Socio-dramatic play is an everyday occurrence in early childhood education as children create narratives together in shared imagined worlds. The teacher's role in this type of play is less clear and this paper draws on a study using Lindqvist's "playworlds" approach to gain insight into how teachers participate in children's play. In…

Art and design involve divergent creative processes. Design is a more constrained domain than art. While creativity in some specific domains, such as painting, sculpture, and music, has been widely studied, some have as yet been little explored. One example is stone carving. What characterizes stone carving, as a creative occupation? What is a…

The "consensual assessment technique" (CAT) represents one of the most popular evaluation techniques used by researchers to assess creative artifacts. In this paper we discuss how the prototypical use of the CAT, while useful for identifying unambiguous examples of creative artifacts, can inadvertently kill the curiosity of researchers…

By using the feminist imaginary as a pedagogical tool for resistance and change, an experience of activism within the university context in Naples, Italy is explored. The article focuses on the potential transformative power of art as catalysis for deeper level emotional and spiritual learning transformation. The aim is trying to inspire critical…

Drawing from Anzaldúa's (1999) ideas on borderlands, this conceptual article addresses the potential of basketball as a space for developing critical subjectivities within minoritized communities. Further, working through relevant scholarship at the intersections of race, play, education, and sports, connections are made as to how basketball is…

This essay explores a conceptual view of imagination and its capacity for educational transformation by acknowledging its ineffable, aesthetic, and social qualities. A critical perspective is applied by drawing upon what Giroux (2013) calls the politics of disimagination. Imagination is then put to the pedagogical task of confronting the…

This paper argues that the teaching of art in Higher Educational Institutions is inherently paradoxical. Informed by the transgressive and interdisciplinary qualities of contemporary artistic practices, education nevertheless is often made to fit into a reductionist, outcome-oriented and individualistic discourse. Taking a weeklong workshop at the…

Studies in musical improvisation show that musicians and even children are able to communicate intended emotions to listeners at will. To understand emotional expressivity in music as an art form, communicative success needs to be related to improvisers' thought processes and listeners' aesthetic judgments. In the present study, we used…

This article explores children's self-initiated outdoor play and holistic learning in a Norwegian kindergarten. While children's self-initiated play is valued in Nordic ECEC, it is rarely analyzed in relation to holistic learning. To explore how children's self-initiated outdoor play contributes to children's holistic learning in ECEC, we observed…

This article explores the potential for engaging 7 and 8-year-old school pupils in performative literature interpretation through process drama. Inspired by new materialism and affect theory, we focus on how literature interpretations come into being in dramatic fiction, and on how these becoming interpretations merge with the classroom. The study…

This article contains 15 "takeaways" about how to teach organic creativity, from actual teachers with several hundred total years of experience. Teachers of English, physics, Advanced Placement Calculus, science, theater, the visual arts, dance, school administration, school counseling, educational psychology professing, world languages,…

One afternoon during the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, as I was retooling my in-person courses for online instruction, I took a break to see how the educators and artists I follow on Instagram were faring. As I scrolled through a variety of posts, I happened upon an image showing a page torn from the 1940 children's book "Lentil"…

This study investigates the relation between Viola Spolin's methodology of theatrical education and Konstantin Stanislavski's. It elucidates major similarities and diff erences between Spolin's theater games and Stanislavski's system in more detail than previous research. This investigation belongs to a research project on the origins of Spolin's…

This paper engages with the medically established view that individuals with autism are not capable of play or being imaginative. This paper resists this idea by reflecting on psychobiographical research conducted on the life of Temple Grandin. By re-witnessing creative experiences in her life, dialogue surrounding the imaginative capacities of…

This study contributes to our understanding of meaning making in CSCL environments by examining a specific aspect of collaborative problem solving in which students improvise, introduce, and make meaning with representations in disciplinary domains. These situations include the embodied and imaginative processes of discovering new representational…