The Mind of God

A radically dualist view of the relationship between God and the universe is apt to make the problem of Divine intervention more difficult than under other metaphysical conceptions. We need to find a closer relationship than this if the causal picture is to work. We could try saying that God is realized by the universe, without being reducible to the universe. He has no further substance over and above that of the universe, but he is not simply identical to the universe. I am not sure I know what this idea of realization comes to for the case of God and the universe, but it least it promises to make it feasible for God to be enmeshed in the natural causal order, without collapsing into it. It is not so much that God intervenes as supervenes, to use the jargon. On this picture, there is a mega- universe that includes both the physical universe and God, with the two locked somehow together

New Opportunities for Interest-Driven Arts Learning in a Digital Age

Traditionally in the United States, schools and after-school programs have played a promi-nent part in teaching young people about the arts. Arts education has been waning in K-12 public schools in recent times, however. This is especially true in low-income communities, where public schools have often cut back on arts instruction so they can devote limited public education dollars to subjects such as writing and math that are the focus of high-stakes standardized tests.When we look outside of school, however, we see a strikingly different landscape, one full of promise for engaging young people in artistic activity. What makes this landscape possible is an eagerness to explore that springs from youths' own creative passions -- what we call "interest-driven arts learning" -- combined with the power of digital technology.This report is a step in trying to understand the new territory. It gives a rundown of scholarship in the areas of arts and out-of-school-hours learning; offers a framework for thinking about interest-driven arts learning in a digital age; examines young people's media consumption; provides a survey of youths' creative endeavors online and elsewhere, along with a look at the proliferation of technologies that young people are using in the arts; and concludes with thoughts about challenges and possibilities for the futur

Learning In the Visual Arts and the Worldviews of Young Children

This paper reports a research study into the effects of rich,sustained visual arts instruction on 103inner city 9-year-olds in two major US cities. We use the lenses of social learning theory, theories of motivation and self-efficacy, and recentresearch on artistic thinking to investigate the programs' effects on children's self-beliefs and creative thinking. The study enlisted a pre -- post measure,treatment-comparison group design along with structured observations of participant andcomparison group classrooms. The arts students made significant comparative gains on a selfefficacy scale and on an 'originality' subscale of a standard creativity test. These effects are attributed to children's engagement in art and to the social organization of instruction includingreinforcing peer and student -- adult relationships. Relationships between self-efficacy beliefs andtendencies to think originally are explored

Building Creativity: Collaborative Learning and Creativity in Social Media Environments

Purpose: Using a systems-based approach to creativity and a sociocultural constructionist approach to learning, this study highlights how creative ideas emerge within a community and spread amongst its members. Design/methodology/approach: Using a design-based approach to research, this study took place within the social media environment, Quest Atlantis. Chat data was collected from 85 participants and screenshots were taken of the virtual architecture designed and built by players in the Quest Atlantis environment, in an effort to explore the nature of creativity and collaborative learning within the context of virtual 3D architectural construction. Findings: Findings illustrate the rise and spread of creativity in online communities and also point to the social and cultural nature of creativity. Research limitations/implications: As this is the first study of its kind, we focus on how creativity operates within a single community in order to draw implications about digital creativity more broadly. Practical implications: Implications for designing virtual and physical communities to promote creativity are discussed. Originality/value: Documenting and analyzing an entire creative system in the everyday world can be a challenging endeavor. Social media, by contrast, offers an opportunity to document, describe, and analyze creativity, extend Csikszentmihalyi’s work into the realm of social media and push back on current conceptions of digital creativity

Gaming Fluencies: Pathways into Participatory Culture in a Community Design Studio

Many recent efforts to promote new literacies involve the promotion of creative media production as a way to foster youth’s literate engagement with digital media. Those interested in gaming literacies view game design as a way to engage youth in reflective and critical reading of the gaming culture. In this paper, we propose the concept of “gaming fluencies” to promote game design as a context in which youth not only learn to read but also to produce digital media in creative ways. Gaming fluencies also present the added benefit of addressing equity issues of participation in the new media literacy landscape. We report on an ethnographic study that documented urban youth producing digital games in a community technology center. Our analyses focus on an archive of 643 game designs collected over a 24-month period, selecting a random sample to identify evidence of creative and technical dimensions in game designs. In addition, we highlight three case studies of game designs to identify different pathways into the participatory culture. Our goal is to illustrate how gaming fluencies allow for a wide range of designs, provide low thresholds and high ceilings for complex projects, and make room for creative expression. In our discussion, we address how gaming fluencies represent a complementary pathway for learning and participation in today’s media culture

The Connected Arts Learning Framework: An Expanded View of the Purposes and Possibilities for Arts Learning

The benefits of teaching art to young people have often fallen into two camps. Children study or practice "art for art's sake" to develop a particular skill. Or they approach "art for academics' sake" to enhance their other studies. But this report comes at arts learning from a different angle: What if learning about or practicing an art could help young people connect more directly to their communities and the world they live in? And how might that change the experience and outcomes for both students and communities? The report, led by Kylie Peppler, an expert in arts learning, and her team at the University of California, Irvine, begins with a connected learning framework. In connected learning, educators seek to create meaningful learning experiences based on young people's interests and then connect these experiences to real-world issues and communities. The authors put art within this context to discover how arts education can help young people build connections with their culture, identity, home lives, communities, professional artists, and future aspirations.

Youth, Technology, and DIY: Developing Participatory Competencies in Creative Media Production

Traditionally, educational researchers and practitioners have focused on the development of youths’ critical understanding of media as a key aspect of new media literacies. The 21st Century media landscape suggests an extension of this traditional notion of literacy – an extension that sees creative designs, ethical considerations, and technical skills as part of youth's expressive and intellectual engagement with media as participatory competencies. These engagements with media are also part of a growing Do-It-Yourself, or DIY, movement involving arts, crafts, and new technologies. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a framework and a language for understanding the multiple DIY practices in which youth engage while producing media. In the review, we will first provide a historical overview of the shifting perspectives of two related fields—new media literacies and computer literacy —before outlining the general trends in DIY media cultures that see youth moving towards becoming content creators. We then introduce how a single framework allows us to consider different participatory competencies in DIY under one umbrella. Special attention will be given to the digital practices of remixing, reworking, and repurposing popular media among disadvantaged youth. We will conclude with considerations of equity, access, and participation in after-school settings and possible implications for K-12 education

"We need it loud!": Preschool making from mediated and materialist perspectives

In this chapter, we frame data analysis from multimodal (Scollon, 2001; Kress, 2003) and materialist (Lenz Taguchi, 2010) perspectives to expand our understanding of the complex interplay of purposes, properties, and possibilities in a moment of playful making at an impromptu art table in a preschool classroom. This auditory double take-that listens and listens again--problematizes educational assumptions in a prominent anthropocentric pedagogy that reads child/material productions primarily as evidence of a linear, lockstep developmental sequence. To unpack a moment of early childhood art production from two perspectives, we explore research methods that move away from privileging order and coherence, taming chaotic intra-actions among materials and humans, discounting material catalysts and perhaps child purposes. This chapter advances a notion of development as jumbled, recursive entanglement of action, artifacts, and making worlds. Art becomes coproduction through which things and humans communicate purposes and possibilities

The Nirvana Effect: Tapping Video Games To Mediate Music Learning and Interest

Abstract. While rhythmic video games like Rock Band have enormous popularity, little attention has been paid to these types of games for their potential for music education. This is a missed opportunity, as the music concepts central to the comprehension of traditionally notated music, we believe, are embodied in rhythmic games’ notation system, including models of metric hierarchy, subdivision, and pattern identification. Furthermore, the game’s alternative notation serves as a novice-friendly method whose lessons can be applied to more traditional forms of notation, affording learners a way into more formal practices. To investigate these possibilities, our study identified 26 youth from an afterschool club with little to no prior experience with rhythmic video games to engage in Rock Band over the course of nine months. Analyzing the learning using a sociocultural framework, we sought to understand the relationship between players’ familiarity with the Rock Band notation and competence with traditional music concepts. Findings suggest that the ways which music is represented in Rock Band provides players with a “doorway in” to more formal music practices through heightening players’ interest and abilities in music. Implications for connecting out-of-school learning to the goals of the classroom are discussed

Composing Pieces for Peace: Using Impromptu to Build Cross-Cultural Awareness

Music has long played a role as an ambassador for peace and understanding between cultures. Yet, there is little research that gauges how creating music aids in the development of cross-cultural awareness. Given today’s tense political climate post-9/11, further investigation of the role that music can play in fostering cross-cultural awareness is needed. Using a sociocultural constructionist framework, this study investigated how 22 youth (12 girls and 10 boys) from the United States, in communication with youth in Tel-Aviv, Israel, analyzed and composed music steeped in traditional Hebrew, Arabic, and Western traditions using the computer program, Impromptu. Participants took part in pre-tests and post-tests to measure their awareness and respect for Israelis at the start and end of the study using the Cross-Cultural Awareness Drawing Task (Bar-Tal & Teichman, 2005). Using qualitative techniques, the researchers analyzed the written reflections of participants on their music composition process over the course of the intervention. Findings suggest that the music composition and analysis exercises had a positive impact on the development of crosscultural awareness over time among American students, helping to counter the common misconceptions about the Middle East fostered in today’s media