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Document Type

Article

Abstract

Creativity is the process by which a change that is new and different emerges. We call it deep when it yields novel forms of both quantitative and qualitative change. If we are to take on the most pressing and persistent challenges to our social, global, and planetary well-being, we need novel approaches of a qualitatively different kind than those that have failed to bring about radical change in the past. In other words, we need deep creativity. The paradox at the heart of ``ideation-first" approaches to creative practice (e.g., brainstorming or ideating) is that if creativity aims to produce outcomes of a qualitatively different kind, then we can't proceed from current ideas. Those will only get us incremental changes in our existing approaches. So what could education look like that enables the emergence of that which cannot be known in advance? In this article, we share findings from research on the teaching of quantitative and qualitative change with early childhood and elementary-age children. These findings call for a radical pedagogical and curricular pivot to a model of teaching as emergent learning. We provide the features of an enactive educational ecosystem for emergent learning that enabled children to make the sophisticated qualitative and quantitative distinctions necessary for deep creativity. From these findings we share implications for 1) pedagogy relative to teaching the processes of deep creativity within early mathematics education, and 2) curriculum relative to what a capacity for deep creativity gives learners access to in the domains of the arts, the sciences, and mathematics.

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