A Culture of Curiosity and Adventure
To be creative is to produce or grow new ideas, items or actions by thinking in new ways. A creativity intense culture is rich with optimism, imagination and enthusiasm. Such a place enables the development of novel ideas through experimentation. This environment would support the sparks of creativity that first imagined a refrigerator, a solar panel, a space craft and an iPod. These supportive cultures embrace mistakes and failures as opportunities for better understanding.
Wagner recommends organizing the learning culture of a school around “thoughtful risk-taking, trial and error, creating, intrinsic motivation: play, passion, and purpose” (Wagner, 2012, p.200). With a goal of creating rather than consuming knowledge our schools must offer rich learning environments that promote a student centered, student led approach to teaching. Constructivists Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Montessori and Dewey all argued that through play in environments that are varied, rich in color, textures, and sounds, learners will construct for themselves an understanding of their world. They encouraged first hand activities such as exploring, building, taking apart and designing. For Dewey (1938), the role of the educator in these environments is to prepare situations where questions would develop from the experiences being had and would, for each learner, meet them at the edge of their current state of understanding and arouse “in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas” (Dewey, 1938, p. 79).
Wagner recommends organizing the learning culture of a school around “thoughtful risk-taking, trial and error, creating, intrinsic motivation: play, passion, and purpose” (Wagner, 2012, p.200). With a goal of creating rather than consuming knowledge our schools must offer rich learning environments that promote a student centered, student led approach to teaching. Constructivists Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Montessori and Dewey all argued that through play in environments that are varied, rich in color, textures, and sounds, learners will construct for themselves an understanding of their world. They encouraged first hand activities such as exploring, building, taking apart and designing. For Dewey (1938), the role of the educator in these environments is to prepare situations where questions would develop from the experiences being had and would, for each learner, meet them at the edge of their current state of understanding and arouse “in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas” (Dewey, 1938, p. 79).