Creative Inquiry introduces both undergraduate students and general readers to the exploratory mindset and hands-on skills essential to the cultivation and implementation of new ideas. Using active learning, this book combines concise explanations and real-world examples with engaging exercises for readers to complete. The writing style is conversational, yet substantial, and the examples given reflect a wide range of disciplines, from early aeronautics and linguistics to zoology. Creative Inquiry emphasizes the importance of direct experience, personal initiative, and the generation of new knowledge. Step by step, the exercises build the skills students need when they tackle the final self-designed Capstone project. Positioned at the end of major sections, five brief self-reflection papers are designed to help students assess their progress and revise their assignments. To encourage collaboration and strengthen metacognition, teams of three to six participants work together on these papers. This encourages an iterative mindset and provides extensive practice with writing. The appendix provides a lively and practical "Top Ten List" of writing strategies for students who need extra advice.

This edited volume brings together international research that explores children’s creativity in STEM inquiry. It takes the position that creativity is relevant in all aspects of life and is essential for adaptable and innovative thinking. The research informed content of the book, highlights both challenges and opportunities for growing children’s creativity. The book focuses on fostering children’s creativity and natural curiosity in the world around them through STEM inquiry. Through STEM inquiry, children are learning through a cross- disciplinary approach where they apply concepts from multiple fields as they are thinking creatively, problem solving and constructing solutions. Educators play a critical role in encouraging children’s creativity by modelling creativity, providing creative projects for children and importantly, establishing rich culturally connected environments where children have the resources, conditions and opportunities for acting and thinking creatively. The book provides a lens for looking at children’s creativity in a range of different cultural settings. It offers insight and guidance to future research and will build educators’ capacity for developing children’s creative practices.

This book explores tools and techniques for creating the arts with groups. It provides insights into why workshops are such an effective and relevant form of creative practice. Throughout, two experienced practitioners share successful principles and qualities. They also include examples of workshops that explore ways of facilitating creative exploration. The authors believe that underpinning any good workshop practice is an understanding of what constitutes a workshop. This is a process in which the relationship between artist/researcher and participant/audience, maker, and witness is fluid. It extends each individual’s abilities and connects doing to learning to inquiring in a single process. The book itself is a dialogue on, and an investigation into, this practice. It fully explores the specificities of workshop practice in relation to how it engages others in arts-based research. Readers learn how workshops involve inquiry into six areas: inquiry into subjects, artistic processes, skills, self, the world, and relationships with others. In the end, this informed investigation helps practitioners to better reflect on their own approaches to arts-based inquiry and research. This, in turn, leads to a better understanding of how readers can use workshops for the maximum benefit of all participants, both individuals and groups.

This book offers a compelling research alternative for dance/movement (and other creative arts) therapists who recognize how valuable artistic ways of knowing are to the theory and practice of their profession. It encourages participation in a mode of inquiry that invites fully authentic engagement, inspires excitement about discovery, and builds confidence in abilities to contribute to the professional body of research literature. Artistic inquiry is defined as research that: (1) uses artistic methods of gathering, analyzing, and/or presenting data; (2) engages in and acknowledges a creative process; and (3) is motivated and determined by the aesthetic values of the researcher(s). These three defining characteristics are theoretically and practically examined in depth and accompanied by examples of artistic inquiry relevant to dance/movement therapy. Interdisciplinary support for the validity of artistic inquiry is drawn from a rich field of resources, including philosophy, social sciences, education, and the arts. Still/Here, a multimedia dance work by Bill T. Jones, is presented as a work of art that can be viewed as artistic inquiry. Jones' use of dance as the primary expressive medium, drawing from the verbal and nonverbal narratives of people living with terminal illnesses, exemplifies the potential that artistic inquiry has for dance/movement therapy. The book concludes with recommendations for the promotion and evaluation of artistic inquiry projects. Throughout, it upholds a vision of research as a vital, satisfying, and essential part of a dance/movement therapist's career.

This book serves as an excellent primer for teachers on the value of inquiry learning as a teaching modality. Teresa Coffman clarifies the importance of inquiry learning under the umbrella of self-directed knowledge construction. Using Inquiry in the Classroom offers teachers the theoretical underpinnings of inquiry learning, as well as practical takeaways of activities that can be put to immediate use in the classroom. - Back cover.

Whether speaking of student or master, Zen hinges on the question. Zen practice does not necessarily focus on the answers, but on finding a space in which we may sustain uncertainty and remain present and upright in the middle of investigations. Zen Questions begins by exploring "The World of Zazen,"--the foundational practice of the Zen school--presenting it as an attitude of sustained inquiry that offers us an entryway into true repose and joy. From there, Leighton draws deeply on his own experience as a Zen scholar and teacher to invite us into the creativity of Zen awareness and practice. He explores the poetic mind of Dogen with the poetry of Rumi, Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, and even "the American Dharma Bard" Bob Dylan. What's more, Leighton uncovers surprising resonances between the writings of America's Founding Fathers--including Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin--and the liberating ideals at the heart of Zen.

Artful Collaborative Inquiry comprises essays created collectively by a group of scholars and artists, the majority of whom have several decades of experience of working together. The book challenges commonly-held, individualistic beliefs about ownership, authorship and scholarly and artistic ethics and practices. The essays exemplify the entangled kinds of scholarly and artistic works that emerge in a post-human world, where humans, other species, environments, things and other matters, all matter and are of equal concern in the conduct of ethical artful scholarship. Situated at the (messy) crossroads where contemporary scholarship and artistic practice converge, the seamless mo(ve)ment and interplay between text and image make up the main body of the work in this book. The chapters combine the playful use and merging of time, space and place, researcher and researched, to give a unique exemplar of research and creativity in the rapidly emerging field of collaborative scholarship. It will be of particular interest to creative and qualitative scholars wishing to conduct more artful research, and artists engaging with scholarship.