Definition of Terms

Innovation

The process of creating and implementing a new idea in the form of a product, process, or service that
impacts efficacy, improves success, or creates value for relative audiences or communities. Innovation is
also a culture or value system itself that can be cultivated within an institution and an individual's
mindset to foster forward-thinking dialogue and creative solutions to problems and when responding to
institutional or societal change or other significant challenges. Innovation benefits others in ways they
have not experienced before. “Innovation” can also be a buzzword without much value when met with a
reluctance to change or stifled by outdated policies.

 

Creativity

The interdisciplinary process of leveraging one’s imagination and resources to develop original ideas
that emerge from one’s experiences, knowledge, and environment. The ability to explore and cultivate
one’s human capacity to create. Creativity can be seen as innate to human experience and the learning
process. Children learn in this manner, but as learners grow educational institutions seemingly guide
them out of this capacity; growing up can appear synonymous with moving from the creative to the
analytic (as if those are mutually exclusive). From the lens of many national systems and societies in
general, creativity is relegated to a hobby-like pleasure while “real work” involves the practical and
informational. This is reflected in course offering, program requirements, and state standards. In a
learner's educational trajectory, reading material evolves from primarily fictional texts (in our youngest
years of school) to primarily informational texts (in high school), the rationale functioning under the
false assumption that informational texts are more conducive to developing critical skills such as
evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing, when the inferential quality of fiction writing innately requires
learners to draw on a much more diverse and analytical skillset. Creativity above all is a vital and innate
component of the learning process and one which cultivates self-worth and celebrates the gifts of the
learner.

 

Learning

Learning is a continuous and life-long process of acquiring and developing behaviors, skills, habits,
knowledge, and other abilities that impact human performance. Learning occurs both formally and
informally, and when learners engage with their environment and/or with content relevant to their
personal, professional, and/or socio-cultural experiences.

 

Learning Environment

A learning environment functions to support the act of learning. It provides the resources necessary for
all types of learners and therefore seeks to facilitate the creative and dynamic delivery of culturally
relevant content and resources to accommodate visual, auditory, kinesthetic, social, and creative modes
of learning. A learning environment, above all, seeks to create and maintain the socio-emotional

atmosphere necessary for learners to be vulnerable, take risks, make mistakes, and excel in their
process of learning.

 

Pedagogy

Learning theories that inform teaching methods. Above all, any pedagogical approach rests on a core set
of values that drive learning. One can emphasize social interaction (social constructivism), or repetition
and reward (behaviorism), or diverse learning styles and student choice (liberationism), or the role of
technology in the learning process (connectivism). Overall, pedagogy is one’s philosophical approach to
facilitating learning.
 

Transferable Learning

Transferable learning refers to the idea that skills obtained in one discipline will “transfer” or be applied
to other disciplines. It functions under the assumption or belief that the interdisciplinary use of
knowledge and skills is a core goal of education. False assumptions can arise from this, creating
structural problems with institutional organization. For example, a common assumption on transferable
skills is that students learn to read and write in their English classes and then carry this skillset forward
to other classes, and that these classes, therefore, do not need to teach students how to read or write.
But just how much is transferring? The reality is that English texts are just as discipline specific as texts in
other disciplines. Learners draw on a very different skill set when reading novels by Octavia Butler, for
example, than the skills required to unpack the dense information, charts, and graphs of a biology or
math textbook. The thesis driven persuasive essays learners write for English class is a writing genre very
different than the hypothesis driven essays for science class (taking a stance or position in one is a
necessity while in the other it’s unethical and presumptuous). Metacognitive reflection activities have
been touted as necessary to fill in this ‘gap’ in transferable learning, and some institutions have taken
the step to offer only interdisciplinary courses taught by two or more faculty members from different
disciplines.

Culture

I chose this term to apply to a two-fold concept. The first refers to culturally responsive curriculum and
practices, a pedagogical approach to curriculum and course design that situates the generational, ethnic,
and linguistic cultures and identities of learners as central to self-expression and the learning process.
The second way I use the term refers to learning in an international (as opposed to national) context.
The intentional effort to expose learners to international systems, knowledge, beliefs, and perspectives
is key to the critical thinking process, and the intentional effort to not privilege or limit knowledge to
that produced by Western nations is also key. Both ways in which I use this term function under the
belief that a culturally dominant curriculum (when it does not have to be) functions to maintain a
culturally dominant society.