Background: Creativity across all disciplines is increasingly viewed as a fundamental educational capability. Science can play a potentially important role in the nurturing of creativity. Research also suggests that creative pedagogy, including interdisciplinary teaching with Science and the Arts, can engage students with science. Previous studies into teachers' attitudes to the relationship between science and creativity have been largely situated within national educational contexts.Purpose: This study, part of the large EU funded CREATIONs project, explores educators' perspectives on the relationship between Science and Creativity across national contexts drawn from Europe and beyond.Sample and Methods: 270 educators, broadly defined to include primary (age 4-11) and secondary (age 11-18) teachers and trainee teachers, informal educators and teacher educators, responded to a survey designed to explore perceptions of the relationship between science and creativity. Respondents were a convenience sample recruited by project partners and through online media. The elements of the survey reported here included Likert-scale questions, open response questions, and ranking questions in the form of an electronic self-administered questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was used to develop a combined attitude scale labelled 'science is creative', with results compared across nationalities and phases of education. Open question responses were analysed thematically to allow more nuanced interpretation of the descriptive statistical findings. Results:The findings show broad agreement internationally and across phases that science is a creative endeavour, with a small number of educators disagreeing about the 3 relationship between science and creativity in the context of school science. Those who disagreed were usually secondary science teachers, from England, Malta or outside Europe (primarily from the United States). The role of scientific knowledge within creativity in science education was found to be contentious. Conclusions:That educators broadly see science as creative is unsurprising, but initial exploration of educators' perspectives internationally shows some areas of difference.These were especially apparent for educators working in formal education, particularly relating to the role of knowledge with respect to creativity in science. With current interest in STEAM education, further investigation to understand potential mediating factors of national educational contexts on teachers' perspectives with respect to the role of disciplinary knowledge(s) in creativity and their interaction in interdisciplinary teaching and learning, is recommended.
This article interrogates how a particular conception of creativity: ‘wise humanising creativity' (WHC) is manifest within a virtual learning environment (VLE) with children and young people. It reports on the outcomes of C2Learn, a three-year European Commission funded project which introduced innovative digital gaming activities to foster co-creativity in the VLE between players. Theoretically the paper builds on previous work, which has conceptualised the potential for WHC within VLEs, as well as other educational contexts. Within C2Learn, arguments have been made for WHC as an antidote to overly-marketised, competitive notions of creativity, as well as for WHC supporting a view of childhood and youth as empowered—rather than ‘at risk'—within digital environments. In particular, this paper focuses on outcomes of the project's final piloting in England, Greece and Austria across the primary and secondary age ranges. This research employed a bespoke co-creativity assessment methodology developed for the project. In order to document WHC, this methodology opted to evidence developments in lived experience via qualitative methods including teacher and student interviews, fieldnotes, video capture, observation and student self-assessment tools. The paper articulates how WHC manifests in C2Learn's unique VLE or C2Space, and its potential to develop more nuanced understandings of creativity across digital environments. It then goes on to consider WHC as a useful concept for changing how we create within VLEs, and the implications for educational futures debates and wider understanding of creativity in education as a less marketised and more ethically driven concept.
Alongside the neoliberalisation of UK Higher Education (HE), the values of speed, competition, marketisation and individualism increasingly shape teaching and learning globally. This article takes seriously the feeling of unease expressed by lecturers and students in this context, proposing that posthumanism offers a theoretical, methodological and praxical means to challenge neoliberal logics and their effects. Through assemblages, diffractive analysis and an experimental film, we explore how module re-design and delivery around 'posthumanist projectbased learning' (PBL) attends to materiality, embodiment, affect, ethicality, social justice and political transformation. We argue that by de-centring the human, posthumanist PBL alerts students, teachers and researchers to the 'trouble' that haunts educational experiences and centres an ethics of community that reshapes the boundaries of accountability. Our work indicates how posthumanism might offer new ways to engage in HE knowledge productionand position materiality, care and our common future as the drivers for teaching and learning.
This chapter explores the entanglement of research and practice, offering an account of science|arts practice in which research-driven "features of creative pedagogy" were used within an action research project to engage young people with the problem of ocean plastics. Thinking with Barad's theory of agential realism, we explore the ongoing emergence of new matter and meaning for the young people, teachers and researchers engaged in this transdisciplinary practice-research.One component of a large H2020-funded project exploring creativity in science/arts transdisciplinary practices across Europe was a study of action research in six UK secondary schools with science/art teacher pairs. This chapter draws on research conducted within one school in which the issue of plastics in the ocean was explored with 52 students aged 14-15 within an "arts-science project", to develop the young people's ideas about environmental responsibility understood, explored and expressed together through science and art.An approach to researching emergent and creative pedagogies which brings agency to the fore within a material-dialogic, intra-active understanding of (post)human creativity was used. Data gathered through mixed methods, including questionnaires, interviews and photographs, and selected via "glow moment" assemblages, were analysed with and through theory using diffractive analysis to iteratively unfold data, theory, research and practice. This stance embodies a material-dialogic approach, with research, theory and "data" in dialogue.In the chapter, a sequence of diffractions is described, responding to initial questions posed by the book editors: "When/where/how do objects/subjects of inquiry, and embodiment, come to matter in STEAM (re-)configurings in practice?" These diffractions unfold the emergence of matter and meaning through intra-active material dialogue in a science|art practice, raising questions from/for practice about the concept of ethics, trusteeship and responsibility in environmental education.
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