Tag Archives: Education

A place for wonder, creativity & discovery

Ipad

“The child starting school this year will graduate in the 3rd decade of the 21st century, a world that will have challenges and opportunities beyond what we can imagine today, with possibilities and problems that will demand creativity, ingenuity, responsibility, and compassion. Whether this year’s student will merely survive or positively thrive in the decades to come depends in large measure on the experiences he has in school”

OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture, & Bruce Mau Design. (2010). The third teacher: 79 ways you can use design to transform teaching and learning. New York, NY: Abrams Books.

Kids speak out on student engagement in Edutopia (2015): “I think having freedom in assignments, project directions, and more choices would engage students. More variety = more space for creativity.”

To what extent do students need/deserve:
1. Freedom
2. Choice
3. Variety
4. Creativity
5. Engagement

Questions for creative teachers

How do you nurture and sustain a culture of creativity in your classroom? How do you support and encourage your students to be curious and feel empowered to solve problems in unique and innovative ways?7494885_orig

Give me an example of creativity in your curriculum and pedagogy. What have you done lately that’s creative?

How do we foster innovation in formal education institutions? What are the barriers to creative learning methods and practices in your school?

How do you respond to Margaret Wheatley’s assertion: “The things we fear most in organizations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity?”

CreativityGoodIdea

The maker education movement

All children deserve opportunities to be the creators of the technologies that create our world, as well as to take part in changing who controls, leads, and owns our future.

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“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” Paulo Freire

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What is the goal of education?

Piaget

Image Credit: Adam Fletcher

Creative curriculum & pedagogy

EducationSD

Design thinking

DesignEducation

Maker education

make

Image Credit: d.school

Welcome to EDCP 508

This course offers graduate students a space to create and a community to explore empirical and theoretical ideas about creativity in curriculum and pedagogical design. Our six modules include critiquing scholarly readings and TED talks, expressing and challenging viewpoints, building upon each other’s work, and experimenting with hands-on learning activities.

Students will engage in this course as instructional designers, content creators, and thinkerers working together on personally or socially meaningful projects. Learning involves defining educational problems and generating creative solutions, brainstorming, bodystorming, mindmapping, prototyping, observing, empathizing, evaluating, and experimenting with diverse ideas, materials, and perspectives. The operative word for this course is CREATIVITY: participants will be supported to develop creative leadership skills, increase creative confidence, become more creative listeners, take intellectual risks, push boundaries, question assumptions, expand research possibilities, and exercise ingenuity.

Students will benefit from a multimodal learning environment and creative instructional strategies (e.g., design thinking challenges, role-playing, and storyboarding). We will make and deconstruct learning artifacts using open-ended materials, develop prototypes for innovative classroom learning environments (on-site and online), evaluate educational apps, build and program robotics, ignite imagination through coding, be inspired by guest presenters, and have fun learning by collaborating and creating.

Creativity