Torrance Journal for Applied Creativity

Creative Thinking and Its Development in the
Studio Art Classroom
by Linda M. Speranza
As a visual arts instructor, I strive to meet two goals: to provide my students
with the skills they are seeking in my classes and to help them learn to think
more creatively. By learning to think more creatively, it is my hope that they will
become better equipped to adapt to the wide range of challenges they will encounter
throughout their lives.
In the general population, I suspect that most people believe that art classes
are designed to develop students’ creative skills; but in the art world, that assumption
is not largely accepted. Rather, it is commonly believed that
• each student comes into art classes with his or her own
inherent level of creativity and
• art instructors are there to teach students the specific skills
they will need to demonstrate that creativity.
The five strengths are:
• fluency (number of responses),
• resistance to premature closure (ability
to resist the first solution and seek
out alternatives),
• originality (uniqueness of responses),
• elaboration (refinement of responses),
and
• abstractness titles (or ability to verbalize
abstract ideas).
At a university, acceptance into an art program is tied to a favorable review
of a student’s portfolio; stated another way, the portfolio review process weeds out
students who do not already exhibit creativity. In contrast, students in a community
college art program that has no portfolio review enter with varied sets of abilities
and desires. Most of the students who participated in this survey have hopes of
pursuing a career in art; others, including many retirees, seek to fulfill a life-long
dream of mastering an art medium. Still others simply want to convey their ideas
in a given medium with no clear understanding of where they want to take the
skills they are developing. The art department where I teach can point to many
success stories among all of these students.
The study of creativity that I have undertaken documents creative growth
among students in the entry-level art classes at Mesa (Arizona) Community College
(MCC). With some 14,000 students, including approximately 1,700 students
who enroll in art classes each semester, MCC is the largest college in the Maricopa
County Community College District (MCCCD). Since MCC is an open enrollment
college whose students self-select into the art curriculum, our nine full-time
and 16 part-time faculty members teach students whose sets of skills and abilities
vary from weak to strong. During a year-long fellowship that I was granted by
MCCCD in 2004, I began studying creativity to document the growth of creative
thought in MCC art students as they learned how to develop, plan, and create a
piece of art.
After exploring creativity and creativity testing instruments, I chose to
use the Torrance Test of Creative Strengths (TTCT) as my determinant of creative
growth. The TTCT is a divergent thinking (DT) test that Runco and Acar (2012)
identify as one of four types of creativity tests, and it tests for 5 creative strengths.
Creativity researchers argue
about whether DT testing actually
assesses creativity or the potential for
creativity. As Runco and Acar (2012)
have noted,
There is great value in the concept of
divergent thinking. Much of the research
focuses on DT tests, and their reliability
and validity, but additional research
tells us more broadly how DT is various
social and psychological factors (e.g., IQ,
personality, family background) and how
it is associated with problem solving,
ideation, and creative potential. Ideas
are useful in many aspects of our lives,
and the research on divergent thinking
remains useful for understanding
the quality of ideas and the processes
involved. (p. 73).
In a discussion of whether the
TTCT tests creativity or potential, an
associate at a Science of Teaching and
Learning (SoTL) conference remarked,
“Well call it what you may, [the TTCT’s
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