Edward Clapp [00:00:00]:
I believe when you contribute to an idea within a particular society, you’re affecting the culture of that society in some sort of way. Whether you’re contributing a painting or a new song or a new scientific theorem, you’re contributing to the development of that culture. And we need to unpack all the pieces that are a part of culture and not just think of it from a social perspective, but also from a cultural perspective.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:27]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:30]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:32]:
This is the fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:36]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:41]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:52]:
Goal to help fuel the more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:00]:
So let’s begin. We are launching season five with Dr. Edward Clap. Edward is a principal investigator at Project Zero, interested in exploring creativity and innovation, design and maker centered learning, contemporary approaches to arts teaching and learning, and diversity, equity and inclusion in education. So in addition to his work as a researcher, Edward is also a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His most recent books include participatory creativity, introducing access and equity to the creative classroom, and maker centered learning, empowering young people to shape their worlds. Welcome to the show, Edward.

Edward Clapp [00:01:44]:
Hey, Cindy. Hey, Matt. It’s great to be here with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:48]:
And I’m going to clap because your last name is clap, so everyone’s going.

Edward Clapp [00:01:51]:
To remember that with an extra p for your pleasure. Ooh.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:55]:
So at the end of season four, we had Michael Hatchett Hansen on the show and he introduced our listeners to participatory creativity. Now, this was such a rich and interesting conversation, and we know you have worked closely with Michael over the years on this topic. So we thought given your extensive work on participatory creativity, we could extend and dig deeper into this important conversation. So for those of you who haven’t heard what participatory creativity is, could you please share with us, Edward, what it is and what it looks like?

Edward Clapp [00:02:29]:
I certainly can. Thank you so much, Cindy. But before I answer that question, I do want to give a big shout out to my great friend and colleague, Michael Hanchett Hansen. Back in the day, he was a professor of mine when I was doing my graduate studies and continues to be a mentor and colleague and great friend today. So participatory creativity would have never came to be without his participatory contributions to the work. But to get to your question, Cindy, the way that I define participatory creativity is uniquely contributing to the development of creative ideas within a particular social and cultural setting, which I understand might be a little bit different from the way Michael defines it. And I’m happy to unpack that with you. Sure.

Cyndi Burnett [00:03:11]:
Why don’t you unpack it?

Edward Clapp [00:03:13]:
Sure. So one of the things that Michael and I have been talking about lately is I’m not going to be able to quote him word for word, but I believe his definition of participatory creativity is something along the lines of contributing to ideas or contributing to developments within society. And I add the word culture to society for a couple of reasons. For one reason to give a nod to social cultural creativity studies, which has a long history and foundations that stretch back to chicks and mahai and other folks. And indeed, there’s been the social cultural manifesto around creativity. So to include both of those words, social and cultural, but also because I believe when you contribute to an idea within a particular society, you’re affecting the culture of that society in some sort of way. Whether you’re contributing a painting or a new song or a new scientific theorem, you’re contributing to the development of that culture. And we need to unpack all the pieces that are a part of culture, and not just think of it from a social perspective, but also from a culture.

Matthew Worwood [00:04:27]:
And just to follow up on that, one of the things that I remember talking to Michael about was this idea of contributing to change. But I’m wondering, is there a deliberate approach to which we go about making change? We have the intent to change in this way, or does it also consider the fact that sometimes our actions have unintended consequences that lead to kind of changes that we wasn’t necessarily expecting? And perhaps sometimes those changes aren’t always for the good.

Edward Clapp [00:04:53]:
Matt, that’s an excellent question, and we’re going deep really fast. So I do believe that contributing to change is deliberate. From the perspective of Howard Gruber, which my colleague Michael Hansen would have mentioned, creativity is purposeful work. And I would suggest that purpose involves intention and deliberateness. So I do think that engaging in change, engaging in participatory creativity is purposeful work is deliberate work. But I would further say that there are ways to participate in creativity which might seem a little less intentional or less purposeful. In my work, I have previously described the idea of contributing stakeholders, and you have a primary group of contributing stakeholders who are engaged in the work. But then you have secondary and tertiary groups of contributing stakeholders who may have unknowns to themselves done something in the past that influences the work of others in the present.

Edward Clapp [00:05:58]:
So they might not be intentionally participating in a creative endeavor in some way, but they are participating in that creativity based on their prior work, which might have had other intentions to the other part of your question, Matt, about creativity isn’t always for the good. I think that opens up a subjective question, well, what is the good? And whose good really matters? But some of my recent work has been around thinking about the issue of ethics and action. So if we’re going to empower young people to shape their world, support them in being creative in some way, then it’s almost our responsibility as educators and other people that engage in creativity studies to bring a sense of ethics and ethical thinking into the creative process. Otherwise, we’re giving people sharp tools and not necessarily equipping them with the sensibilities on how best to use those tools.

Cyndi Burnett [00:06:59]:
So, Edward, when I first heard about participatory creativity, and I heard you speak on the topic, my mind was really shaken because so much of the creativity work that has been done in the field for the last 70 years that we’ve really been focused on this area has been around the creative person and the creative individual. And this really shifts creativity out of the individual and into this participatory where everyone is sort of a participant and a player in new ideas. So what’s really interesting to me is how this participatory creativity removes the ego. So no longer are we looking know you mentioned in the book Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, and saying, oh, look at all these eminent creators or look at all these wonderful things and how we have this focus on individualism, especially in the western culture, and all of a sudden we’re shifting this into it’s about everyone. It’s about how everyone contributes. And so, you know, removing this ego of like, I’m going to be a highly creative person or I’m going to do all these great works and it’s about me. How do people respond to this?

Edward Clapp [00:08:04]:
That’s an excellent question, Cindy, and I’m glad you brought it up. People respond to this in very different ways. It all depends on how you arrive or how you come to the conversation. And I think many people within the field of creativity studies will be well attuned to the social, cultural perspective of creativity. This won’t be new news to them. This will be material that they’ve been reading for the last 30 years or more. But other folks who might be coming at this work from different perspectives, maybe a practitioner perspective, might arrive at this work and find it very jarring. So something I say when I’m giving a lecture and in front of educators, I kind of make a stance when I’m up front and I say, I want to point out something very specific about my understanding of participatory creativity.

Edward Clapp [00:08:52]:
And I say, no one is creative. Even children are not creative. The thing that is creative are ideas. And when we move the focus from individuals to ideas, so, as previous theorists have said, when we take creativity out of the skulls and skin of individuals and place it in a social space, that allows everyone to participate in creativity, bringing their unique talents, expertise, cultural perspectives to the table, so that everyone can engage in the development of creative ideas, not be judged on what it means to be creative in some way.

Matthew Worwood [00:09:33]:
What pops into my mind is conversations we’ve had around kind of creative potential. The concept is that we have an idea, but of course, if it stays within us, it only has potential to be creative. And I think what you’re highlighting is that when we put an idea out there into the environment, there’s opportunities for us to receive feedback, feedback from our colleagues, feedback from our peers, and as you reference, stakeholders, people that perhaps we’re designing for to try and improve their lives. And so as we kind of move into a classroom environment, I’m thinking about, what are some of the specific strategies that teachers can do to facilitate that kind of collaborative experience? And a student’s thrown an idea out there, and now we’ve got to think about all of the different things that we have to consider when we bring that idea to fruition during development, what are some of the key things that teachers need to think about as they facilitate that process?

Edward Clapp [00:10:26]:
Excellent question. Thank you so much, Matt. There are many different ways to think about strategies for taking a participatory approach to creativity in the classroom. I’m going to name about three of them. The first one would be home in on ideas. So really focus on the broader idea. Don’t get too hung up about artifacts or products. So don’t worry about the drawing or the painting or the first kind of prototype of that robot or that first sketch of something.

Edward Clapp [00:11:02]:
Let’s not focus on the artifacts. Let’s focus on the ideas. And then when we focus on the ideas, well, what’s the broader story behind those ideas? Something that’s central to the participatory approach to creativity is something that my colleagues and I call a biography of an idea. So what is the life story or history of an idea? And this is very intentional, because we find when we look back at the history of creativity studies from a very individualism or individual based perspective, one of the ways that researchers studied creativity was that they looked at individual folks who were deemed to be creative geniuses in air quotations here. And then they kind of wanted to tell the life story or the history, the biography of that individual, to find the secret sauce. Well, what was it about that person that made them creative? And what we learned from all these biographies is there is no secret sauce. Those individuals are diverse as the things that they may have participated in the invention of. So the twist here is, what if we thought about some of those creative individuals and instead told the life story or the biographies of them as individuals? What if we told the biographies of the ideas that they’re most known for? And if we tell the history or the life story or the biography of those ideas, we’ll see that many people contributed to those ideas over time.

Edward Clapp [00:12:25]:
So, to get back to your question, Matt, what I would suggest is to really focus on ideas. So what’s the idea that’s being proposed? What’s the story behind these ideas, and what does the future look like? What’s the next chapter that we might write look like? So that’s my first suggestion. My second suggestion is to find an on ramp for everyone. So to really think about the different roles that young people might play in the development of an idea. So not who are the best actors in a classroom, who’s the best at drawing or something like that, but what are the various ways that young people might be able to play, or various roles that young people might play as they participate in the development of those ideas and focus on diverse perspectives. What are the different characteristics, or what are the different cultural backgrounds that young people bring to the work? And how can we capitalize on that and allow young people to bring the best of themselves to creative work? My last one, and this closes out the original book, and it’s going to close out the next book, is to always remember to focus on joy. Creative work should be fun, and to really focus on bringing the energy and the joy and the fun to creative work.

Matthew Worwood [00:13:41]:
You know what I really like about that, and it is part of my follow up question around equity, is thinking about unpacking where did that idea come from? What have I experienced in my life that has contributed to that idea? How am I viewing that idea because of my unique background, and then making sure that within that classroom environment. There are opportunities for other people to share how they’re perceiving that idea, to consider how their idea actually might be similar, but it’s a little bit different because of their unique perspective that has come about because of different backgrounds. So to that point, how do we kind of, like, tackle the equity piece a little bit more directly in the classroom environment when it comes to not only generating ideas, but then also selecting the ideas as well?

Edward Clapp [00:14:26]:
That’s another great question. Matt, thank you so much. And I’m glad to go into that space of talking about access and equity. Indeed, that was the subtitle of my original book, introducing access and equity to the creative classroom. And I really think that participatory creativity, when done know, can really achieve that, and it has a lot to do with. I think the answer to your question is really in your question. When we think about the ideas that are being presented, how can each young person who’s engaged with that idea think about it from their own social and cultural perspective, think about it from their own family history, think about it from the things that they’re interested in today and the things that they really do well, or the things that challenge or make them struggle. So really taking this individual approach to how do I come to this idea? And then how can I work collectively with others to advance the idea to its next iteration? And I’ll follow that up really quickly by saying one of the pitfalls of participatory creativity is that it feels like it’s anti individual, and that’s not true.

Edward Clapp [00:15:30]:
It might have an anti individualism approach, but it is very pro individual. It’s all about what does the individual bring to the broader group, and how do we highlight that individuality that each person brings? It’s not about individual ownership of creative ideas. It’s about unique participation in collective idea development.

Cyndi Burnett [00:15:53]:
So how does this differ from the profile of participation?

Edward Clapp [00:15:57]:
Excellent question. Very deeply related. Essentially what a profile participation is. It’s the many ways in which a young person might participate in creativity. And there’s some history here. My colleague Howard Gardner, who works with me at Project Zero, he is well known, as many of your listeners will be familiar with, with the theory of multiple intelligences. And one of the ways that that theory has been wrongly interpreted is that everyone has a single learning style. Everyone has one kind of intelligence.

Edward Clapp [00:16:30]:
And Howard never met for the theory to be interpreted in that way. Howard’s understanding was, everyone has access to all of the intelligences in different degrees, at different levels. And when you look at the different levels, of your intelligences that makes up your profile of intelligence. So I’m borrowing a lot from Howard Gardner here by coining a term called a profile of participation. So young people don’t participate in creativity in just one way. They participate in creativity in many different ways that make up their profile of participation. And those profiles of participation are not static, but they change and develop over time. So another pitfall of participatory creativity is labeling kids and putting them into boxes.

Edward Clapp [00:17:14]:
Oh, that kid is the designer. Oh, that kid’s the experimenter. Oh, that kid’s the project manager, and oh, that kid is the ideator. Well, those kids are those things, but they’re also many other things. So we really limit young people’s potential if we just think about them as participating in creativity in a unidirectional sort of way. Participating in creativity is very dynamic and has many different facets to it, and it’s really powerful to draw out what a profile participation is for a particular student.

Matthew Worwood [00:17:45]:
And I do just want to kind of highlight one thing that you said that I think is very relevant for educators is quite often when we go about implementing any type of form of project based learning. I certainly have observed some educators kind of like say, okay, they don’t necessarily tell the student what role they’re taking, but they allow the students to self select what role they’re going to take. And so very quickly, you can have the person who’s comfortable with computing or perhaps creating and making digital media products. Oh, I’m not going to engage too much in the idea because I’m going to get involved in the development phase. And I do think we as educators need to make sure that everyone is equally contributing to the generation of ideas and the selection of ideas. And we as educators need to help students at least challenge them to not always kind of fall into the same standard role within these group projects. Yes, you might be really skilled at this, and when we get to the point of making the animation, we’re going to call upon your skills, but we also need to make sure that you are also engaging earlier in the process and participating, because it’s not just about creating and making, it’s also about discussion, collaboration, exchange of ideas before we get to that stage.

Edward Clapp [00:18:54]:
As know Matt, that’s a great point, and I’m going to say yes and no. I think that, yes, it’s important to have young people participating in the development of ideas over time and to be connected to the work that they’re doing, but no, because sometimes kids come in and come out, and we need to give them that space of participating when they feel most apt to do so, but stepping out or kind of participating in a different way when it feels forced or sort of it’s going in a direction that doesn’t suit them. We also need to give young people the opportunity to opt out of a particular idea development process if it’s just feeling forced for them, or it’s not going in a direction that meshes with their talent, skills, or cultural perspectives. And perhaps they need to start down a new path in some way. This also reminds me of a recent book chapter that I wrote, probably a couple of years now, called don’t call it collaboration and drawing the difference between participation and common understandings of collaboration. Now, there’s volumes of literature written about the concept of collaboration from an academic perspective and a practitioner perspective, but from a very colloquial stance, from a very common understanding of collaboration. We hear people talk about collaboration in terms of everyone doing everything together at once, and everyone doing everything together at once isn’t the most productive way to engage and work as a team. I use the example of soccer, a soccer game, and I have a five year old daughter, and when I watch her soccer games, it does look like everyone going after the ball at once.

Edward Clapp [00:20:44]:
But if you were to watch a professional soccer game, or a soccer game at a slightly more advanced level than the peewee league, you would see that people have different roles, they have different positions, and they go in and out of when they’re interacting with the ball, their positions are dynamic, and someone who’s in one position might kind of step into another role when it’s necessary for them to do so. But we shouldn’t restrict people to participating in the game. In the idea development, pursuing the ball, everyone shouldn’t be doing the same thing at once, because that’s not productive. But we also shouldn’t just let people stand within their ten foot radius and not go outside of it, because they need to have that dynamism so that they can hop in and out of the game when they’re needed and when they feel their expertise will be most welcome.

Matthew Worwood [00:21:31]:
I appreciate your response, and I think it’s about that balance, and there is a debate actually, in my town about should the u nine s be changing position? Because at this stage they don’t quite know what is their best position, even though they have a preferred position. But until you’ve actually had an opportunity to rotate the team, you don’t know, right? So I think as educators, it is about getting that balance and I think it’s important to not necessarily put someone who’s completely uncomfortable with their right foot playing on the right side and constantly being asked to kick the ball with their right foot. But at the same time, we need to give them an opportunity to perhaps have different chances on the field in different positions, and it’s a balancing act.

Edward Clapp [00:22:13]:
Matt, you bring up a great point about when do we stretch young people beyond where their comfort zone is versus when do we allow them just to be their best selves in that space. And I think that’s a challenge for the teacher in the creative classroom just as much as it is a challenge for the coach on the soccer pitch.

Cyndi Burnett [00:22:35]:
Thanks for that, Edward. I have one more big question for you. You talk a lot in your book about the crisis of creativity in education, and you talk about eight different crises we have in education around creativity. Can you share with us just a few of these?

Edward Clapp [00:22:52]:
Yes, indeed, Cindy. That’s a great point. And that was indeed the impetus for the first book on participatory creativity. And that know, kind of moving beyond or addressing these eight different crises in creativity. The way I originally framed it were that there were five crises of creativity stemming from our culture of individualism, and there were additional three crises of creativity stemming from our cultures of power. And this could be quite a long lecture, but I’ll just try to sum it up really quickly. The first crisis of creativity from our cultural of individualism are that some kids are more creative than others. Misconception.

Edward Clapp [00:23:31]:
And this is really rooted in thinking about creativity from an individualist perspective, but also thinking of it from a culture of achievement and testing. So if there’s a creativity test, then students perform differently on that test. And if they’re given a grade in some sort of way, well, then indeed, some students are more creative than others. And that sets us up as educators and administrators and people that think about creativity to do something very challenging. And that’s to think that, okay, well, some students are more creative than others, or maybe even worse, some students are creative and other kids are not. And when we kind of think of when we approach creativity from that perspective, that leads us down a dangerous path, potentially, to track young people into creative roles versus other people out of those creative roles. So we have to get away from that. Some kids are more creative than others.

Edward Clapp [00:24:27]:
Misconception. The other crisis, or a second crisis of creativity from our culture of individualism is the I’m just not a creative person syndrome. And I know in my life, and I’m sure in your life and many of the lives of your listeners, we’ve all heard this before, oh, I’m just not a creative person. And unfortunately, we might have heard that in our classrooms. Young people say, oh, I’m just not a creative person. Oh, I can’t just do that. And that comes from defining creativity too narrowly. Creativity is doing one certain thing.

Edward Clapp [00:24:54]:
It’s the arts bias towards creativity. If you can’t draw, you’re not creative. You can’t play the violin, you’re not creative or something else. If you can’t build a robot, you’re not creative. So, opening up what it means to participate in creativity and not just narrowly define creativity so that young people can say, I’m just not a creative person. And that leads into the next crisis of creativity. From our culture of individualism, narrowly defining creativity privileges some students and alienates other students. So if we define creativity in a certain distinct way, in a way that privileges the cognitive capacities or abilities or talents of one group of students, well, then that alienates a whole other group of students who bring other skills and talents and cultural perspectives to our classroom.

Edward Clapp [00:25:41]:
The fourth crisis of creativity from our culture of individualism is denying young people the opportunity to invent and create with others. And we know from the work of Lev Vagotsky and many others that learning is inherently social. It happens through the interactions of groups. So if learning happens through the interaction of groups, then so, too does creativity happen through the interactions of groups. And then the fifth crisis of creativity, from the perspective of our culture of individualism, is that if we have an individual approach to creativity, we’re ill equipping young people for success in life and work in the current era, in the current decade and the decades to come. Because we know from the contemporary workplace, it’s not all about the creative individual sitting in their cubicle, making stuff all by themselves, that the creative workplace is very interactive. It’s all about people sharing ideas and developing them off of one another. So those are the five crises of creativity from our culture of individualism.

Edward Clapp [00:26:40]:
The three additional crises of creativity from our culture of power are this whole notion that we’re assuming that creativity in education is socially and culturally neutral. And I would definitely talk about this differently if I was writing about it today versus how I wrote about it more than half a decade ago. So the next crisis of creativity stemming from our culture of power is assuming that creativity in education is socially and culturally neutral. And if we look back at creativity studies for 20 or 30 years, or maybe even ten years ago, we’ll see that the field was very white and it was very male. And we can’t assume that the white men who develop creativity studies, and it’s not exclusively white men, but largely the bibliography or the reference sections in articles about creativity studies, reference the work of white men. And if we think that the work of those individuals is objective, we’re really fooling ourselves. But the work of creativity studies has been very much from a dominant white culture perspective. And to the degree that creativity studies, which supports creative curricula and education, is coming from that perspective, we can’t assume that it’s socially, culturally neutral.

Edward Clapp [00:27:53]:
It’s socially and culturally charged from that dominant white male perspective. The next crisis of creativity from our culture of power is a misalignment in identity and creative icons. And we’ve all seen the posters of Steve Jobs, we’ve all heard about Charles Darwin, and we’ve all heard about Vincent van Gogh, and we’ve all seen those posters of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at us, telling us how creative he is. These are all dead white men. And too often, the identity of creative icons, the representation of creativity, doesn’t look like the majority of our students. And the last crisis of creativity stemming from our culture of power is an imbalance of opportunity. And this is starkly true here in the United States, as it is true in other countries, is that only a select few students have access to creative learning experiences, and they tend to be students who are at public schools in more wealthy districts, or students who have access to creative learning experiences within independent and international schools. Now, that’s not exclusively true, but we do see that access to creative learning experiences grossly falls on the lines of race and class.

Edward Clapp [00:29:09]:
So there’s an imbalance in access to creative learning experiences. So if you put those all together, five plus three equals the eight barriers to participation or access to creative learning experiences.

Matthew Worwood [00:29:25]:
So time is getting a little short. Now, usually what we do is we finish up and ask all of our guests three tips to take away. But I think you addressed that earlier in the interview, so we’re going to skip that. And I’ve got this burning question that I wanted to ask you, and it’s a little bit associated with your work around agency for design, and it’s a tip for me. So one of the things that I’m very sensitive to when it comes to ideas is within the process, we quite often are looking to identify problems. And I kind of, like, talk a little bit to my students about what makes a good problem. So I say, well, ideally, you’re really passionate about it. If the problem is addressed, it’s likely to have a big impact and improve the lives for either yourselves or other people.

Matthew Worwood [00:30:08]:
And there’s opportunities for creativity. And I talk a little bit about the concept of ill defined and defined problems. And if we can find a nice ill defined problem, then there’s probably lots of opportunities for creativity. And what I kind of have the students do is go around and try and identify a problem, ideally a good problem, as I’ve outlined. So my question for you is, from your work with agency for design, do you have a specific strategy that I can take away and begin adopting within my classroom? So when I task students to go out and identify a problem or find a problem, they can implement this strategy. So we start off with a really good place, which is some really, really exciting problems that hopefully will generate a whole bunch of exciting ideas.

Edward Clapp [00:30:52]:
That’s an excellent question. Matt. Thank you so much. And thank you for the reference to the work of agency by design and its associated framework for maker centered learning. I’ll share a quick resource for you and your listeners, and that is to visit the agency by design website, agencybydesign.org. And if you click on the thinking routines, tools and strategies bar, you will find dozens and dozens of tools to address exactly what you’re talking about. Matt looking at problems and working with problems in the classroom, but in general, just working with maker centered learning and supporting student empowerment and student agency. But to specifically answer your question, I might bring it back to participatory creativity a little bit and suggest thinking about a problem as an idea and thinking about a problem as a system.

Edward Clapp [00:31:39]:
So let’s start with an idea. If we think about a problem from the perspective of an idea, well, what is the biography of that idea? Who are the people that contributed to that idea over time? How did that idea take shape? And if we look at the history of that idea, then we might find future opportunity in those past histories. Another way is to think of a problem from the perspective of a system. And if we think of a system and take apart its various pieces, see the different players that are part of that system, understand how the parts and the pieces of a system interact with one another, we can then kind of, from taking the thing apart, find opportunities to put it back together again in a more effective way. So if we think about something of like the problem of institutional racism as an idea, well, what is the history of that idea? Who contributed to that idea? How did that idea take shape over time? If we think of the idea of or the concept of institutional racism as a system? Well, what are the different parts of the system? Who are the people that participate in that system? How do the parts and the people interact with one another? And once we take apart institutional racism as a system, how can we put it back together again in a way that we solve the problem that we started with? So those are some of my perspectives for jumping into thinking about problems as either ideas with histories to themselves or thinking about them from a systems based perspective, taking apart those systems and then putting them back together again in ways that better suit the needs, interests, and cultural perspectives of the young people who have those systems. The last thing I’ll say is I love to talk about this concept of redirecting authority, which comes from the agency by design project. And it’s a very intuitive concept to understand giving problems back to the people that have them. So not being the authority in the room that has to solve problems for young people, but saying, hey, who’s got this problem? How do they deal with it? And what would it look like to find resolution? So give problems back to the people that have them? Might be my last tip there.

Cyndi Burnett [00:33:47]:
So, Edward, thank you so much for joining us today. I want to highly recommend his book participatory creativity, and we will put a link to this in the description. I’ve already recommended it to at least a dozen colleagues. If you have five books on creativity and education, this should be one of them. I just absolutely love this book, and I can’t wait to hear about your next book coming out with Julie Reigns. And hopefully that will come out in the next year or two, and maybe we’ll bring you back on the podcast with Julie and to talk more about how teachers can deliberately bring in participatory creativity into the classroom. So that concludes this episode of the fueling Creativity and Education podcast. If you have any questions or thoughts about this episode or past or future episodes, please reach out to us at questions at fueling ##creativitypodcast com my name is Dr.

Cyndi Burnett [00:34:37]:
Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:34:39]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:34:42]:
This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dadsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.