Educating for Innovation: The Learning Sciences and the Future of Schooling

The seminar is co-hosted by CITE,
Faculty of Education and SRT-LS, The University of Hong Kong

In the 1980s, the cognitive revolution of the 1970s began to result in practical applications in two areas: creativity and learning. In creativity, these lines of research have resulted in the contemporary prominence of the "creative cognition" approach and the "sociocultural" approaches to creativity. These approaches have largely replaced an earlier emphasis on the personality traits of creative individuals. In learning, these lines of research have resulted in the learning sciences, an interdisciplinary field of research that emerged from a combination of cognitive, situated, and distributed views of learning.

My current project is an attempt to synergistically combine these two contemporary lines of research, with the goal of better understanding how to design learning environments that help learners be capable of more creative thinking and behavior. I am interested in how to foster creativity in all of the content areas: not only in the arts, but also in math, science, and engineering. I hope that this research will ultimately have implications for teacher preparation, curriculum design, and assessment. It may also have implications for how schools are conceived of as institutions, and may imply different boundaries between formal schools and other learning environments, such as libraries, museums, the home, the Internet, and mobile devices.