CICERO CAMPUS LECTURE

MONDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2009
TIME: 16.15 - 17.30
VENUE: Room K218, Siltavuorenpenger 20R, University of Helsinki

CICERO Campus Lectures are free of charge and everyone is welcome to attend!

* CLICK HERE TO WATCH * THE WEBCAST OF THE LECTURE
(There is no sound at the beginning of the video, please fastforward to 04.44 min)
> CLICK HERE FOR THE PPT PRESENTATION

CREATIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING
By Prof Keith Sawyer

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.

Recommended reading for the lecture:
"The Future of Learning in the Age of Innovation"

About the lecturer:
Prof Keith Sawyer
Washington University in St. Louis

Keith Sawyer is an Associate Professor of Education at Washington University, with additional appointments in the Department of Psychology and the School of Business.  His most recent books include Group Genius: The Creative Power Of Collaboration and The Cambridge Handbook Of The Learning Sciences.  For his sabbatical year, he is spending the fall term as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge.  Prior to this visit, he spent one month at the San Francisco Exploratorium, an influential science center, and after returning to the U.S., he will spend the winter and spring terms at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

LINKS

Prof Sawyer's website

Prof Sawyer's blog on Creativity and Innovation