Future Teachers’ Implicit Ideas on Creativity: Visual Stimuli for Idea-Generation Activities

Despite the studies on creativity since the 1950s have widely suggested that creativity can be developed through training programs, it seems to remain the idea that creative performances are linked to endowments of the individual and that they cannot be subject to educational action [1, 2]. On the other hand, some research points out that the scarcity of activities that stimulate the generation of new ideas is at the basis of the lack of creativity in the classroom [3]. Teachers’ implicit ideas of about creativity are therefore central for the promotion of idea-generation activities in the classroom. This contribution investigated the implicit ideas on creativity of 150 university students in training to become future teachers. Personal beliefs on what defines a product and a process as creative were investigated, together with ideas on the potential of a visual stimulus (a picture of unstructured material) as a generator of new ideas in school context. In our results, some of the stereotypes that characterize naive conceptions of creativity in literature emerged: terms linked to the semantic area of freedom, spontaneity, art, etc. In line with this view, students’ interpretation of the visual stimulus focused on those characteristics that made the image similar to commonly used objects. Although many teachers recognize the importance of creativity as an educational goal, their implicit conceptions may interfere with their ability to grasp the potential of some stimuli in generating new and useful ideas [4, 5].