This open access book offers a concise overview of the theories constructed within the various human sciences around the theme of creativity as a symbolic capacity to link things together: it ...manifests itself when the individual endowed with a certain type of intelligence encounters cultural and social conditions that enable them to develop that capacity to the maximum, rather than inhibiting it or diverting it to other fields where it is doomed to failure. Even the most intimate of human expressiveness is considered as a result of an active social relationality. Social dimensions of creativity (evaluation, primary socialization, motivation, leadership) and “creative processes” (creative attitude, creative gesture, divergent thinking, problem-solving capacity, interdisciplinary approach, randomness, algorithmic creativity) are also analysed. The book concludes by evaluating the course taken in the light of the relational theory of society: the development of creativity cannot beconceived outside of self-other relations. This book is the result of a translation done with the help of artificial intelligence. The text has subsequently been revised further by a professional copy editor in order to refine the work stylistically.
This open access book explores the synergy between AI and education, highlighting its potential impact on pedagogical practices. It navigates the evolving landscape of AI-powered educational ...technologies and suggests practical ways to personalise instruction, nurture human-AI co-creativity, and transform the learning experience. Spanning from primary to higher education, this short and engaging volume proposes concrete examples of how educational stakeholders can be empowered in their AI literacy to foster creativity, inspire critical thinking, and promote problem-solving by embracing AI as a tool for expansive learning. Structured in three parts, the book starts developing the creative engagement perspective for learning and teaching to then present practical applications of AI in K-12 and higher education, covering different fields (teacher education, professional education, business education) as well as different types of AI supported tools (games, chatbots, and AI assisted assessment). It also delves into the ethical considerations, policy implications, and the central role educators play in harnessing the power of an AI informed educational experience.
Earlier research I conducted indicated that students lacked confidence in their L2 writing and in their ability to express themselves in their L2. It was hypothesised that creative writing could have ...an impact on these areas. Over the course of the 2019 academic year, third-year English majors in a Japanese university enrolled in a creative writing program completed a "Language Skills Assessment," kept a learner diary under freewriting conditions and took part in semi-structured interviews which were conducted at the end of the year. Despite a small sample size, the results were positive. Results from the questionnaires showed an upturn in self-assessment of L2 writing ability. Word count in freewriting activities showed an increase indicating a concurrent increase in writing fluency, an indicator of increased confidence. Responses in learner diaries and in the semi-structured interviews supported these results, and students were clear that creative writing was a significant factor in their increased confidence regarding L2 writing. Keywords Confidence, motivation, academic writing, creative writing, identity
InAmbient Rhetoric,Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the ...dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act.Rickert develops the concept of ambience in order to engage all of the elements that comprise the ecologies in which we exist. Culling from Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology inBeing and Time,Rickert finds the basis for ambience in Heidegger's assertion that humans do not exist in a vacuum; there is a constant and fluid relation to the material, informational, and emotional spaces in which they dwell. Hence, humans are not the exclusive actors in the rhetorical equation; agency can be found in innumerable things, objects, and spaces. As Rickert asserts, it is only after we become attuned to these influences that rhetoric can make a first step toward sufficiency.Rickert also recalls the foundational Greek philosophical concepts ofkairos(time),chora(space/place), andperiechon(surroundings) and cites their repurposing by modern and postmodern thinkers as "informational scaffolding" for how we reason, feel, and act. He discusses contemporary theory in cognitive science, rhetoric, and object-oriented philosophy to expand his argument for the essentiality of ambience to the field of rhetoric. Rickert then examines works of ambient music that incorporate natural and artificial sound, spaces, and technologies, finding them to be exemplary of a more fully resonant and experiential media.In his preface, Rickert compares ambience to the fermenting of wine-how its distinctive flavor can be traced to innumerable factors, including sun, soil, water, region, and grape variety. The environment and company with whom it's consumed further enhance the taste experience. And so it should be with rhetoric-to be considered among all of its influences. As Rickert demonstrates, the larger world that we inhabit (and that inhabits us) must be fully embraced if we are to advance as beings and rhetors within it.
What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then holds rubrics up for critical scrutiny in the ...context of contemporary developments in the field. As an alternative to the generic character and decontextualized function of scoring guides, he offers dynamic criteria mapping, a form of qualitative inquiry by which writing programs (as well as individual instructors) can portray their rhetorical values with more ethical integrity and more pedagogical utility than rubrics allow. To illustrate the complex and indispensable insights this method can provide, Broad details findings from his study of eighty-nine distinct and substantial criteria for evaluation at work in the introductory composition program at "City University." These chapters are filled with the voices of composition instructors debating and reflecting on the nature, interplay, and relative importance of the many criteria by which they judged students' texts. Broad concludes his book with specific strategies that can help writing instructors and programs to discover, negotiate, map, and express a more robust truth about what they value in their students' rhetorical performances.
Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? ...The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.
The socially minded linguistic study of storytelling in everyday life has been rapidly expanding. This book provides a critical engagement with this dynamic field of narrative studies, addressing ...long-standing questions such as definitions of narrative and views of narrative structure but also more recent preoccupations such as narrative discourse and identities, narrative language, power and ideologies. It also offers an overview of a wide range of methodologies, analytical modes and perspectives on narrative from conversation analysis to critical discourse analysis, to linguistic anthropology and ethnography of communication. The discussion engages with studies of narrative in multiple situational and cultural settings, from informal-intimate to institutional. It also demonstrates how recent trends in narrative analysis, such as small stories research, positioning analysis and sociocultural orientations, have contributed to a new paradigm that approaches narratives not simply as texts, but rather as complex communicative practices intimately linked with the production of social life.
A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers' Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty
As the world's preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop ...has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the "workshop" method of classroom peer criticism.
Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program-such as Flannery O'Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson-David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers' Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.
