Review of Research in Education

Inquiring into the democratization of creative early educational experiences through the lens of the politics of belonging, this review of research asks: What does research reveal about creative early educational experiences as they pertain to history, race, and justice? Seeking to better understand the racialization of creative early educational experiences, this review undertakes a transformative justice in education approach, attending to the historical roots of the contemporary racialized politics of belonging. Despite the creativity, improvisation, and imagination displayed historically by Black, Indigenous, and other Communities of Color, findings underscore how creative educational experiences prioritize Eurocentric onto-epistemologies, (re)inscribing inequitable schooling. Creative disruption and Black futurities offer two possible pathways to disrupt the legacy of racism in U.S. early schooling.

Environmental education seeks to foster meaningful connections to local and global environments through creative nature experiences. Responding to critiques of historical inequities, practitioners are prioritizing equitable access for historically marginalized youth, particularly from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities; this identity-centered prioritization, while essential, generates questions of normativity, diversity, relevance, and engagement within identity groups. Drawing on creativity as meaningful person-world encounters characterized by pluriperspective, future-oriented, nonlinear, and open-ended qualities, this chapter uses culturally sustaining pedagogy to explore how environmental education studies (a) operationalize Latinidad and associated constructs, (b) enact creative experiences in environmental education, and (c) qualify the roles of Latinx communities in shaping these creative experiences. We review studies of environmental education with Latinx youth in the United States that explicitly employ culturally sustaining approaches to engage these communities. We bring together these frameworks as a strategy to move beyond discrete notions of Latinidad in environmental education and toward nuanced conceptions of what it means to acknowledge and cultivate environmental literacies in these diverse comunidades.

Black creative educational experiences (BCEEs) are participatory, performative cultural experiences created by or for students, centering Black artistic expression, aesthetics, and engagement. Using African-centered frameworks, we provide a methodological guide for examining BCEEs in education research, which includes centering Black “ways of knowing,” validating creative expressions cultivated by and for Black people, acknowledging the influence of Black creative expression on research and practice, considering researcher positionalities as observers and cultivators of Black creative expression, and viewing Black creative expression as knowledge production. We found BCEEs are democratizing educational experiences rooted in intellectual and expressive freedom (freedom of movement/voice/tongue), and community building. BCEEs should be centered in education research, particularly postsecondary education, and prioritized in institutional programming, curricula, and high-impact practices.

In response to the special issue on democratizing creative educational experiences (CEE), we conducted a thematic analysis of recent scholarship on creativity and decolonization (2010–2021) and analyzed recurring tensions across literature grounded in Indigenous, Black, feminist, and non-western epistemological perspectives on creativity. We found themes that are not new but are yet to be taken up consistently and credibly in western creativity and education research and practice. For instance, spirituality emerges as a valuable ingredient for creativity, body as inseparable from the mind, dialectic resistance and resilience as acts of creative existence, and non-human agency as essential to the creative process. Informed by these themes, we share implications for research and practice, seeking new spaces inclusive of historically ignored onto-epistemologies.

Traditional definitions and assessments of creativity often neglect to identify the complexity surrounding Black students’ brilliance, leading to lack of access and funding. Further, even when recognized, Black students are often funneled into programs that do not facilitate positive development of their racial-ethnic identity. Through our systematic review of 155 publications, we developed the BlackCreate Framework to illustrate how effective Black creative educational experiences (BCEEs) create fugitive spaces for creative expression and education. Within these spaces, both societal oppression and community assets are explicitly discussed as a part of the creative process, providing students methods for adaptive coping and for addressing systemic inequities. Given these findings, we advocate for consistent funding and support for fugitive spaces to promote Black students’ creativity.

The movement from STEM to STEAM, with its emphasis on real-world applications, promises to meet the changing needs of a globally connected world. However, the potential of transdisciplinarity to inspire and deepen our understanding of who we are and how we make sense of a world in turmoil remains undertheorized. This article makes a case for repositioning STEAM education as democratized enactments of transdisciplinary education, where arts and sciences are not separate or even separable endeavors. Drawing upon posthumanist theorizing, three projects will exemplify transdisciplinarity across music, mathematics, and science education. Transgressing and transcending disciplinary boundaries, and attending to both human and nonhuman perspectives, we invite a rethink of the work of schools, going beyond democratizing creativity to fully enact posthumanist transdisciplinarity.

This chapter presents a broad interdisciplinary literature review linking artists’ economic precarity and need for but resistance to entrepreneurial skills, alongside colonial histories, structural racism, and hierarchies of taste in arts organizations. These themes are complemented empirically by engaging data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) to demonstrate indicators of attrition and privilege of arts alumni relative to their participation in the arts workforce. Meaningfully different associations across racial/ethnic groups are uncovered, showing structural exclusion of Black arts alumni in particular, in addition to other intersectional dynamics. This chapter underscores the importance of addressing student debt, the potential of creative pedagogies across the curriculum, and the need for imaginative approaches to renewed public funding of art and artists.

Creativity is a vital topic of various educational discourses, yet the support it receives within the school system is insufficient. This chapter focuses on four particular ways of making creativity more democratized, salient, and accessible in school settings. We start by exploring the educational benefits of egalitarian theoretical approaches to creativity. Then, we posit that democratization requires an equal focus on the cognitive aspects of creative potential and the motivational sphere of self-perception and self-regulation. Third, analyzing cognitive characteristics, we pay special attention to creative imagery: an understudied yet critical aspect of creative potential. By meta-analyzing available evidence from interventional studies, we show that there are multiple effective approaches to enhancing creative imagery, so—in a sense—supporting creative potential might be democratized as well by going beyond creativity training. Fourth, and finally, we discuss the possibilities of adapting so-called wise interventions for the educational psychology of creativity. We review available evidence of how to strengthen creative confidence and the perceived value of creativity among students, and how to make their creative self-regulation more effective.

This review brings together scholarship from creative educational experiences (CEE) and connected learning to describe a connected arts learning framework, reframing arts education in the 21st century with a focus on connecting youths’ interest-driven art making to opportunities through supportive relationships. Such a framework pushes the arts education field to consider outcomes beyond artistic skill acquisition and academic achievement to include a broader range of opportunities, including those civic- and career-related; promote interest development through targeted exposure to new forms of art making; create and implement professional development and programming to emphasize networks and connections; and draw from culturally sustaining practices to bridge connections between spaces for learning. A connected learning lens applied to what we know about high quality arts education sharpens our focus on how CEE can cultivate equity and social/cultural connection for youth.

This chapter provides a systematic, synthesizing, and critical review of the literature related to assessments of creativity in education from historical, theoretical, empirical, and practical standpoints. We examined the assessments used in the articles focusing on education that are published from January 2010 to May 2021 in eight creativity, psychological, and educational journals. We found that the assessments of creativity in education are split between psychological and education research and have increased international participation. Additionally, these assessments are more general than specific and focus more on cognitive than noncognitive aspects. Like previous reviews of assessments of creativity in general, this review showed that creativity in education is still mainly assessed by divergent thinking or creativity tests, self-report questionnaires, and product-based subjective techniques. We analyzed the benefits and drawbacks of each approach and highlighted many innovations in the assessment. We further discussed how the major assessment approaches address race, ethnicity, class, and gender issues in education. We concluded the review with recommendations for how to better assess creativity in education and how assessments of creativity in education contribute to our understanding of the creative educational experience and democratizing education.

Creativity forms a part of educational curriculum and is an important element of education research. Clearly, creativity research of the past has made a great impact in the ways in which creativity has been integrated within education and educational practice. Yet how creativity has been studied and how the methodologies of these studies shape produced knowledge and impact educational practice are still rather limited and limiting. This chapter calls for methodological experimentation, various forms of performativity, and creativity in the context of research utilizing speculative wonderings. We situate our arguments in different trends in creativity research and discuss more methodologically diverse, speculative, and creative futures.

In this review of literature, we attend to some of the ways that well-intentioned hopes for fostering creativity and encouraging greater inclusion may also rely on problematic premises that work to reify exclusionary logics and practices. More specifically, we historicize and critically examine how creativity studies—often despite explicit efforts to broaden notions of creativity, include marginalized populations, and democratize education—have differently reanimated racializing and ableizing discourses over seven decades of efforts to scientifically study, define, and/or cultivate creativity. In our emphasis on the relationship between past and present designs, we attend to more pernicious tensions and concerns that continue to hold implications for scholarship, research, policy, and practice.

This chapter explores the urgent relevance of posthumanist theory and practice for democratizing creative educational experiences in 21st-century schools, universities, and informal learning environments. Posthumanism challenges the myopic centering of the human in creative education in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence, and zoonotic disease, where nonhuman agencies are intricately imbricated in human cultures and lives. Using a cartographic methodology, the chapter critically maps key theories and debates in posthumanist creativity studies across four substantive fields of inquiry: (a) process philosophy, (b) affect studies, (c) place-based education, and (d) creative ecology. Drawing links between theoretical concepts and practical examples of creative experience across formal and informal education contexts, the chapter scopes an alternative agenda for critical studies of creativity in light of the posthuman turn.