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My creativity work featured in ISTE article

Some aspects of my creativity research was recently featured in the ISTE magazine, “Empowered Learner,” in an interview covering the ideas of colleague and friend Dr. Punya Mishra.

It’s exciting to have creativity emerging as a topic of interest around contemporary teaching, learning and schooling. For anyone interested in reading this, you can find a copy of the April issue of the magazine here. The article on creativity begins on page 26, and my work and research is mentioned on pages 30 – 32.

Learning and the Brain Conference: The Science of Innovation

I’m honored and excited to be speaking at the Learning and the Brain Conference (“The Science of Innovation) in San Francisco this week. The topic for this conference centers around varied strands of innovation and creativity in education and my focus will be on habits of mind of creative teachers.

A draft of my presentation is available here

New publications: Teaching, design thinking, creativity, and STEAM

I’m excited to share several new publications, all of which seem to have come out around the same time toward the end of the year here. And all of which tend to circle around some of the same themes of creativity and design thinking for teachers and teacher education, and ways to broaden or integrate new ideas in STEAM teaching and learning (in the case of the Thinking Skills & Creativity pieces this is reflected in using design thinking to support teacher creativity in managing problems of practice; in the STEAM Journal piece this involves drawing upon design skills to develop STEAM; and in the Leonardo article, we explore the use of figurative language as a bridge between the arts and sciences).

Henriksen, D. & Mishra, P. (2018). Of metaphors and molecules: Figurative language bridging STEM and the arts in education. Leonardo. Just Accepted publication Jan 25, 2018. doi: 10.1162/LEON_a_01607

Henriksen, D. (2017). Creating STEAM with design thinking: Beyond STEM and arts integration. The STEAM Journal, 3(1), Article 11. Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/steam/vol3/iss1/11

Henriksen, D., Richardson, C., & Mehta, R. (2017). Design thinking: A creative approach to educational problems of practice. Thinking Skills & Creativity. 26, 140-153.

 

Teachers are Designers

Thrilled to have a new piece out in Phi Delta Kappan (a practitioner journal exploring research from a practical standpoint), exploring the ways that I have used design thinking to help teachers address problems of practice in the classroom. Having opportunities to learn about and engage their design thinking habits of mind can provide teachers with approaches and structures that can support how they manage complex problems in the challenging domain of teaching. More about these outcomes of accepting uncertainty, valuing empathy, and seeing teaching as design, is shared here:

Henriksen, D., & Richardson, C. (2017). Teachers are designers: Addressing problems of practice in education. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(2), 60-64.

Transdisciplinary thinking and creative teachers

Recently published a new piece in Thinking Skills & Creativity journal. This article shares an exploratory study of accomplished, award-winning teachers with respect to the way that they use seven key transdisciplinary skills for creative thinking in their classrooms. Full text of this piece is linked with the citation here:

Henriksen, D. (2016). The seven transdisciplinary habits of mind of creative teachers: An exploratory study. Thinking Skills and Creativity. 22, 212-232.

New eBook on Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education

Last year, I had the opportunity to co-edit a special issue of the Journal of Technology & Teacher Education, along with Punya Mishra, around the topic of creativity, technology, and teacher education. While there is a fair amount of scholarship dealing with any of those topics individually, finding work at the intersection of these 21st century issues had previously been more difficult. So it was exciting to take a step toward building a collection that spoke to these topics collectively. The articles were all from top scholars at esteemed institutions (from Harvard, to Michigan State University, to University of Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, and several others), which covered a range of research methods, theoretical approaches, and different angles on the intersection of creativity, technology, and teacher education.

We were further honored and excited to recently have this collection of work turned into an eBook from AACE, so that it can be accessed and viewed more widely. For those interested in these topics, you can find the eBook here: https://www.learntechlib.org/p/172823/

 

 

Creativity, Youtube & more: Who are the gatekeepers?

I’m pleased to have a new piece out as part of the running column series that I collaborate on for the journal TechTrends. This is one I coauthored with ASU doctoral student Megan Hoelting, on a topic of interest to us both — how technology is opening up the world and changing systems of creativity.

Feel free to check it out here, if you wish:

Henriksen, D., & Hoelting, M. (2016). A Systems View of Creativity in a YouTube World. Tech Trends. (60)2. 102-106

Failure and Creativity! (New Art Education Journal Article)

The importance of failure, and our willingness to engage with it, is important. With my interest in creativity, failure is something I have been interested in. Scholars of creativity have long recognized that a key to innovation s a willingness to try new things, and even fail; then learn and continue to refine our work. The fear of failure prevents us from trying new things. It prevents us from learning from mistakes, failures, or errors without judgment. When we succeed, we pat ourselves on the back and move on. But when we fail we have to pause, consider what occurred, regroup, and continue to try new things and improve. In short, we learn. Success is a wonderful thing and we all love to have it. Yet in educational terms, let’s not be so unwilling to fail, or quick to paint mistakes or failures as terrible things. When we fail, we can learn–we can try new things, we can get better and we can create.

I was thrilled to coauthor a piece with Dr. Shaunna Smith of Texas State University, for Art Educational Journal. Examining her students’ experiences in digital fabrication/art education courses, we explore their experiences with creativity, learning, and growth through failures.

Please feel free to view the article here:

Smith, S., & Henriksen, D. (2016). Fail Again, Fail Better: Embracing Failure as a Paradigm for Learning and the Visual Arts. Art Education Journal. 69(2), 6-11.

Writing this piece was also a chance to drop in a favorite quote, “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Creativity in mathematics: New article about learning from the best

This is the next article in the series in TechTrends  on the topic of Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. In this article we seek to better understand creativity in the disciplines by a close study of the 4 individuals who won the 2014 Fields medal in mathematics. You can access the article below.

Mehta, R., Mishra, P., & Henriksen, D., & the Deep-Play Research Group (2016). Creativity in mathematics and beyond — Learning from Fields medal winners. Tech Trends (59)7

Book Chapter on E-Leadership & Teacher Development

We were invited to write a chapter for a book titled ICT in Education in a Global Context: Comparative Reports of Innovations in K-12 Education, on the topic of e-leadership and teacher development. This book (part of an on-going series published by Springer), “aims to capture the current innovation and emerging trends of digital technologies for learning and education in k-12 sector through a number of invited chapters in key research areas.” The book was recently published and a complete reference to our chapter, the abstract and a link to the PDF is given below.

Mishra, P., Henriksen, D., Boltz, L. O., Richardson, C. (2015). E-Leadership and Teacher Development Using ICT. In R. Huang; Kinshuk; J. K. Price (Eds.). ICT in Education in Global Context: Comparative Reports of Innovations in K-12 Education. Berlin: Springer. pp. 249-266.

Abstract: In this chapter, we develop a definition of e-leadership that extends from the business sector to encompass educational contexts. We describe schools as complex ecologies and dynamic organizations that require a change in both traditional forms of leadership and more recent ICT use. We use the RAT (Replace, Amplify, Transform) framework to explain the varying degrees to which ICT has been used in business and education and relate this model to the research in e-leadership. It is through the purposeful, transformational use of ICT and the meaningful development of multiple kinds of knowledge that those in charge of teacher education and growth can use ICT to develop a new kind of teacher leader.