Innovation in Educational Research

A recent podcast titled "Hallelujah," part of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History series, had as its focus "... the role that time and iteration play in the production of genius, and how some of the most memorable works of art had modest and undistinguished births" (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/07-hallelujah). A particularly intriguing aspect of this podcast was its exploration of how it is that creative ideas are generated and undergo change, and how and when in this process the artist realizes that (s)he may have "gotten it right." In the podcast, Gladwell uses economist David Galenson's ideas about the different ways that innovative contributions occur by focusing, as Galenson did, on the work of Picasso and Cezanne (Galenson, 2010, 2011). These equally brilliant artists had very different ways of working, and very different assessments of the degree to which they felt that they had met their artistic goals. (For more on this, listen to the interview with John Elderfield, former Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, in the same podcast.) Galenson calls Picasso a Conceptual Innovator, someone who spent a great deal of time before ever laying brush to canvas clarifying what it was he wanted to express, articulating it in all its dimensions, carrying out few studies within a relatively short period of time, and then spending relatively little time actually executing the major work itself. By the time he got to the actual painting, he knew with certainty what he wanted. In contrast, Galenson called the equally brilliant artist Paul Cezanne, who had an enormous impact on Picasso (Trachtman, 2003), an Experimental Innovator. Cezanne often completed many studies, several of which in a particular series appeared more finished than others, and only after multiple and varying efforts did he complete a full work which he treated as "righter" than its predecessors. Cezanne's work process yielded incremental versions (and visions), but each was assessed as somehow incomplete, as he puzzled--sometimes painfully--over how best to express himself artistically. Unlike Picasso, Cezanne rarely had a pre-conceived notion of a work when he began, and he attempted to sort out his intent and goals by actually painting. And he never was certain when or if he was finished. Galenson has also provided examples of conceptual and experimental innovation in other disciplines, including those as diverse as poetry (Galenson, 2005) and science (Galenson & Pope, 2013). In his podcast, Gladwell provides at some length examples of these distinct approaches that Galenson has described in the area of musical composition, with Leonard Cohen's 5-year struggle with his song Hallelujah as a distinct example of experimental innovation. Characterizing the work of Picasso and Cezanne as two extremes on a continuum is used effectively by Gladwell and Galenson to illustrate differences, yet it would be naive to accept these differences as absolute. Certainly Picasso experimented albeit in a more abstract and economic fashion (not on canvas) while Cezanne could not have produced as he did without conceptualizing what he wanted even if such conceptualizations changed with different iterations along the way. Another way of thinking about the way human beings approach tasks is presented by Kahneman (2011) in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, where he describes two systems by which the brain forms thoughts. System 1 is characterized by thinking that is fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, and subconscious, and System 2 is characterized by thinking that is slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, and conscious. As with our previous examples, these extremes are illustrative; human beings are capable of using both ways of thinking depending upon individual and contextual demands. We find these examples useful in thinking about scholarly engagement and innovation in teaching and learning, and in education more generally. …