Camilla Hopkinson
1
Dance Making 12/16/13 Portfolio Introduction Reflections
Howard Gardner concludes his book, Creating Minds by saying that, “…human beings may be condemned to oscillate back and forth between periods of innovation and tradition, between modernism and historicism” (376). Rather than a condemnation I believe that the ability to look forward and backward with the mindfulness to be in the present is never easy but it is a powerful thing. After all, Jack Mezirow writes that, “Learning is understood as the process of using a prior interpretation to construe the new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one's experience as a guide to future action” (5). So I would like to use this introduction as an opportunity to think through the medium of writing to reflect on some of what I have learned this semester. Thinking about Gardner’s book as a whole, one component that he omitted from his case studies that could be of interest is whether any of the creators made their creative achievements under pressure. Gardner does not make any mention of deadlines pressing the creators to finish their work; instead these creative geniuses seemed to take their time developing their masterpieces. In fact, they all fit into a pattern of spending ten years building up to their best work, which Gardner calls the ten-year rule (345). But within those ten-year periods, were there no last minute panics that led to either planned or unexpected achievements? As a student with frequent due dates—which do not generally allow for long-term, conceptual development—this aspect of how the formidable creative thinkers executed their work interests me. Jonathan Burrows writes that forced concentration on work is often wrong