Creativity & Learning

Overview

Two edited volumes anchor this line of work: Creativity, Technology & Education: Exploring their Convergence (Mishra, Henriksen & the Deep-Play Research Group, 2018) and The 7 Transdisciplinary Cognitive Skills for Creative Education (Henriksen, 2018).

The papers behind this theme are in the Scholarly Record, my full publication record built from Google Scholar.

Key Articles / Publications

The development of a trans-disciplinary framework: Theory, research, practice. Mishra, Henriksen & Mehta (2015), Creativity, Digitality, and Teacher Professional Development, traces how our theoretical framework grew out of research on highly creative teachers and was then applied back into teacher-education courses and rubrics for evaluating creative work. (PDF)

Technology integration, transdisciplinary creativity & learning. Mishra, Koehler & Henriksen (2011), The Seven Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind: Extending the TPACK Framework Towards 21st Century Learning (Educational Technology, 51(2), 22-28), proposes seven cognitive tools for creative, transformative learning that extend TPACK, and shows how teachers can repurpose digital technologies to support each one.

The line continues past these founding pieces into creativity and generative AI: Henriksen, Mishra & Stern (2024), “Creative Learning for Sustainability in a World of AI: Action, Mindset, Values” (Sustainability, 16, 4451), and Mishra & Henriksen (2026), The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning (TechTrends).

The Rethinking Technology & Creativity column

An ongoing series for the journal TechTrends, running continuously since 2012 and now past 75 installments, under the broad rubric of Rethinking Technology and Creativity for the 21st Century. Recent installments show where the series has gone: Control vs. Agency: Exploring the History of AI in Education (2025) and, in May 2026, The Mirror and the Black Box (with Danah Henriksen).

Defining Creativity & the SCALE instrument

Creativity: NEW and SCALE. With Danah Henriksen, Rohit Mehta, and the Deep-Play Research Group, I’ve argued that a creative product has to clear three bars at once: it has to be novel (genuinely new), effective (it actually works, solves the problem, meets the need), and whole (it hangs together as a coherent, satisfying artifact, not just clever in pieces) — the NEW framework.

The companion question is where creativity like that comes from, which is what SCALE (Support for Creativity in a Learning Environment), built with Carmen Richardson, is for: a short observational instrument that looks at a classroom’s Learner Engagement, Physical Environment, and Learning Climate to gauge how well it supports student creativity. One defines what a creative product looks like; the other assesses whether the environment around a student is set up to produce one. More at Scaling up the SCALE instrument

Story

One thread ties the whole series together: conversations. Over the years, the Deep-Play Research Group and I have interviewed creativity researchers and creative practitioners — neuroscientists, writers, designers — asking each what creativity looks like from inside their work. Talking with people across such different fields kept confirming the transdisciplinary argument: the habits of mind that creative people describe sound much the same, whatever the discipline.

Connections to current work (GenAI)

Most of my recent thinking about creativity happens at its intersection with generative AI. These tools are weird, and that weirdness is what makes them useful for creative work: they juxtapose ideas no human would think to put together. I have tested this in practice, co-writing an AI Halloween story (Vikram or Vetaal) and collaborating with Claude on typographic designs. The column has followed the same questions into print, most recently in The Mirror and the Black Box (2026), on how the metaphors we choose for AI shape what we can think about it.

Impact / spread

The clearest measure of this line of work is its longevity: the column has run in TechTrends since 2012, more than 75 installments, and two Springer volumes grew out of the same body of work. Just as important: the Deep-Play Research Group began as a handful of graduate students at Michigan State, and its members — Danah Henriksen, Rohit Mehta, Melissa Warr, and others — are now faculty running their own research programs on creativity, design, and technology.