Sunday, 3 November 2013

Participatory pedagogy and fostering creativity and innovativeness

  There is a tension between Creativity and Innovation. They are like two Dogs in their play: sometimes it is hard to say if they are fighting or playing a rough play or game. Some times it seems for me that we can not see world in all it´s colours. Of course there is allways a realm of economics and necessities. But there is and should be also the realm of culture, art and freedom to create.

But how to foster creativity and innovativeness? I attended three years of higher education project, which is called "Campus Conexus". The central result of the project closer to the idea of participatory learning and engagement to learning. It is not a narrow pedagogical theory but a broader idea of ​​democracy and people's ability to develop themselves, their society and culture. This pedagogy has its roots in John Dewey's "partisipatory pedagogy" and Freire and bell hooks' "engaged pedagogy ". Also, Bereiter´s and Scardamalia´s thoughts support the idea that genuine participation in community activities enables an in-depth knowledge and adoption of individuals and groups in a creative exchange of information and knowledge production.

Student engagement has been suggested as an indicator of quality of teaching. In turn, work engagement models among teachers appear to emphasize the significance of a sense of vigour, dedication and absorption as the key elements of job satisfaction. So far, however, teacher engagement has not received much attention in the context of higher education. Therefore, if engagement is seen as a predictor of students’ success in their studies, it can be assumed to be a good descriptor of teachers’ work engagement.