The Montclair State Experiment That Could Change How Every College Teaches Creative Thinking

For the first time in years, a student stopped in front of a tree on the Montclair State University campus in New Jersey and looked at it for several minutes. She observed the bark’s ridges, the way each leaf maintained its shape, and the snow-like pattern of seeds floating from branches. She then wrote about it. Not for a science project. Not for a class on art. For a course called Creative Thinking, which was taught concurrently by a professor of classics, a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher, none of whom completely agreed on what creativity was but all of whom thought it could be taught.

The course, which has been offered at Montclair State since 2012, started out as a direct reaction to an unsettling finding in American educational statistics. A seminal study conducted in 2010 found that children’s creative thinking test scores had been steadily declining for the previous twenty years. The results were quiet in the same way that some uncomfortable facts are often quiet; they were acknowledged, briefly mentioned, and then mainly ignored while academic institutions continued to teach in the same manner. Montclair State took a different approach. It created a course centered on the issue and asked a few genuinely unlikely partners to teach it together.

Professor of physics Ashuwin Vaidya, who led sessions in 2012 and 2014 and contributed to the curriculum’s development, talks about wanting students to think and ask questions independently rather than just absorb information. That seems simple until you consider how infrequently it occurs in a traditional lecture hall, where the room’s layout—rows of seats facing a single speaker—has been subtly arguing the same point about authority and knowledge transfer for 200 years. That architecture is upended by the Creative Thinking course. Professors and visiting artists are added to the curriculum. The next day, students sit in the same room as the artists and ask questions after attending rehearsals for performances by visiting choreographers. Liz Queler, a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, stopped by and talked about her process. In 2013, musician and performer Laurie Anderson shared her thoughts on creativity. These are not guest lectures added to an already-existing curriculum. They are the framework.

Mika Munakata, a math professor, asked students to draw parallels between math and a dance performance by the Brazilian group Companhia Urbana de Dança. Her goal was to help students see mathematics as a means of observing pattern, proportion, and movement in the world rather than as an end in and of itself. Kirk McDermid, a philosophy professor, describes creativity in terms of exploration, making it clear that this process is dangerous, prone to failure, and difficult to measure. Just this recognition distinguishes the course from the majority of university programs, where the grading system tends to subtly discourage the kind of unrestricted intellectual risk-taking that results in truly novel ideas.

Reading about this course and the faculty’s descriptions of their own teaching experiences gives me the impression that modeling is more crucial than actual instruction. By working with individuals who have different perspectives, venturing outside of their fields, and letting their students witness their uncertainty, the professors themselves are taking chances. In higher education, where expertise is frequently performed as confidence and admitting ignorance can feel costly from a professional standpoint, that is less common than it should be.

It is worthwhile to trace the intellectual lineage that runs beneath the course. Paul Baker, a 1950s educator and artist whose curriculum thinking was decades ahead of most current discussions about interdisciplinary learning, planted the seed. Furthermore, the link to Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children program at Montclair State College—where Australian philosopher Philip Cam received his training and went on to create inquiry-based teaching strategies that are currently employed in classrooms throughout several nations—indicates that Montclair has been quietly considering how to teach thinking for a longer period of time than the current discourse tends to recognize.

It’s still unclear if the Creative Thinking course can be replicated on a large scale or if it requires a certain mix of institutional support, willing faculty, and the unique creative energy that seems to congregate around programs that have found their purpose. The idea that a student who learns to view a tree through the simultaneous lenses of language, mathematics, dance, philosophy, and science has gained knowledge that no single discipline, taught in isolation, could have imparted seems more difficult to dispute.