Creativity, Digitality, and Teacher PD

by | Monday, August 24, 2015

te-digital-age

It has been almost 5 years since my research interests shifted formally to issues related to creativity, technology and teacher education. This line of work (though less influential than my TPACK related work) has led to multiple journal articles and research studies. It is influenced the classes I teach and in turn my pedagogical experiences have influenced my thinking and writing. Recently Maggie Niess and Henry Gillow-Wiles provided us (my research team The Deep-Play Research group) an opportunity to look back on this line of work and write it up for the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age. Details, abstract and link to article provided below:

Mishra, P., Henriksen, D. & Mehta, R. (2015). Creativity, Digitality, and Teacher Professional Development: Unifying Theory, Research, and Practice. In  In M. Niess, & H. Gillow-Wiles (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age (pp. 691-722). Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. [Download the article as a PDF]

Abstract

This article describes the development of a trans-disciplinary framework for creative teaching using technology. In recent years, the authors of this paper (and collaborators) have sought to better understand the role of creativity in educational technology. Our approach seeks to inform theory, research, and practice. In this piece we step back to provide a big-picture view of the process of developing a theoretical framework for creative, transformational teaching with digital technology. We describe the development of our ideas over time, through research projects focused on highly creative teachers and their practices. We describe how we have applied these ideas in teacher education courses devoted to creativity and technology, and developed rubrics for evaluating creative products. At a meta-level we aim to provide a rich example of the reciprocal nature of theory, research, and practice in educational technology. Through this we hope to provide one example of how such a theory/ research/ practice development process works, with the goal of informing future work of this type.

 

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Leigh Wolf @IgniteLansing

Leigh Wolf, my partner in crime as far as the MAET program goes, recently presented at Ignite Lansing. She talked about her two passions, teaching and food (not sure which order to place these). Specifically she talked about food photography and the connections she...

Can Machines Stink? A Touring Test of Human Exceptionalism

Can Machines Stink? A Touring Test of Human Exceptionalism

My friend Leigh Wolf sent me the Journal of Imaginary Research's 2024 call for abstracts (note, abstracts not papers) on the theme of "Flourishing." Do check out the journal. It IS a hoot! I do plan to submit something to the journal. I mean how cool would that be......

Death & Taxes

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting visual representations of complex data and just discovered Death & Taxes, 2009: "is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected...

Cool i-Images at MICDS

I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending...

The distance education revolution

TCRecord this week features an article by Gary Natriello titled Modest Changes, Revolutionary Possibilities: Distance Learning and the Future of Education. As the abstract says In this essay, I take stock of the developments shaping distance learning and consider the...

Creativity, genius & age

Malcolm Gladwell has a great essay in a recent New Yorker on the relationship between genius and age. It is popularly believed that genius is often tied up with precocity. There are two aspects to this. First, creativity requires the energy and brashness of youth....

Discrimination in Academia: A personal experiment(?)

Try as we might to be open-minded the truth is that we all have biases. These biases can be subtle and insidious and it is rare that we get to confront them head on. A recent story that has been making the rounds on  NPR, InsideHigherEd, and The Washington Post about...

The futility of existence

I stumbled across this little machine that shuts itself off once it has been switched on! How cool is that. I don't have an clue whom to credit it to and would appreciate a heads up on that. I was reminded of the myth of Sisyphus which led to a great piece of...

The medium is the massage

Nicholas Carr has an interesting post (titled Rewiring the mind) on the findings of a recent study into the information seeking behaviors of scholars. (The full study in pdf format can be downloaded here.) Carr seems to suggest that these results indicate a...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *