Creative Inquiry introduces both undergraduate students and general readers to the exploratory mindset and hands-on skills essential to the cultivation and implementation of new ideas. Using active learning, this book combines concise explanations and real-world examples with engaging exercises for readers to complete. The writing style is conversational, yet substantial, and the examples given reflect a wide range of disciplines, from early aeronautics and linguistics to zoology. Creative Inquiry emphasizes the importance of direct experience, personal initiative, and the generation of new knowledge. Step by step, the exercises build the skills students need when they tackle the final self-designed Capstone project. Positioned at the end of major sections, five brief self-reflection papers are designed to help students assess their progress and revise their assignments. To encourage collaboration and strengthen metacognition, teams of three to six participants work together on these papers. This encourages an iterative mindset and provides extensive practice with writing. The appendix provides a lively and practical "Top Ten List" of writing strategies for students who need extra advice.

This edited volume brings together international research that explores children’s creativity in STEM inquiry. It takes the position that creativity is relevant in all aspects of life and is essential for adaptable and innovative thinking. The research informed content of the book, highlights both challenges and opportunities for growing children’s creativity. The book focuses on fostering children’s creativity and natural curiosity in the world around them through STEM inquiry. Through STEM inquiry, children are learning through a cross- disciplinary approach where they apply concepts from multiple fields as they are thinking creatively, problem solving and constructing solutions. Educators play a critical role in encouraging children’s creativity by modelling creativity, providing creative projects for children and importantly, establishing rich culturally connected environments where children have the resources, conditions and opportunities for acting and thinking creatively. The book provides a lens for looking at children’s creativity in a range of different cultural settings. It offers insight and guidance to future research and will build educators’ capacity for developing children’s creative practices.

This book explores tools and techniques for creating the arts with groups. It provides insights into why workshops are such an effective and relevant form of creative practice. Throughout, two experienced practitioners share successful principles and qualities. They also include examples of workshops that explore ways of facilitating creative exploration. The authors believe that underpinning any good workshop practice is an understanding of what constitutes a workshop. This is a process in which the relationship between artist/researcher and participant/audience, maker, and witness is fluid. It extends each individual’s abilities and connects doing to learning to inquiring in a single process. The book itself is a dialogue on, and an investigation into, this practice. It fully explores the specificities of workshop practice in relation to how it engages others in arts-based research. Readers learn how workshops involve inquiry into six areas: inquiry into subjects, artistic processes, skills, self, the world, and relationships with others. In the end, this informed investigation helps practitioners to better reflect on their own approaches to arts-based inquiry and research. This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of how readers can use workshops for the maximum benefit of all participants, both individuals and groups.

Creative research methods can help to answer complex contemporary questions which are hard to answer using conventional methods alone. Creative methods can also be more ethical, helping researchers to address social injustice. This bestselling book, now in its second edition, is the first to identify and examine the five areas of creative research methods: • arts-based research • embodied research • research using technology • multi-modal research • transformative research frameworks. Written in an accessible, practical and jargon-free style, with reflective questions, boxed text and a companion website to guide student learning, it offers numerous examples of creative methods in practice from around the world. This new edition includes a wealth of new material, with five extra chapters and over 200 new references. Spanning the gulf between academia and practice, this useful book will inform and inspire researchers by showing readers why, when, and how to use creative methods in their research. Creative Research Methods has been cited over 750 times.

EDUCATION / Preschool & Kindergarten

With lots of examples and color images, this resource is both a foundational text and a practical guidebook for bringing contemporary art into elementary and middle school classrooms as a way to make learning joyful and meaningful for all learners. The authors show how asking questions and posing problems spark curiosity and encourage learners to think deeply and make meaningful connections across the curriculum. At the center of their approach is creativity, with contemporary visual art as its inspiration. The text covers methods of creative inquiry-based learning, art and how it connects to the “big ideas” addressed by academic domains, flexible structures teachers can use for curriculum development, creative teaching strategies using contemporary art, and models of art-based inquiry curriculum. Book Features: Provides research-based project ideas and curriculum models for arts integration.Shows how Project Zero’s flexible structures and frameworks can be used to develop creative inquiry and an arts integration curriculum.Explains how contemporary visual art connects to the four major disciplines—science, mathematics, social studies, and language arts.Includes full-color images of contemporary art that are appropriate for elementary and middle school learners.Demonstrates how arts integration can and should be substantive, multi-dimensional, and creative. “If you long for an arts classroom that connects students to the astonishingly interesting world they live in and want some helpful guidance on how to do it, this is the book for you!” —From the Foreword by Connie Stewart, University of Northern Colorado

An essential guide for teaching and learning computational art and design: exercises, assignments, interviews, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work. This book is an essential resource for art educators and practitioners who want to explore code as a creative medium, and serves as a guide for computer scientists transitioning from STEM to STEAM in their syllabi or practice. It provides a collection of classic creative coding prompts and assignments, accompanied by annotated examples of both classic and contemporary projects, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work, and features a set of interviews with leading educators. Picking up where standard programming guides leave off, the authors highlight alternative programming pedagogies suitable for the art- and design-oriented classroom, including teaching approaches, resources, and community support structures.

Creative Inquiry in the Arts & Humanities: Models of Undergraduate Research aims to assist faculty and administrators of any academic discipline who are creating undergraduate research opportunities that move beyond the natural and social sciences, as well as those working to sustain well-established, multidisciplinary programs. It offers examples of successful programs, assignments, curricula, journals, and conferences that support the research, scholarship, and creative activity of students in arts and humanities disciplines. Those examples cover a diversity of students' scholarly and creative work, including individual and collaborative writing, oral presentations, works of visual art, scholarly compilations, exhibits, musical compositions, plays, performances, public scholarship, and publications in many different forms. Those who mentor undergraduate research in the arts and humanities know the challenges of working with student researchers in disciplines in which solitary scholarship and individual creative processes are the norm. This work simply cannot, and should not, replicate a scientific model that utilizes teams of researchers, pooled data, and calibrated methods. Student research in the arts and humanities must reflect the kinds of work that scholars do in those fields. But which skills and bases of knowledge can mentors impart to students who do not have access to archives and special collections, who do not read classical languages, or who are just beginning to learn techniques that scholars in the field have mastered? How can faculty find the time to mentor individual student researchers when they are responsible for teaching hundreds of students every semester? Is it wise for faculty to invest that time in their undergraduate students' research when they need to publish their own work for tenure and promotion? Creative Inquiry in the Arts & Humanities: Models of Undergraduate Research is a collection of replicable examples and expert advice from scholars who are fully aware of these questions and difficulties and committed to addressing them with practical ideas and successful models. --Publisher description.

Provides a solid, foundational understanding of creativity that enables readers to elicit creative performance from their students. The first book of its kind in the school library field, The Creative Imperative: School Librarians and Teachers Cultivating Curiosity Together assists educators, school librarians, school counselors, and parents in learning about creativity and inquiry as well as how to foster these desired processes in school settings and beyond. The work begins by addressing the foundational aspects of creativity, and then discusses creativity within the educational setting, exploring how educators can be more creative themselves and coax creative performance from their students. The final part of the text focuses specifically on school libraries and the role of librarians in developing environments and opportunities for inquiry that nurture creativity.

Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals learn, i.e. how they acquire, organize and deploy knowledge and skills. The 20th century can be considered the century of psychology on learning and related fields of interest (such as motivation, cognition, metacognition etc.) and it is fascinating to see the various mainstreams of learning, remembered and forgotten over the 20th century and note that basic assumptions of early theories survived several paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology. Beyond folk psychology and its naïve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into some basic categories, such as behaviorist learning theories, connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, constructivist learning theories, and social learning theories. Learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields of interest but rather we can find the topic of learning in various disciplines, such as philosophy and epistemology, education, information science, biology, and – as a result of the emergence of computer technologies – especially also in the field of computer sciences and artificial intelligence. As a consequence, machine learning struck a chord in the 1980s and became an important field of the learning sciences in general. As the learning sciences became more specialized and complex, the various fields of interest were widely spread and separated from each other; as a consequence, even presently, there is no comprehensive overview of the sciences of learning or the central theoretical concepts and vocabulary on which researchers rely. The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning provides an up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the specific terms mostly used in the sciences of learning and its related fields, including relevant areas of instruction, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, and especially machine learning and knowledge engineering. This modern compendium will be an indispensable source of information for scientists, educators, engineers, and technical staff active in all fields of learning. More specifically, the Encyclopedia provides fast access to the most relevant theoretical terms provides up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the most important theories within the various fields of the learning sciences and adjacent sciences and communication technologies; supplies clear and precise explanations of the theoretical terms, cross-references to related entries and up-to-date references to important research and publications. The Encyclopedia also contains biographical entries of individuals who have substantially contributed to the sciences of learning; the entries are written by a distinguished panel of researchers in the various fields of the learning sciences.