What is creativity? Can it be developed? What role does confidence play in our creative ability at the moment of creating? Creativity is one of the characteristics of the human being, which is why it has been the subject of numerous studies.
In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson argued that conceptual metaphors are not mere embellishments of language, but structures that determine what we can think and, therefore, what we can imagine. We don’t just describe the world through metaphors; we also perceive, reason, and act through them. This approach is useful for analyzing how our understanding of creativity has changed over time.
At first, creativity was conceptualized through the prism of romantic mysticism: it was a “visit of the muses”, a “gift” exclusive to artistic geniuses (with a gender bias that, unfortunately, persists). Over the years, this elitist vision was replaced by other metaphors that attributed creativity to a “muscle” or a “skill” to be cultivated. This shift was due, in part, to the remarkable development of the scientific study of creativity. In 1950, J. P. Guilford gave an influential speech to the American Psychological Association, in which he denounced the scant attention given to the subject. Since then, work on creativity has grown significantly and has been approached from different angles, psychoanalytical, cognitive-psychological, computational, or sociocultural.
In recent years, much of this research has focused on understanding the role of creative confidence in our creative behavior (Karwowski and Barbot, 2016). From Bandura’s sociocognitive perspective, as cited in Karwowski and Barbot, human behavior is understood as the result of a continuous interaction between what we do, what we think and feel, and our surrounding context.
This socio-cognitive perspective is precisely the starting point from which Tierney and Farmer (2002) sought to explain creative behavior in the work context more than two decades ago. By delving deeper into the relationship between creativity and creative confidence, Tierney and Farmer opened up an area of research that has examined the processes underlying creative behavior. Shortly after, Beghetto (2006) extended this line to the educational field, exploring the antecedents and consequences of developing confidence in one’s creative capacity, which is called creative self-efficacy. At a time when creativity is considered a key issue in contemporary education, understanding the factors that influence students’ creative performance is essential for designing effective educational strategies.
Karwowski and Beghetto’s creative behavior model (2019) is based on the premise that greater confidence in one’s creativity increases creative agency, thereby increasing the likelihood that people will engage in creative behaviors. Such beliefs about one’s creativity, therefore, play a significant role in transforming potential into actual creativity. Together, creative behavior and creative trust are considered mutually reinforcing.
This mutually reinforcing relationship, however, does not arise in a vacuum, but is profoundly mediated by the cultural and social experiences accumulated by each student. From a sociocultural perspective, Glăveanu (2015) states that creativity is not a purely individual attribute, but a process distributed between the person, their connections, and the cultural resources available in their environment. In this sense, creativity develops, or is limited, depending on the context.
Some people begin their studies with more creative confidence due to the family environment in which they were raised, their greater willingness to explore and be stimulated, their greater inclination to adapt to new situations, or their participation in various stimulating experiences. The person who has grown up in an environment rich in stimuli, diverse interactions, and everyday creative practices will have internalized not only skills but also a creative identity. On the contrary, the absence of these experiences does not reflect an innate lack of creativity, but an inequality in access to the circumstances that nurture it and make it visible.
Education can be a way to address these inequalities.
The latest research has confirmed that creative self-efficacy, or students’ confidence in their creative abilities, is a variable sensitive to the educational context. The classroom is a space of symbolic mediation in which the student constructs their image through interactions with their peers, the teaching staff, and the proposed tasks (Vygotsky, 1978). When the educational environment offers opportunities to explore, make mistakes, and receive meaningful feedback, it is possible to develop a more positive perception of one’s abilities. From a sociocultural perspective, Glăveanu (2015) argues that creativity requires contextual possibilities for creative action. If the educational context offers diverse experiences, opens spaces for dialogue, and connects learning with real life, it expands students’ possibilities to act creatively and, in turn, to recognize themselves as creative people.
Therefore, the possibility of recognizing oneself as a creative person depends largely on interaction with the learning experience. Evidence indicates that creative identity correlates with student engagement, especially with reflective learning. Reflective learning serves as an awareness-raising mechanism: by examining their beliefs and evaluating problems from different perspectives, students not only exercise creative thinking but also gain evidence of their ability to do so, which strengthens their confidence.
That confidence in their creative ability is also nourished by participation in high-impact practices, such as service-learning programs, research projects with teaching staff, or international experiences. These results suggest that educational institutions have a real opportunity to influence students’ creative identity by implementing various strategies.
The development of these strategies would also serve to enhance students’ critical thinking, that is, the ability to question assumptions, explore implications, and sustain the discomfort of addressing complexity. Different studies have analyzed the relationship between critical and creative thinking. We know that this relationship is neither simple nor uniform, but we also know that working on the tendency to question one’s beliefs and seek new ideas can serve as a bridge between the two types of thinking. When the classroom reinforces the perception that students are capable of facing complex situations and looking for new ideas, it contributes to the mutual reinforcement of their creativity and criticality.
It is not enough, therefore, to carry out creative activities. It is necessary to cultivate a willingness to question and analyze before diving into creative work. In this sense, service-learning is particularly interesting, since exposure to social problems presents students with complex situations that require analysis, deliberation, and decision-making with real consequences. Cooperation also appears here as a factor that can expand students’ creative capacities through the exchange of perspectives and ideas.
Beyond the construction of learning experiences, other variables are relevant to the formation of students’ creative identity. Among them, cognitive reappraisal stands out: the ability to change the interpretation of situations or thoughts to regulate emotions and improve emotional well-being is associated with a higher creative self-concept, and perseverance in effort seems to predict who most often resorts to this strategy. Alongside these individual variables is the question of how creativity in classrooms is assessed, or not assessed. In recent years, approaches to evaluating creativity in educational contexts have expanded, in line with the growing international emphasis on identifying, cultivating, and assessing students’ creative potential. In fact, creativity is recognized by various international organizations as a key competence aligned with the general objective of equipping students with the skills they need to succeed in life and society. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), for example, has developed a framework for assessing creative thinking.
However, assessing creativity on a global scale with a single instrument entails risks from a sociocultural vision of creativity according to which creativity is not an individual and cognitive phenomenon, but a profoundly social, cultural, and distributed process, since these instruments can reduce creativity to variables such as problem-solving, ignoring cultural variation in what is considered original, and ending up homogenizing educational practices.
Beghetto and Van Geffen (2024) argue that there are at least two distinct approaches to assessing creativity in the classroom: evaluation of creativity and evaluating for creativity. The former generally has a summative approach and is often used by researchers and educators for comparative purposes. The second, on the other hand, has a more formative objective. It focuses on providing students and teachers with the opportunity to monitor and develop their creative potential through self-assessment and feedback. It represents a key educational aspect within the field of creativity assessment. If educational institutions incorporated frequent cycles of formative assessment of creativity, education systems would probably be better able to help students develop their confidence and creative competence.
In summary, different investigations have helped us to understand that in those educational contexts in which opportunities for creative work are offered, a safe emotional environment is created for experimentation, interactions are encouraged that promote the vision of problems from multiple perspectives, and supportive feedback from teaching staff can have a more positive impact on students’ creative confidence. Students in such learning environments are more motivated to devote time and effort to cultivating their creative potential, which, in turn, positively impacts their confidence.
But working on creative confidence cannot be separated from developing a critical understanding of what creativity means. It is not enough to believe that one is capable of creating, but it is also necessary to ask oneself why and under what conditions.
If at one time creativity was a “divine gift” reserved for a few people, and later a “muscle” that anyone could train, today it coexists with a new family of metaphors that deserve attention, understanding creativity as a resource, as capital, or as a competitive advantage. There is talk of creativity to “solve problems,” “respond to the challenges of the 21st century,” “improve employability,” and “manage uncertainty.” Creativity, in this framework, is produced, optimized, and monetized. Thus, it can cease to be an invitation to explore and become a demand for performance. Play, error, or reflection, which are precisely the places of creativity, are outside this framework.
Recognizing this does not mean rejecting creativity’s social and economic value, but remembering that this value does not exhaust its meaning. Education has a particular responsibility here: offering spaces where creativity can develop without constantly having to justify itself in terms of productivity, spaces where new metaphors emerge, depicting creating as a way of getting to know oneself, relating to the world, and imagining new possibilities and realities.
About the Author
Paula Álvarez-Huerta is a researcher at Mondragon Unibertsitatea. She also holds a PhD in Innovation and Educational Intervention from the same institution. After completing her degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Oviedo, she continued her academic and professional training in the United Kingdom. She holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Management and Sustainable Development from the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy at SOAS, University of London.
References
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