A Socio-cultural Perspective on Creativity, Tech & Ed

by | Sunday, March 20, 2022

Almost exactly a year ago Danah Henriksen, Carolina Torrejon Capurro and I submitted a chapter for the second edition of the book Creativity and Innovation: Theory, Research and Practice edited by Jonathan Plucker. Given the time that had elapsed, since we had written the piece, I had almost completely forgotten about it – till a physical copy of the book landed in my mailbox.

Our chapter is titled A Socio-cultural Perspective on Creativity and Technology: New Synergies for Education (full reference below), and I do think we did a good job bringing together ideas from current creativity research, technology theory and education and provided some new ideas for educators and researchers to consider.

We do hope you read the entire chapter, but here are some key takeaways:

  • Creativity and technology are both essential to educational futures.  A synergistic, socio-cultural perspective provides an integrative framework with transformative implications for teaching and learning.
  • We advocate for understanding these issues in education settings based on Glaveanu’s 5A’s model, which moves away from the traditional 4P’s of creativity (person, product, process, and press) toward the language of actor, action, artifact, audience, and affordances.
  • This model allows for a language and understanding of creativity based on the interrelation or interaction between its elements rather than the elements themselves.
  • Technologies as tools to think, work, and create with are part of the social-material world and have different creative affordances (real and perceived). The advent of the internet in particular has unleashed ground-up creativity, which is in contrast to the traditional structures and boundaries of schooling.
  • Digital devices in general (and the internet in particular) allow for dramatic creative shifts in society and new implications for how we think about teaching and learning.

Here is the complete reference:

Henriksen, D., Mishra, P., & Capurro, C.T. (2022). A Socio-cultural Perspective on Creativity and Technology: New Synergies for Education. In Plucker, J. (Ed). Creativity & Innovation: Theory, Research & Practice. (2nd Edition). Prufrock Press.

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