New Experiences Encouraged Nancy Cartwright Learned To Successfully Deal With Challenges At An Early Age

When Nancy Cartwright was 13 years old, she was half-way across the world, armed with simple faith, far-seeing eyes and a challenge that would have daunted most grown-ups.

Her father, working for the Riblet Tramway Co., was helping build a tramway across the foothills of the Himalayas. The family had lived in Katmandu for a year when Cartwright’s parents fell ill with dysentery. It was up to Cartwright to bring her parents home.

Her parents had to travel on stretchers, resting for two-week stints in Calcutta, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

“Our family was a family of great faith. I felt like I was walking through something special,” Cartwright says. “People were so kind to us.”

The months in Katmandu that preceded the grueling trip, the journey itself and, finally, the happy rendezvous she made with American adolescence back in Spokane helped arm Cartwright with tools that fuel her approach to life.

An ability to see connections, for one. An ability to maneuver past fear and through great distances, finding treasures in strange places.

Cartwright, 52, is adviser of the gifted and talented program at West Valley High School. She is on sabbatical for a year for more study in her field, creativity.

Her research this year is funded partly through Washington’s Christa McAuliffe Award. She is also working on her doctorate at Gonzaga University.

Cartwright is writing a field guide on ways teachers can help students learn what she calls “the technology of creativity.” Further, Cartwright wants to apply this process to Washington’s education reform.

“If we can, I believe our culture will change. That kind of change is true reform,” Cartwright wrote in her McAuliffe proposal.

More plainly, Cartwright believes that the intellectual tools needed for creative thinking are skills that can be learned, just like those “far-seeing eyes.”

She has put her beliefs to work at West Valley High since 1985. She teaches French, humanities and art.

But, really, she says, she is teaching kids. Teaching them to seek experiences - the exhibit at Gonzaga University of glass artist’s Dale Chihuly’s work, say, and the Japanese Garden at Manito Park. The Spokane Symphony and a visiting troupe of Russian ballet dancers - and to see connections between those experiences.

“They say Mrs. C stands for Mrs. Connection,” Cartwright says with her wry smile.

She remembers a class field trip to a touring performance of “Les Miserables” as a “tears-in-the-eyes experience” for some of her students.

“It was clear to them that if they studied the humanities and prepared themselves beforehand, they would have a far different experience” from those less-prepared members of the audience, Cartwright said.

Clearly, a necessary piece of creativity, for Cartwright, is preparation. Study.

Her tool bag at West Valley also includes a biennial trip to Europe with students whose training leads them to focus intelligently on an area of interest.

She wants them to explore bravely, knowing they must accept the consequences of their own decisions. Accountability, you might say.

What does that have to do with creativity? A lot.

If you didn’t remember to pack your own moleskin, Cartwright warns her students, a blistered heel might keep you from the architectural wonders of Mont St. Michel. Or Rome.

Cartwright might send one group off on a scavenger hunt in Paris, expecting them to return at the end of the day with proof that they reached their agreed destination.

Cartwright’s philosophy can be simplified this way: Go forth, explore, see connections. Then come home, reflect carefully and find new insights, new ways for our culture to view itself.

The idea of changing our culture is integral to creativity, Cartwright believes. If the creative process works in a vacuum and produces no change, then the process is incomplete.

She subcribes to a theoretical framework for creativity described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. This framework is a triangle.

The first corner is domain, a term for an accepted area of expertise. Art, for instance. Second is field, defined here as those experts who judge a new contribution. Third, is talent - the individual’s contribution.

Some people use this process often, intuitively, Cartwright says. Those students, parents, teachers and school administrators are the ones she will interview for her field guide. It is their habits and skills that she wants Washington’s teachers to incorporate in their own work.

Finally, one of the requisites for creativity, Cartwright believes, is a thirst for knowledge.

She learned that at home. The trip to Nepal was no fluke. Her family was hungry for experience and learning.

Cartwright’s parents were from large families in Alabama. Schooling ended early for both her parents - 10th grade for her father, fifth grade for her mother.

When Cartwright was 3 years old, her father picked out Spokane - literally from a National Geographic magazine - and the family moved.

“They were both bright people and wanted something better,” Cartwright says. She remembers how eager her mother was to hear what Nancy had learned in school each day. She remembers the yearly train trips back to Alabama.

“I learned to look at people with a different perspective,” she says. “I knew there was a bigger world out there.”

She learned to have far-seeing eyes.