Creativity, Learning and Technology: Lights and Insights for New Worldmaking Possibilities in Education

Abstract

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, creativity, learning, and technology became guiding lights for the debate on transforming conceptions and practices within education systems around the world. Given creativity’s intersubjective and agentic nature, it can work as an invaluable resource when promoting learning in formal and informal educational settings. Notwithstanding, these same features make it a challenge to know the conditions under which creativity development can be propelled through technology in educational contexts. Moreover, the technological revolution seems to have accelerated the pace of contemporary societies, often demanding rapid responses to creative challenges. Yet, from a developmental and constructivist standpoint, creativity is embedded in an intricate matrix where individual and sociocultural influences interact to help construct new ways of “worldmaking”. Thus, it can be envisioned as an attribute of the complexity of a psychological subject’s sociocognitive-emotional structures, whose development occurs in the interstitial space between self, others and the world, requiring time to manifest. Considering that technology modifies the person’s relation, action, construction of world(s), of others and self, we intend to discuss the mode and extent to which it can effectively be inscribed into education to promote the development of creativity. In this conceptual paper, we explore the impact on the continuous process of worldmaking (from where creativity blooms) of moving towards an ever-growing technological society, capable of innovative answers to the pandemic (e.g., distance learning) and other unpredictable challenges. We conclude by discussing how the so-called (re)constructive exploration pedagogies can be aligned with technology-based educational programs – capitalizing on their potential to transform human thinking, (inter)acting, and experiencing-, to nurture the development of creativity in education.