The Roots of Creativity: Trans-disciplinary Thinking Skills as Tools for Creative Thinking and Learning in the 21st Century
This symposium addresses the trans-disciplinary thinking skills that support creativity. It will consider why and how thinking across disciplines and connecting between disciplines is essential to creative thinking for the 21st century. The symposium lays out the seven trans-disciplinary skills established in work by Root-Bernstein (1999) and Mishra, Koehler & Henriksen (2011), as essential tools for thinking. These seven creative-cognitive skills include: Perceiving, Patterning, Abstracting, Embodied Thinking, Modeling, Play, and Synthesis. Each presenter in this symposium will describe one of the skills in detail, and will discuss the theoretical, and pragmatic ways in which creativity is supported and nurtured by this skill. A range of examples will be given across different disciplines, and then to speak to different contexts of teaching and learning with technology. Each presentation will contribute to building a richly nuanced perspective on creativity for teaching and learning.