A Focused Exploration About How Technologically Enhanced Educational Approaches Can Positively Foster Early Childhood to Young Adult Learning and Creativity

Abstract

The critical focus of this co-authored paper will be to examine research approaches, design processes, and the analyses of their outcomes that address how and why technologically enhanced teaching and learning strategies and methods can positively affect the knowledge construction and critical thinking abilities of a wide range of learners, as well as those who teach them. More specifically, this paper will interrogate and examine how technologically facilitated learning and creativity nurturing affects the conceptualization, learning, instruction, immersion in design processes, and educational reforms that are evolving (or that perhaps need to evolve) in educational spaces designed to meet the needs of this set of learners. We propose to present information-cum-knowledge gleaned from over fifteen years of our own research in and around this area, as well as pertinent scholarship from several others who are and have been working in this space, that explore and interrogate two key foci. The first entails an examination of how interactive technologies could be leveraged to help students in these age ranges chart more meaningful and effective learning paths for themselves by enabling them to intertwine the knowledge and skills necessary to understand a given concept, phenomenon, or domain. Second, this paper will critically examine how information and communication technologies, or ICT (and the pedagogical approaches that these both affect and are affected by), might be used to pierce the siloed nature of the conceptually and methodologically constrained, subject-based teaching that pervades so much of the K-12 and university-level learning paradigms.