Cultures of Creativity
Cultures develop when people find ways to play, make, and share. This report describes how human cultures can be characterised by their similarities rather than their differences, and emphasises the importance of recognising playfulness and creativity to develop societies prepared to accommodate the rapid changes associated with technology and globalisation.
EDITH K. Ackermann
Cultures of creativity and modes of appropriation: From DIY (Do It Yourself) to BIIT (Be In It Together)
One of the particularities of today’s “cultures of creativity” is that they are neither local (typical of a region) nor global (common among citizens of the world). Instead, they cut across generations, social groups, and territorial borders (geographic, national, ethnic), resembling what some refer to as “glocal” (Robertson, 1995).
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Eduardo O.E.M.C. Chaves
Play and Learning: One Brazilian’s View
We human beings, have two basic tasks when we are born: one, immediate and extremely urgent; the other, long term. The first of these two tasks is to survive. We are all born, as it were, prematurely and ill-equipped to live. We are born incompetent in the most elementary tasks: we are not able to feed ourselves, to communicate, to walk, to defend and protect ourselves against the elements, against other animals or even against other human beings.
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Merlin Donald
Cognitive evolution: Implications for developing a creative mindset
The most ancient defining characteristic of the human mind is the ability to make things with other made things. Our dance with made things started millions of years ago, and it is still the center of the human universe. We have moved from stone tools to satellites and silicon chips, and the creative mind at the center of this interaction still dominates the process.
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Sally Duensing
Cultural assumptions and social interactions in museums
This essay focuses on culturally based assumptions about learning and play that are embedded in science museum exhibits and program design in various international venues. These assumptions reflect conscious and unconscious cultural values and perspectives derived from international museum practice, as well as from national and local cultural contexts that influence the form and content of their presentations.
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Hasina B. Ebrahim
The role of play in fostering a creative culture: A South African perspective
Young children in the preschool years in a diverse country like South Africa are exposed to a myriad of rich experiences as childhood is constructed by and for them. As experts in childhood who are making sense of the world around them the opportunities for play helps them to reconstruct knowledge, skills and values they are exposed to in multiple learning environments such as the family, community and preschool.
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Gerhard Fischer
Social creativity and cultures of participation: Bringing cultures of creativity alive
Although society often thinks of creative individuals as working in isolation, intelligence and creativity result in large part from interaction and collaboration with other individuals. Much human creativity is social, arising from activities that take place in contexts in which interaction.
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Artin Göncü
Sociocultural and creative processes in imaginative play of young children
This essay aims to illustrate that a focus on the activity of play itself, including its motivational origins and performance features, rather than its correlations with other aspects of development, will help us understand this curious activity and, as a corollary, construct new avenues for the investigation of how imaginative play advances children’s development.
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Francois Grey
Making and Learning in China
Although a relatively recent phenomenon, the maker movement in China has rapidly established several vibrant local communities based around hacker spaces in major cities. The movement has strong links to Chinese hardware manufacturing and has attracted the interest and support of local government
as well as the academic establishment.
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Beth Hennessey
Cultures of creativity: Nurturing creative mindsets across cultures – A toolbox for teachers
A typical classroom is fraught with killers of student intrinsic motivation: Expected reward, expected evaluation, competition, surveillance and time limits all serve to make it almost impossible to maintain a playful attitude and a willingness to take risks. It is much easi¬er to demonstrate how to undermine intrinsic motivation than it is to foster it.
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Yoshiro Miyata
Nurturing creative mindsets in the global community
For hundreds of thousands of years, creativity has been an essential part of the life of us humans. Eating daily meals in the wild environment involves many kinds of creative works: hunting animals, catching fish, finding edible plants, growing vegetables, cultivating soils, discovering cooking methods, building and maintaining fire, etc., etc.. All these works require creativity.
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Mitchel Resnick
Lifelong kindergarten
We live in a world that is changing more rapidly than ever before. Today’s children will face a continual stream of new issues and challenges in the future. Things that they learn today will be obsolete tomorrow. To thrive, they must learn to design innovative solutions to unexpected problems. Their success and satisfaction will be based on their ability to think and act creatively.
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Philippe Rochat
Why play? The meaning of play in relation to creativity
In today’s increasingly leisure oriented era, play is often viewed and projected as a measure of happiness and success in life. This is evident in advertising slogans and proverbs like “Play hard, life is short!” or “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. But if play is the panacea for the good life, what is it exactly? What do we mean by play and playing, and what does it consist of?
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Mark A. Runco
Fostering creativity across cultures
Creativity can be supported by parents, teachers, businesses, and even communities. As a matter of fact, it is very important that support is offered by everyone involved. A child growing up in a family that encourages creativity, in a culture that valu¬es creativity, with teachers who support creativity, has excellent chances of fulfilling his or her creative potentials.
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Marie Taillard & Yun Mi Antorini
Creativity in the LEGO Ecosystem
Ecosystems must constantly adapt to the broader environments in which they exist. In the business world, this requires staying ahead of competition, sociological changes, economic pressures, regulations, and other external factors. To remain sustainable, the LEGO Ecosystem must be carefully nurtured – valuable components, relationships, and interactions must be preserved and renewed, and allowed to evolve with time.
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Keang-Ieng (Peggy) Vong
Cultures of creativity in Chinese kindergartens today
The understanding of creativity and how it is fostered in Chinese kindergartens today may differ from how creativity is described in Western literature. Some early childhood teacher educators would argue that the terms used to explain what creativity means have to be teacher-friendly and conceptually manageable.
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Michael Wesch
Building cultures of creativity in the age of the Knowledge Machine
Twenty years ago, Seymour Papert visited a preschool where he was drawn into a discussion led by inquisitive four-year-olds on the matter of how giraffes sleep. He was impressed by what he called “a bumper crop of good theories” but no theory could come to grips with the matter of where the giraffe would put its head (Papert, 1993). Though Papert himself had grown up in Africa, he had to admit that he did not know how a giraffe slept, and so it remained a mystery.
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David Whitebread & Marisol Basilio
Play, culture and creativity
Play is ubiquitous in humans; every child in every human culture plays, and there is strong archaeological and historical evidence that this has always been the case since the emergence of human species. It is also well established that a key adaptive advantage of the long period of biological immaturity in humans is that it allows for extensive play in all its rich variety, way beyond that observed in any other species, which underpins the astonishing problem-solving abilities and creativity of humans.
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Thomas Wolbers
Three pathways by which culture can influence creativity
There is good evidence that culture can shape basic perceptual processing and that it can influence how people deploy attentional focus. For example, people in Western cultures tend to focus on salient objects and use rules and categorization to organise the environment, whereas people from Eastern cultures
focus more holistically on relationships and similarities.
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