490131 SE Theory and practical experience of teaching and learning (2014W)

This seminar explores the potential of Wise Humanising Creativity to challenge the status quo through and within educational systems by drawing on the work of Anna Craft, a leading global authority on creativity in education. Craft?s seminal work helps us understand how we can use ?possibility thinking? to transition from what is to what might be through ?what if?? and ?as if? thinking to respond to the changing nature of childhood and youth.

Craft (2011) argues the four key features of changing childhood and youth inherent in the digital revolution can be see as:

?plurality of identities (people, places, activities, literacies), possibility-awareness (of what might be in invented, of access options, of learning by doing and of active engagement), playfulness of engagement (the exploratory drive) and participation (all welcome through democratic, dialogic voice). (Craft, 2001, 33)

Unpacking the 4Ps, seminar participants will come to see how they are inherent to digitally-connected childhood and youth. With this understanding they will be better placed to embrace childhood and youth as empowered, and imagine preferable futures for them and their communities through the kinds of teaching and learning practices they design for their classrooms.

Additionally, the seminar will explore and experiment with Creative Emotional Reasoning?s (CER) non-linear thinking techniques that foster co-creativity, including Semantic, Diagrammatic and Emotive reasoning.

An overarching goal of the seminar is to explore WHC and CER in order to plan teaching and learning activities for ?high possibility? classrooms where children and young people are given opportunities to learn well, be creative, productive and thinking citizens who can help solve, not only problems important to them and their community, but also some of the world?s most significant problems.