Maria Daskolia

Secondary Teachers' Conceptions of Creative Thinking within the Context of Environmental Education.

ABSTRACT This research study, grounded in experiential learning theory, utilized a draw-and-explain assessment to measure change in secondary students’ knowledge before and after an experiential field trip. Our results indicated that the secondary students (aged 15–18 years) had pre-existing knowledge of the local delta area that included both abiotic and biotic factors. Prior to the field trip students drew generic and isolated configurations of land and water features. The change in scores from pre- to post-visit drawings indicated that the experiential field trip did cause an overall statistically significant change in students’ knowledge of the local delta environment. Our findings denote the importance of outdoor field experiences and calls attention to the need for collaboration between informal and formal educators. Based on the findings of this study, an experiential learning approach could provide an effective model for informal program design and formal classroom activities related to field experiences. The researchers make suggestions for formal and informal educators that reflect the findings and relate to the experiential learning cycle.

Addressing Creativity in the Collaborative Design of Digital Books for Environmental and Math Education

This study presented here focuses on the collaborative design of digital educational resources (called “c-books”, c for creative) for environmental and math education. It addresses social creativity as an activity situated within a particular sociotechnical environment consisting of a community of interest (CoI) and an innovative technology for designing authorable e-books (the c-book technology). The focus of analysis on the identification of the stages through which a CoI gets involved into a creative task finally leads to the production of a creative product. The paper presents the case study of the collaborative design of “Climate Change”, one of the c-books designed within the context of the M C Squared project. The aim was to depict and discuss the CoI’s involvement in designing the c-book as an activity located in and boosted by the specific sociotechnical environment. The study’s findings give important insights into collaborative design that draws on social aspects of creativity.

Role of Context in Social Creativity for the Design of Digital Resources

This paper presents a study of social creativity in the collaborative design of digital educational resources within a new socio-technical environment. This environment embeds a communication space for the designers, as well as an authoring tool enabling the meshing of text with dynamic digital widgets. We focus on understanding the processes of social creativity occurring in communities of interest, gathering together members from diverse communities of practice, taking the context of four socio-technical environments seriously into account. Our hitherto achieved results from the design of one digital resource in the French community of interest show a deep interconnectedness between emergent creativity and contextual issues.