This essay draws on empirical research from two studies examining creativity, activism, and education in Hong Kong. We use a decolonizing and deimperializing approach to centering creativity as a lever for social change, and demonstrate the ways in which the specifics of culture, region, time, and place uniquely produce forms of creativity, as has…

In what the author calls an autoethnography, he examines two aspects of his love of a favorite childhood toy: G.I. Joe. First, because the author is a contingent pacificist and this military figure--a fundamentally violent toy--played so important a role in his life, he now seeks to reconcile his aversion to (real life) violence with his enjoyment…

The growth in international student enrollments in Australian pathways to higher education over the last decade is helping to broaden awareness of the presence of culturally diverse ontological perspectives. Nevertheless, tutors and students are still confronted with numerous difficulties that point to an inherent Western denial of cultural…

More professors and institutions want to move from a detect-and-punish to an educate-and-prevent model for dealing with plagiarism. Understanding the causes of plagiarism, especially among international students, can aid in efforts to educate students and prevent plagiarism. Research points to a confluence of causal factors, such as time pressure,…

Responding to an earlier "Phi Delta Kappan" article, the author rejects the argument that East Asian students' high scores on international educational assessments come at the expense of learning to be creative and entrepreneurial. According to survey research, people in Japan, Korea, and other East Asian nations perceive themselves to…

In the face of globalization, speed communication, and the mashing up of once clearly drawn borders, it seems both pertinent and constructive that music education philosophers make use of comparative frameworks to make sense--and make new sense--of educational and musical events, products, and interactions. However, comparison that is merely…

The article integrates the seven papers of the two special issues with a special focus on discussing the differences in people's beliefs about creativity between the Chinese and American cultures: How it is conceived, evaluated, and nurtured. It uses three metaphors to capture major differences in these aspects, and highlights areas with profound…

This review of the literature explores how Americans and Chinese view creativity and what they expect from creative products. American and Chinese explicit beliefs about creativity (i.e., expert opinions) share many similarities. Implicit beliefs, however, show more divergence: Americans tend to value novelty and more "groundbreaking"…

Education is under pressure to respond to the changing modern world. Education system worldwide aims to develop students into well-rounded citizens and help them become creative problem-solvers. Several theories have been proposed in the research literature which emphasizes the importance of social and cultural context to creativity. Eastern and…

Cross-cultural music education can motivate children to look at music in fresh ways and awaken their imagination to new possibilities and ways of thinking. This paper presents the voices of three practitioners experienced in, and passionate about the field of culturally diverse music education. Over the past 25 years the presenters have ignited an…

This study examined science teachers' conceptions of creativity in science education, pedagogical ideas, and contextual factors perceived as constraints on teaching for creativity and any differences in the conceptions of teachers from South Korea and the United States. Participants in the study consisted of 44 South Korean and 21 US secondary…

In this article, the author asks why we assume that we must define something before we can begin to understand it? Is that assumption a holdover from the predominantly behaviorist orientation of the 1950s when everything had to be measurable? Haven't we gotten past the paradigm of defining, measuring, then studying phenomena? If physicists had to…

We investigated the effects of divergent thinking training (with explicit instruction) on problem-solving tasks in a sample of Third Culture Kids (Useem and Downie, 1976). We were specifically interested in whether the children's originality and fluency in responding increased following instruction, not only on classroom-based worksheets and the…

Educators must realize that, in Japan, authentic learning means mastery of memorized information, not experiential learning and independent reasoning in preparation for life. Although many Japanese can recite long strings of facts, few can answer "why,""how,""what if," and "what do you think" questions about…

Project-based team activities are commonly used in higher education. Teams comprised of members from different national cultures can be faced with unique challenges during the creative process. Hofstede's (1991) cultural dimension of power distance was used to examine one such design team's intra- and inter-group interactions in a graduate-level…