A Sociocultural Perspective on Creativity and Technology: New Synergies for Education

Creativity and technology are both essential to educational futures. A synergistic, sociocultural perspective provides an integrative framework with transformative implications for teaching and learning. We advocate for understanding these issues in education settings based on Glaveanu’s 5 A’s model, which moves away from the traditional 4P’s of creativity (person, product, process, and press) toward the language of actor, action, artifact, audience, and affordances. This model allows for a language and understanding of creativity based on the interrelation or interaction between its elements rather than the elements themselves. Technologies as tools to think, work, and create with are part of the social-material world and have different creative affordances (real and perceived). The advent of the internet in particular has unleashed ground-up creativity, which is in contrast to the traditional structures and boundaries of schooling. Digital devices in general (and the internet in particular) allow for dramatic creative shifts in society and new implications for how we think about teaching and learning.