Chapters authored
Dare to be Disruptive! The Social Stigma toward Creativity in Higher Education and a Proposed Antidote
Despite the fact that creativity has been named one of the top-10 skills necessary for success in the twenty-first century, the current educational system in the developed world stifles creativity through its focus on convergent thinking and standardized testing. We propose that a stigma toward creativity exists among educators, which prevents successful implementation of creative teaching and fostering creativity within the classroom. The proposed root cause of the stigma toward creativity in education – that creativity is perceived as disruptive – is examined through the lens of the Adaptor-Innovator theory of creativity and the implicit and explicit theories of creativity, as well as the psychological factors inherent to the social construction of stigma. Seminal and current research in the fields of creativity studies and communication studies offer insight into this phenomenon. The chapter concludes by proposing an antidote to address and fight this stigma as seen through the lens of Fishbein and Ajzen’s Theory of Reasoned Action.
Part of the book: Creativity