Profiling Scholars of Creativity: Practicing the Process with Dr. Michele Root-Bernstein

Excerpt

There’s a problem with the term creativity… it’s got all these preconceived notions, and prejudices and wishful thinking attached to it… we’re trying to understand this huge ball of stuff — Michele Root-Bernstein (personal communication).

Playing with distinctions, boundaries, unassailable truths, and the limits of utility is, in fact, what many of the most innovative people in all disciplines do — Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein in Sparks of Genius (1999, p. 255).

Over the past few years, we (the Deep-Play Research Group) have been writing an ongoing series under the broad rubric of “Rethinking Technology and Creativity in the 21st Century.” We have covered a lot of ground in these articles, around issues related to defining and measuring creativity, teaching creatively with technology and transdisciplinary thinking. We begin a new phase for with this article. Each article for the foreseeable future will focus on interviews with renowned scholars of creativity. Our goal is to make the work of these scholars more accessible and to connect their work to the themes that underlie this series. We begin these conversations with independent scholar and writer Dr. Michele Root-Bernstein.