Learning in Creative Chaos

I've been digging again...

As I said in my last post, I've been rather pleasantly surprised at how much has been published in the last several years on creativity and learning styles. I'd thought at the outset that, perhaps, IDD and educational psychology viewed creativity studies as "fluffy," but I'm really not finding much of that attitude (of course, the quest has only just begun).

What I am finding is a lot of discussion of creativity and how it helps drive gifted students in their learning styles. I've found articles on this going back quite far. Only recently, it seems, has there been serious pursuit of using creativity studies in the students at the opposite end of the spectrum, those who are considered by many to be "underachievers" or "at risk." It seems to me that this is a natural fit--these students need to be taught in more creative ways because the standard methods have not worked for them. And with teaching them to think more creatively (as in advanced problem solving), according to the articles I've been scanning today, many of these "problem" students have excelled in surprising areas (such as math and science).

Then there are the articles about the use of creativity in teaching ESL students--many many articles, all basically spouting the same message to instructors--"think outside the box" when teaching culturally diverse groups. While there may be some nuggets of gold in there as far as suggestions to ESL instructors, the basic underlying theme of them all left me with a "one for the duh file" impression, meaning that it should be obvious that ESL instructors approach teaching multi-cultural students in new and refreshing ways (and not necessarily the same methods they'd use on their native English speaking students).

I'm still going through the articles relating creativity with technilogical/multimedia advances. The ones that link creativity with motivation with digital media (and there are a few) are of primary interest to me and I want to post a writeup on each separately in order to document them for future reference.

...Until that time...

posted by Stash @ 11:56 AM