Our Common Humanity

Abstract

At a time when common ground and common cause are hard to find, and an air of whining and grievance permeates the airwaves and the Internet, this issue of Creative Nursing on Cognitive Creativity celebrates the life of the mind that characterizes our humanity and has the potential to knit us together: our drive to create.In "Creativity at the Opening of the 21st Century," our guest editors Alfonso Montuori and Gabrielle Donnelly of the California Institute of Integral Studies report that "creativity research now includes a strong emerging focus on everyday creativity, increasingly seen as a phenomenon that permeates every dimension of life, with increasing recognition of group and collaborative creativity." Creativity is paradoxical, requiring "both order and disorder, rigor and imagination, hard work and play, idea generation and idea selection, times of introspection and solitude and times of interaction and exchange.""Thinking at the level of paradox requires the integration of creative thinking for the production of ideas and critical thinking for decisions on choices and priorities." This wisdom is from Dr. Berenice Bleedorn, a scholar who was an important influence on nurse entrepreneur Marie Manthey, the developer of the Primary Nursing care delivery model. In a conversation with nursing professor Lori Steffen, Manthey describes how her understanding of creativity has been transformed.The new paradigm of the everydayness of creativity is acknowledged by Professors Javier Corbalan, Pilar Almansa, Olivia Lopez-Martinez, and Rosa M. Liminana-Gras, from the University of Murcia in Spain, who studied thinking styles and creativity preferences among nursing students and practicing nurses. These authors state that "creativity, like intelligence, is something that everyone has to a greater or lesser extent, and thus is not a fixed characteristic but rather a talent that people can develop."The concept of transdisciplinarity as the future of creativity is explored in two ways. First, University of Minnesota nursing professor Teddie Potter presents the history of transdisciplinarity, stating that rather than "a new approach to knowledge acquisition . . . it actually is a return to humanity's roots. At the beginning of human history, science, spirituality, and culture were inseparable." She then presents reflections from master of nursing students she teaches (these students already have baccalaureate degrees in other fields), on their personal professional trajectories, examining ways in which their past will inform their future.Then nursing professor Carey Clark advocates for a transdisciplinary approach, which "takes into account our values, ethics, and the embodied lived experience within our area of concern or profession," to address the resistance to needed transformation in nursing academia "which has created obstacles to revising pedagogical processes, resulting in ongoing difficulties in creating change in the practice setting."Patricia Freed, professor of psychiatric nursing at St. Louis University, shares Clark's concern for the priorities in academic nursing today. In her review of See Me as a Person: Creating Therapeutic Relationships With Patients and Their Families, by Mary Koloroutis and Michael Trout, Freed identifies the "growing need to promote formation of student's professional identity rather than to merely socialize students or help them take on nursing roles while we educators evaluate their performance." She describes nursing educators' choice of course materials as "serious business, as it provides the foundation for what student nurses are expected to learn and use in their future practice as well as a profound influence on the development of students' identity. …