CREATIVITY IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC: lessons from CompeTI.CA & Brilliant Labs research in Education By Jacob Lingley | Instructional Design & Co-Program Director | Brilliant Labs Dr. Viktor Freiman | Professor, Université de Moncton | Department of Elementary Education and Educational Psychology | Faculty of Education The article below is a summarized excerpt of a longer piece of research forthcoming on our Academic Blog (www.brilliantlabs.ca/blog). If you are interested in learning more about the topics presented in this article, be sure to check out our blog before November 2020 for the full version. The blog format will include a brief discussion regarding if some of the speculative thoughts became a reality. The blog will also feature more detail about the collaboration
Multiple school observations conducted by the CompeTI.CA research team has documented, since 2016, important gains in student creativity (Freiman and Kamba, 2020). For instance, when team members arrived at one school in western New Brunswick, they were literally pulled by three Grade 3 students over to a project that filled the foyer of their school. Researchers were soon captivated by a passionate, 40-minute long story about how a model community, made from cardboard, wires, tape and blinking lights was produced by the students’ entire class. It was an amazingly rich lesson of creativity. A lesson that was given by these students, one of which mentioned that he and his classmates felt more like teachers than students. The student voices were filled with pride for what they had made -- they had harnessed their collective creative power and accomplished something real. This was only one example of rich experiences students shared with us in makerspaces across the province from May 2016 when we made the first visit until March 2020 when school life of all students across New Brunswick dramatically changed. Almost seven months later, September 2020 has seen students, teachers and thousands of school community members return to a very different culture of learning. While the brilliant ideas of the young makers described above were 68
Brilliant Labs Magazine Revue Labos Créatifs
