The present study will be concerned with the relationship between personal and social adjustment and creativity in a college population.

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The purpose of this thesis is to address the following research questions: 1) what is the current status of creativity research in a typical classroom, and 2) how does an instance of exemplary teaching serve to encourage creativity in a technology education setting? The first research question is focused on through a thorough review of published literature on creativity in order to frame the second research question. The second research question is addressed by understanding how Mr. Brad Thode, the technology teacher at Wood River Middle School in Hailey, Idaho, encourages his students to be creative. By investigating this one program, it will provide a greater understanding and deeper insight into how to promote creativity in students. Specifically, a phenomenological case study approach is used to investigate Mr. Thode and his nonlinear teaching style and to see how he fosters and promotes creativity in his classroom and among his students. Special attention is given to practices, methods, traits, etc. that have the potential to be replicated or modified for use in other classrooms. Findings are framed in the four generally accepted components of creativity: person, product, process, and press. Results indicate that creativity can be modeled and recommendations for promoting creativity in the classroom are outlined.

Thesis advisor: Michael G. Pratt / Persistence, continuing effort in the face of challenges over time, can have clear benefits for creativity. At the same time, abandonment, stopping effort toward a course of action, is often necessary to help creators move forward towards their best ideas. Creative workers, and the organizations that employ them, thus face a dilemma between forces for persistence and forces for abandonment in developing ideas and projects, what I refer to as the persistence dilemma. Existing theory provides some clues about this dilemma (e.g. theories of motivation or escalation of commitment), but a lack of holistic theorizing leaves many questions outstanding. Through a longitudinal qualitative study of four organizations, I set out to explore how creative workers managed the persistence dilemma. I found that the organizational context shaped how project teams responded to the dilemma. Teams within the startups I studied managed the dilemma with a process focused on commitment. Leaders helped team members transform the ambivalence that resulted from the dilemma into commitment to the organizations core project. Teams in the established organization, by contrast, managed the dilemma with a process focused on balance. The organization focused on balancing forces for abandonment and forces for persistence since both were perceived as necessary and beneficial in their own way. My work has implications for understanding the persistence dilemma, as well as for theories of creativity more generally. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Management and Organization.

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No / The Leverhulme Trust (UK), the Spanish Psycologists’ Association (Consejo Nacional de Colegios Oficiales de Psicólogos, COP-CV and COP’s Division on Work, Organizations and Personnel Psychology), the Valencian Government (Conselleria de Educación, Generalitat Valenciana), the University of Valencia and the European Association of Work, and Organizational Psychology (EAWOP) for their kind funding contributions

LAUNCH is a multi-organizational initiative led by NASA, Nike, USAID, and Department of State to seek and accelerate disruptive innovations to address intractable sustainability issues. The focus of this embedded case study is the evolution of the idea of LAUNCH through the lens of group practice. The empirical evidence includes detailed documentation of artifacts, group practice constructs, interaction and process maps for the five embedded cases, sentiment analysis of 25,000 email interactions, as well as a unique contribution of insights from a LAUNCH co-founder and participant-observer that were continually woven back into the conduct of LAUNCH group practice. The study looks at the conduct of group practice in a continual pull and tug across four construct continuums: tall-flat governance, expedite-explore deliberations, control-create idea generation, and electron-proton behaviors. Process maps of the group activities and artifacts demonstrate the continual tension along these continuums, which is supported by sentiment analysis of email interactions among group members. Plotted over time, sentiment analysis illustrates successive waves of positive and negative interactions during deliberation around development and implementation of ideas and processes. These findings are described using scientific metaphors from atomic physics and quantum mechanics. The behaviors of individuals within the LAUNCH core group resemble subatomic particle behaviors, while the group interactions sentiments resemble quantum theory wave behaviors, such as light waves. The quantum revolution resolved the scientific dilemma of wave and particle behaviors of matter and energy" which is much like the duality of the conduct and behavior of individuals and the interconnected interactions in group practice, and its effect on the rise and fall (wave) of ideas. The particle-wave duality in quantum theory sparked the big idea for a quantum theory of social dynamics, proposed in this study. The proposed theory applies to the conduct of group practice, behaviors exhibited by individuals and groups of individuals, and the generation of ideas evoked by disruption through social interactions. The proposed theoretical tenets may shed light on the broader understanding of the social dynamics embedded in group practice: 1) group practice is convened around and bound by a shared goal " the strong force; 2) individual actions influence the conduct of group practice in positive and negative ways; 3) individuals convened in group practice interact with one another through interconnected wave patterns of sentiment that affect the rise and fall of ideas; 4) individual behaviors and group interactions fluctuate in dynamic patterns of interference that disrupt the conduct of group practice; 5) individuals and groups of individuals mutually reinforce one another and amplify ideas with in-phase behaviors, while obstructing people and progress with out-of-phase behaviors; 6) disruptive thinking is a discomfort factor necessary for idea generation in a socially constructed world; and 7) creativity that arises in response to disruption can evoke idea-generation, new knowledge, and new ways of knowing. / Ph. D. / LAUNCH is a multi-organizational initiative led by NASA, Nike, USAID, and Department of State to seek and accelerate disruptive innovations to address intractable sustainability issues. This study looks at how tension and conflict generated by team collaboration can lead to innovative outcomes. The study maps individual and group interactions, processes, and products over a five-year period as the LAUNCH team conducted innovation events around the topics of water, health, energy, waste, and materials. The findings are described using scientific metaphors from atomic physics and quantum mechanics, which sparked the proposed quantum theory of social dynamics that applies to collaborative behaviors exhibited in teams, and creativity evoked by disruptive social interactions.

Examination of the underlying principles of creativity reveal theoretical aspects that have not been well explored in creativity facilitation software. Most significantly of these, there has been little investigation into exploiting the distinctions between early- and late-stage creative processes and the attendant differences in cognitive processing active at those times, nor into employing the structural scaffolding embedded within creative works and the manner in which these can be extracted and harnessed to define levels of abstraction through which the material can be viewed and manipulated. The Wheelsong project was conceived to exploit these principles, in the service of devising more creatively facilitative music composition tools, by focusing on these earlier, exploratory stages of the creative process, and by privileging structure over minutiae, in alignment with the mode of cognition (and corresponding user needs) that dominate the exploratory phase. Explorations conducted with Wheelsong demonstrate that the platform embraces broad stylistic and cultural ranges of output. Experiments comparing the creative merits of early-stage, fragmentary outputs produced by Wheelsong against those produced by traditional representation schemes show a substantial improvement in both subjective quality and diversity indicators adhering to the structurally produced candidates, as measured by human judges.

Examination of the underlying principles of creativity reveal theoretical aspects that have not been well explored in creativity facilitation software. Most significantly of these, there has been little investigation into exploiting the distinctions between early- and late-stage creative processes and the attendant differences in cognitive processing active at those times, nor into employing the structural scaffolding embedded within creative works and the manner in which these can be extracted and harnessed to define levels of abstraction through which the material can be viewed and manipulated. The Wheelsong project was conceived to exploit these principles, in the service of devising more creatively facilitative music composition tools, by focusing on these earlier, exploratory stages of the creative process, and by privileging structure over minutiae, in alignment with the mode of cognition (and corresponding user needs) that dominate the exploratory phase. Explorations conducted with Wheelsong demonstrate that the platform embraces broad stylistic and cultural ranges of output. Experiments comparing the creative merits of early-stage, fragmentary outputs produced by Wheelsong against those produced by traditional representation schemes show a substantial improvement in both subjective quality and diversity indicators adhering to the structurally produced candidates, as measured by human judges.