New instructors often face feeling like an imposter. This article explains an innovative contributioncalled the Music-Coaching-Improv (M-C-I) Framework of 15 skills that includes the top five ways touse music, five key coaching skills, and five core improv skills. The M-C-I Framework was thefoundation for three improv exercises that were selected…

Practitioner Exchanges (PXs) at Luna Dance Institute are casual community conversations co-facilitated by dance educators around a topic of dance teaching inquiry. With the physical disconnection of the COVID era, these in-person roundtables shifted to Zoom, and became even more essential in bringing teaching artists together. Educators from all…

From a social constructivist perspective, learning happens by way of engagement with other people and with objects in the environment, often through a process of play and exploration. The notion of tinkering illustrates this mode of creative play, which is relevant not only to youth learning but also to educators' professional learning. In this…

The purpose of this research is to study (i) the history and knowledge development of papercutting in Western Henan, and (ii) the process of studying cultural heritage learning design and development of cultural and creative products. Qualitative research methods were used. Field data were collected through research documents and surveys,…

Drawing from a range of ethnographic information gathered within a participatory design project on after-school learning and educational justice, this paper describes the new ways of seeing and relating that emerged when researchers and educators "examined the obvious" (Erickson 1973/84) and closely analyzed the embodied--physical,…

Experience of nature is widely linked to well-being, including psychological restoration. Benefits to creativity have been explored in a limited number of studies which refer to theories of restorative environments as frameworks, but it is unclear which aspects of the environment and person-nature transactions are implicated in these processes. In…

Participating in creative activities is associated with increased positive emotions and enhanced subjective well-being in general populations. However, these relationships are less understood in the daily lives of creative individuals who regularly engage in both professional creative behaviors and everyday creative experiences. Therefore, in this…

In drama lessons based on improvisation and role playing, participants express themselves spontaneously, take on various roles and act out by pretending. With improvisation, which is one of the two basic strategies used together with role playing in drama, the participants act in accordance with the designed dramatic fiction. The goal of this…

For many music students studying classical piano in tertiary institutions, techniques in improvisation are not included in their undergraduate curriculum. Despite the acknowledged musical benefits of improvisation, piano pedagogy curricula remain firmly rooted in the nineteenth century, focusing on the performance of the familiar canon of…

Student engagement in tertiary cinema studies can be fickle: while most students respond strongly to films, little regard is similarly paid to prescribed readings or other coursework that is crucial to developing complex critical thinking with media. This paper presents a case study of an intervention aimed to remedy this disparity of student…

Improvisation is a fundamental aspect of musicianship and an important pursuit in music education. Children in music classes throughout the world are engaged with improvisation in a variety of modes and settings. Whether singing, physically moving, or playing an instrument, the act of improvising in front of others may raise one's…

Improvisation is an important element of global musical practices. However, musical improvisation is often neglected in K-12 and collegiate music education programs, with some music educators suggesting that improvisation cannot be taught. Rather, improvisation must be facilitated, enabled, and fostered. In this review of literature, I examined…

This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular…

Creativity can be measured with a variety of methods including self-reports, others reports, and ability tests. While typical self-reports are best understood as weak proxies of creativity, biographical reports that assess previous creative activities seem more promising. Drawbacks of such measures -- including skewed item distributions, a lack of…

This classroom-based action research explored the influence of creative engagement strategies-- a combination of Participation Squares and Spin-the-Wheel--on enhancing student engagement in a middle school classroom. The study was motivated by a recurring issue of poor student engagement. The intervention, used as a class starter to boost student…