Berenice “Bee” Bleedorn is, without doubt, one of the most remarkable people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I spent a couple of hours last Sunday meeting with Bleedorn and her Minnesota Creatives— a group of her former students and colleagues—discussing creativity.
I had written a short article, “Is it possible to teach creativity?” (second item; the longer, original article is also available (.pdf; 61KB)) for Emerging, the bi-annual magazine of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. Someone in Bleedorn’s network sent her a copy of the article and she contacted both Brad Hokanson, the subject of the article, and me.
The magic for Bleedorn turned out to be the fact that Hokanson uses Paul Torrance‘s 50-year-old scoring criteria for creative and divergent thinking in his undergraduate creative problem solving course. Turns out that Bleedorn is one of the planet’s most effective evangelists for Torrance’s work.
My academic background—both as an undergraduate and graduate as well as a short teaching stint—is in humanistic psychology. There was a natural connection with Torrance’s creativity work, and he visited our campus several times each year. Most of us—students and faculty—were quite familiar with the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (.ppt; 2.7MB). So I was intrigued when Hokanson mentioned using Torrance’s methodologies in his classwork.
Bleedorn, as it turns out, took only a single course with Torrance—when he was still at the University of Minnesota—but the two carried on a professional relationship until Torrance’s death in 2003. Torrance hired Bleedorn as a research assistant and she went on to obtain degrees in education and educational psychology from the University of Minnesota and a doctorate in leadership and human behavior from United States International University. Bleedorn founded the apparently now-defunct Institute for Creative Studies at the University of St. Thomas. She’s written extensively, most recently Education is Everybody’s Business: A Wake-Up Call to Advocates of Educational Change, published in 2005. Bleedorn is currently a principal with Creative Development Initiatives.
Bee Bleedorn is also 98 years old.
At the end of our meeting, Bleedorn—did I mention she’s 98 years old—asked me something along the lines of what my professional aspirations were. What I heard was, “what are you going to do with your life, sonny?” Horrifyingly, I didn’t have an answer.
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