources—that all of us have infinite creative potential—and that we are all mutually dependent on one another’s creativity and productivity.

These beliefs and concerns have not changed—and we don’t expect they will.

Susan Marcus

Susie Monday

Cynthia Herbert

Part 1

The WHAT and

Reviews for The Missing Alphabet

[suziannabean · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good information, very dry.

[ellsbethb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The parents in my daughter's preschool were asked to read this. At first, I found myself annoyed at the explanations of the importance of creativity. Then I realized I was reading it as an educator who had background on the topic and familiarity with the research presented. I didn't need convincing that kids need to play and that creativity is something that can be taught. When I stopped being an ed snob and started to read it more as a parent, it was a better book. I most appreciated the sections that gave specific actions you can take with your own kids. This is a worthwhile book if you are looking to expand your child's perspective beyond the worlds of math and reading. I also enjoy the shift in perspective the book gave me as a parent.