Another chapter for the 5th edition of the Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology. This is a broad survey chapter about the importance of designing learning environments in a way to nurture the habits and dispositions of creativity in learners. One of the big challenges in writing this chapter was the scope of the topic. Not only does creativity have a deep body of literature in a number of different fields, but it’s thought of very differently, and approached from a very different set of assumptions, across cultures. We chose to address it mostly from the perspective we’re natively familiar with, while also recognizing that there were a number of other ways we could have taken our writing.
To give a sense of how we treated the topic here’s a paragraph from our introduction:
Our discussion is structured as follows: first, we briefly review the literature of creativity, both to describe some attributes that are important to nurture when foster- ing learner creativity, as well as to identify common conditions for promoting cre- ativity in learners. Next, we examine some examples learning environments that foster learner creativity, particularly as related to helping people develop an inte- grated creative identity and not just the acquisition of intellectual or skill-based components of creative action. Third, we discuss implications from the research and examples and offer recommendations for the practice of instructional design and technology, to help designers better address learner creativity through the instruc- tional environments they create.
Reference:
McDonald, J. K., West, R. E., Rich, P. J., & Hokanson, B. (2020). Instructional design for learner creativity. In Bishop, M. J., Boling, E., Elen, J., & Svihla, V. (Eds.), Handbook for research in educational communications and technology(5th ed., pp. 375-399). Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36119-8_17
