Posthumanizing creativity

by | Friday, January 25, 2019

Dr. Kerry Chappell is a professor at the University of Exeter’s Graduate School of Education. She merges her training in dance, her doctorate in experimental psychology and interest in education to develop a transdisciplinary research program on better understanding how creativity could be nurtured. Her research has focused on the holistic meanings of learning, knowing, and being, bridging gaps between the understanding of the mind, body and materiality in creativity. She sees disciplines not as glued together but recommends a

mix of perspectives as a way of really getting to the bottom of questions that you are curious about…If you have a question that you’re curious about sometimes your knowledge from an art form might help you; sometimes the sciences might help you. So, it’s not just doing a discipline for the sake of it. It’s really trying to…answer some of the big questions that we’re facing.

Creativity is such a transdisciplinary topic itself that every discipline will have its own approach to understanding it. Psychologists, sociologists, artists, all may perceive and study it differently. Instead of thinking of these differences as contradictory to one other, we need to think of them as offering unique insights into creativity. Dr. Chappell suggests:

I think it gives us lots of perspectives on a concept that we’re all trying to understand, to demonstrate whether it’s there or not. So I think they are all complementary, I don’t think it’s about right and wrong in this kind of research.

Dr. Chappelle was recently interviewed by us for our ongoing series for Tech Trends. You can find a list of all the articles in the series here, and if you are interested in just the interviews, go here. Read the complete article by following the link in the citation below:

Mehta, R., Henriksen, D., & the Deep-Play Research Group (2019). An embodied dialogic endeavor: Towards a posthumanizing approach to creativity with Dr. Kerry Chappell. Tech Trends. 63. p 6-12.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-018-0357-7

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?

Why creativity, technology and education don’t play well together?

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Happy Valentine’s Day: Old/New ambigram

Happy Valentine’s Day: Old/New ambigram

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TPACK & creativity

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2017 Torrance Lecture on Creativity

2017 Torrance Lecture on Creativity

This past April, I delivered the annual E. Paul Torrance Lecture at the University of Georgia. Being invited to give this talk was a huge honor, for two main reasons. First, because of Paul Torrance, the person for whom this lecture is named. Dr. Torrance, known...

Multitasking & the learner

Multitasking & the learner

One of the myths of the new digital generation is that they are natural multi-taskers. The evidence, however, indicates that multi-tasking is detrimental to performance and success, and  though we may try delude ourselves, the fact of the matter is that, we do...

New ambigram: Nihal

My friend, Hartosh (I had written previously about his mathematical novel here) and his wife Pam, recently had a baby boy. This ambigram is of his name: Nihal Enjoy.

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