Although we consider creativity and critical thinking two of the most important skills today, children often have limited opportunities to flex their creative muscles. Parents and teachers need to encourage creative children to find at least one outlet, along with venues and audiences to showcase their work. With summer on the way, now is the right time for parents and teachers to help gifted children look for ways to expand their creative horizons.
The International Torrance Legacy Creativity Awards competition is one way gifted children ages from ages eight to eighteen can nurture their inventiveness in the areas of writing, visual arts, musical composition, and inventions. Judged by professionals in those fields, the competition (now in its eighth year) has grown to include original submissions from hundreds of students around the world, including Australia, Bahrain, China, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States.
The awards honor the fundamental contributions of psychologist E. Paul Torrance (1915–2003), who devoted his life to examining correlations between intelligence and creativity. Throughout his career, Torrance wrote over 1,500 books and articles and enabled thousands of young people around the world to realize their potential. He described the talents and abilities of gifted children in a manifesto with which many authors, artists, musicians, and inventors will identify:
Manifesto for Children
Don't be afraid to fall in love with something and pursue it with intensity. Know, understand, take pride in, practice, develop, exploit, and enjoy your greatest strengths. Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others and to walk away from the games they impose on you. Free yourself to play your own game. Find a great teacher or mentor who will help you. Learn the skills of interdependence. Don't waste energy trying to be well rounded. Do what you love and can do well.
Students who respond to this invitation and use it as a catalyst to create new work in the fields they love exemplify the spirit of the manifesto.
Each year, the Torrance awards provide themes to act as a supportive structure for students’ work. The 2016 themes are:
- The Honor and the Glory
- A Grateful Heart
- What a Mystery!
- Couldn’t Help Laughing
- Journey to Forever
- A Reluctant Adventure
- Who Would’ve Thought
- Exploring a New Universe
Students are encouraged to submit a poem, short story, painting, collage, print, photograph, sculpture, musical composition, or invention to reflect one or more of these themes. For entry details, click here. The deadline for submissions is August 20, 2016.
The vision of E. Paul Torrance continues to gain meaning as we grow in our understanding of creativity. Parents and teachers should encourage their students to participate in the awards, as well as other competitions like the Future Problem Solving Program International, Odyssey of the Mind, Destination Imagination, and domain-specific events.
These venues give our gifted children a vision of what is possible for their lives and how they can contribute to the world in creative ways.
Joan Franklin Smutny is the director of the Center for Gifted and Midwest Torrance Center for Creativity. In addition to NAGC’s Creativity Network, the Center is one of the sponsoring partners of the International Torrance Legacy Creativity Awards.
Editor's note: This is part of a series of blog posts that is collaboratively published every week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and National Association for Gifted Children. Each post in the series exists both here on Flypaper and on the NAGC Blog.