Exploring Portrayals of Creativity Sponsors in Contemporary Children’s Literature

By Katie Caprino, Elizabethtown College

One of the reasons I became a teacher was because it was a profession in which I thought I could be creative. A writer, I wanted a position in which I could carry on my passion of writing and inspire student writers.

Reflecting back on my work as a middle and high school English teacher, I lament the limitations I feel were put on my work as a creative person. Even my current role as a literacy teacher educator seems overwhelmed at times by elements which I feel are the absolute antithesis to creativity.

My opportunity to teach the creative methods course at my institution gave me a space to engage with creativity and to help future teachers think critically about what creativity looks like in the classroom and inspire them to be creative teachers. Inspired by Brandt’s (1998) work on literacy sponsors, I believe that teachers, students’ peers, and even students themselves play an important role in being creativity sponsors.
​
In this blog post, I share a few contemporary books that provide portrayals of creativity sponsors, framing my work in the context of research on creativity. I then provide teachers with some ideas on how to use contemporary children’s literature texts as inspiration to facilitate a creative classroom.

​The Books

​One Time. Creech’s (2001) Love That Dog has been a mentor text for many of my students’ poetry writing. My sixth graders and my preservice teachers laugh at the same parts of this ode to poetry and write beautiful pieces inspired by the poems referenced in the text. It should not be surprising that I was so excited to read Sharon Creech’s (2020) latest middle grades book One Time. Readers are introduced to Gine Filomena, who is an imaginative eleven-year old.

Gina has always had her dad to cultivate her creativity, but she really blooms when Antonio, her creative and somewhat mysterious neighbor joins her class, which is taught by the new and creative teacher Miss Lightstone. Miss Lightstone tries out methods unheard of with the last teacher: time to write, inspiration boards, wordplay, and provocative questions on the board like Who are you? The other students in the class are a bit slower to adopt Miss Lightstone’s methods of giving them choice and few boundaries. They want to know how they will be graded. And exactly what to do. There is mystery and intrigue, and not everything makes complete sense to the characters in or the readers of One Time, but one thing is clear: Gina will always remember her creativity sponsor: Miss Lightstone.
​
This is a powerful book that touches upon issues of creativity and, more broadly, what our schools have become. It is a book that would make a wonderful read-aloud to younger students, a fabulous read at the middle grades level, and a powerful read for preservice teachers.

Ish. I have come to love the work of Peter H. Reynolds. As part of my work on this project, I came across his 2004 children’s picture book Ish. This book introduces readers to Ramon, a boy who loves to draw. However, when his brother Leon ridicules him, he gives up. That is, until his sister Marisol brings him into her room full of all of his previous drawings. Marisol helps him understand an important lesson: that the process not the product matters (Resnick, 2018). His sister’s creativity sponsorship motivates him to think differently about his art and writing.

In the Draw-ish video embedded below, Peter Reynolds takes viewers to a creating adventure by starting with a single dot.

What Ish helps young children and adults realize is that it only takes one person to inspire an artist. When I use this children’s picture book in my creative methods course, I want to ask my students: Do you want to be more like Leon or Marisol in your classroom?
You can also read more about Peter Reynolds’s Animation-ish, a web-based animation program. ​

What If. Writer Samantha Berger and illustrator Mike Curato teamed up to create a wonderful children’s picture book about a little girl’s ingenuity. Letting nothing stop her, she is committed to always creating, even when it means figuring out exactly what materials will help her reach her goal. The beauty of this book is not only in its storyline but also in its creative composition. The mixed-media illustrations give texture to a book that embodies creativity. 
​
A perfect read-aloud title, What If is a creativity sponsor on its own, but I believe younger children will really be motivated by seeing a young girl, with no adult intervention, be creative on her own. The little girl does not have a creativity sponsor; she is capable of being her own. Her resourcefulness is inspiring. The story begins with her writing a story and then imagining if the pencil broke and how she would still create stories. She then shares how she would fold the paper to create stories and then chisel the table and carve the chair when she ran out of paper. And on and on.

We want thinkers like this protagonist in our classroom, in our world. We want young children who can create on their own, perhaps with some scaffolds yes, as Resnick (2018) writes in his book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Passion, Projects, Peers, and Play and as Miss Lightstone realizes in Creech’s (2020) One Time, but we want them to have the resilience and confidence to do some of the creative lifting themselves.

Resnick (2018) emphasizes the importance of having students engage in the creative learning spiral, a process by which students imagine, create, play, share, and reflect. What if helps young readers see the power of the first three tenets. Teachers and parents would be smart to organize classrooms that facilitate the creative opportunities the story’s lead creative character has.

In this video, Resnick discusses how to help kids become creative thinkers.

On a Magical Do-Nothing Day. One thing I have noticed during the time of COVID was that the people who told me they were bored the least were people whom I would characterize as having hobbies and being readers. Now certainly, I have not validated my hunch through systematic study, but I do wonder if creativity has served some as a type of buffer to the challenges of this unprecedented time for some people. It’s almost as if we have had almost a half of year of what Beatrice Alemagna’s (2016) character in On a Magical Do-Nothing Day experiences.

A young child laments coming to a cabin with their mother. Wanting to only play an electronic game, the child’s mom takes the game away. Of course, the child finds it and heads outside into what is a miserably rainy day - made more miserable when the game is lost. But what the loss of the game allows is for the child to see the world in a new way. This book is less about a young child creating creative products, like in What If, but it is a book about opening oneself up to notice things in different ways. And this is something play allows.
​
Emphasizing the importance of play to the creative process, Resnick (2018) discusses how pivotal it is that we allow students to play. The premise of his entire book, indeed, is that all grades should be more like kindergarten used to be, not overwhelmed with curriculum standards and coverage, but with opportunities for students to engage in his 4Ps: projects, passion, peers, and play. Because these, he claims, open up creativity’s doors.

Now What?

Certainly, adding the titles shared above to your classroom library is a good start. Sharing these books with students in a way that invites them to discuss what they think creativity is, whether they are creative, and how their schooling experiences have encouraged or restricted creativity could be the next step.

And then I call for a little self-reflection. Are you, as a teacher, more like Leon or Marisol in Ish? How might you be more of a Miss Lightstone from One Time? When you think about your students, do they take risks like the little girl in What If? Or do they ask so many questions about how assignments will be graded and what you want like Gina’s classmates in One Time? Do your students know what to do with some free time like the little child in On A Magical Do-Nothing Day?

These reflections might prompt you to think about how you might use one of the books shared in this post as a mentor text for a lesson idea. Here are some ideas!

      ● Let your students freewrite, working up to longer periods of time, and share their work. (One Time)
     ● Provide students with an object and ask them what they would do if that object broke in order to complete an intended
         task. (What If)
      ● Offer spaces in your classroom where your students can explore and play. (On a Magical Do-Nothing Day)
      ● Invite your students to draw a picture, and post everyone’s picture in a gallery. (Ish)

It is important to think about how important creativity sponsors are in a child’s life. Teachers can be creativity sponsors, but so, too, can peers and children themselves – if we let them! It is my hope that these book recommendations, along with the reflective prompts and lesson ideas, may inspire creativity in you and your students!

Books Referenced

Alemagna, B. (2016). On a magical do-nothing day. New York: HarperCollins.

Berger, S. (2018). What if. New York: Hachette Book Group.

Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. College Composition and Communication, 49(2), 165- 185.

Creech, S. (2020). One time. New York: HarperCollins.

Creech, S. (2001). Love that dog. New York: HarperCollins.

Resnick, M. (2018). Lifelong kindergarten: Cultivating creativity through projects, passion, peers, and play. Cambridge,
​          MA: MIT Press.

Reynolds, P. (2004). Ish. Somerville, MA: Candlewick.

Kathryn Caprino is a CLA member and is an Assistant Professor of PK-12 New Literacies at Elizabethtown College. You can follow her on Twitter @KcapLiteracy. She blogs frequently at Katie Reviews Books.