Accepting the Challenge: Helping Schools Get Smarter about Supporting Students’ Creative Collaboration and Communication in a Changing World

Abstract

Although the purpose of schools can be (and has been) debated, one common goal that most people agree upon is that schools can and should play a role in preparing young people for the complexities of the future. This goal is somewhat paradoxical in that the future is unknown. So how might schools prepare young people for the unknowable? The prototypical response has been to design learning experiences based on what is already known in the hope that the knowledge, skills, and experiences in school will be durable enough to equip students for navigating the complexities of the problems they will encounter in the future. Consequently, most of what students learn in schools is predetermined. Although we recognize that some of these experiences can be beneficial for helping students in the future, we assert in this concept paper that schools can (and need to) get smarter about the kinds of educational experiences that students engage with if we are to prepare them for addressing the uncertainty of complex problems that they face now and into the future. More specifically, we open this concept paper by briefly discussing the prototypical curricular experience that schools provide young people and how these experiences sometimes fall short in providing students with the opportunities, experience, and confidence necessary to creatively engage with, resolve, and communicate about their experiences addressing complex problems. We then introduce a collaborative creative curricular experience called Journalistic Legacy Challenges (JLC). JLCs can support students in learning how to identify, address, document and communicate about complex problems that can make a difference in their communities and in their own and others’ lives. The experiences offered by JLCs differ from prototypical learning experiences because they require young people to identify problems that matter to them, collaborate with skilled others to address those problems, develop their creative confidence, and learn how to use journalistic learning to document and communicate about their work to broader audiences.

The Evolution of Intelligence: Analysis of the Journal of Intelligence and Intelligence

“…The thematic map for JOI showed a relatively high level of centrality for the creativity and education clusters. However, these clusters were only found in the basic quadrant, indicating high popularity but low level of development of topics using the keywords creativity, intelligence, personality, and wisdom (see Beghetto and Madison 2022 ; Childs et al 2022 ; Massie et al 2022 ; Suh and Ahn 2022 ) and education, metacognition, psychometrics-statistics, and emotional intelligence (see Forthmann et al 2022 ; Hofer et al 2022 ; Józsa et al 2022 ; Novikova et al 2022 ). An emerging topic was artificial intelligence blended with bias and assessment (see Andrews-Todd et al 2022 ; Bernardo et al 2022 ; Pásztor et al 2022 ).…”

Are STEM Students Creative Thinkers?

“…A key theme in the literature is the criticism of educational systems for inadequately nurturing transversal skills, particularly creativity ( Beghetto and Madison 2022 ; Darbellay 2022 ). Corazza et al ( 2021 ) refer to the “Traditional Education System (TES)” where creativity is not only omitted as an explicit objective, but students even tend to be penalised for behaviour associated with creativity, such as mind-wandering, slow responses, or unexpected answers.…”

“…Yet, it seems safe to say that the introduction of creativity to the education system is generally perceived as an unwelcome disruption and met with resistance. In view of this, Beghetto and Madison ( 2022 ) maintain that “it is not students who need to get smarter before they address complex challenges, rather, it is schools that need to get smarter in the kinds of curricular opportunities they provide young people” (p. 11).…”

Technological competencies in the education of undergraduate students in sports education

“…In order to develop learning and creative collaboration during student work and problem-solving, this is done by searching for new and alternative perspectives efficiently and actively, cooperating with skilled students, and building on each other's strengths to produce innovative ideas (Bandura, Freeman, & Lightsey, 1997;Baruah & Paulus, 2019;Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2008). Finally, it should be noted that students prefer to have limited opportunities to learn methods of documenting their creative work and communicating it effectively to others (Beghetto & Madison, 2022).…”