EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST WORKS TO LIBERATE CREATIVITY IN NEW BOOK

"People with vision are able to see the future as if it were here and now. They make the possibilities so real through their imagination that they can operate as easily on the elements as a child plays with toys on the floor."

-- From "Growing Open," a manuscript by Corliss McCallister, Ph.D., and J. Michael McCallister, Ph.D.

Vision and playfulness are only two of many attributes shared by people who think creatively, says Corliss McCallister.

An educational psychologist who teaches at Southeast, McCallister is about to leave on a two-month fellowship to work on "Growing Open," a self-help book about creativity.

The book she is writing with her husband Michael, the director of Sponsored Programs at the university, attempts to provide a neurophysiological understanding of how a creative brain might work, along with tools people can use to liberate their creativity -- no matter what their field.

Those who value logic above all else are the last to accept the value of creativity, McCallister says. "Because you can't measure it in some laboratory, they tend to discuss it as something warm and fuzzy."

Rather than case studies, which scientists tend to disregard anyway, the book contains "inventories" -- exercises that make people more aware of how they limit their creativity.

"When you begin to examine what you do and what other forces do to you, you become conscious of how things might be if you are open to the possibilities," McCallister says.

Thus the manuscript's title.

She herself was trained as an elementary teacher, and earned master's degrees in special education and theater. At one time she planned a career on the stage.

When she turned to psychology, her dissertation at Texas A&M University researched the neurochemistry of exceptional children.

She also is an exhibited visual artist.

Now McCallister has devised a system of looking at different levels of creativity. She calls them sight, revision, devision, envision and vision.

Each of these levels, she writes, is part of a continuum from the current and concrete to the abstract and conceptual -- "to that which cannot be experienced."

Children are naturally creative, says McCallister, the mother of 15 1/2-year-old Gillian and 9 1/2-year-old Grady.

Unfortunately, they soon learned that society in general views creative people as flaky and lazy. And that creative ideas, those that look at situations and problems in new ways, are distrusted.

"American education is the worst for always reinforcing the right answer," she says. "There are many right answers. Creative people look at all their options."

"...If we want to reinvent government and find a cure for AIDS, we have to find new choices. What this book does is de-program people."

As a psychologist, McCallister also prizes the therapeutic value of creativity in overcoming pain and tragedy. This manuscript itself was created out of the need to heal a personal tragedy: the experience of being kidnapped and assaulted.

A person unused to being creative can find no logical way to deal with a tragedy, she says. "The only way they can survive it is by being creative."

Or, as McCallister did, a creative person immerses herself in the creative endeavor. "They find ways of releasing the anger or energy by making something good come out of the negative experience," she said.

Creativity has been a trendy topic in recent years. "I'm trying to extend that into a serious intervention in American life," says McCallister, who is the recording secretary of the American Creativity Society.

Valuing and teaching creative thinking, which is the kind of change she envisions, meets resistance.

"When a society is challenged with so many changes -- the Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the Vietnam peace movement -- there are pressures on institutions and people. There are two ways to react: withdraw or be aggressive," she says.

Calls for a return to basics in education, for states' rights and the de-evolution of government are withdrawals, in her view.

"It's always easier to turn around and go home."

Going forward into the unknown is the essence of creativity, McCallister says.

"If we decided to allow individuals to be creative, our productivity and quality of life would be incredibly advanced," she predicts.

"I think we'd have a new Renaissance."