It's MAGIC!

Media Education Research Journal editorial for the special issue, MERJ 5 edited by the DARE collaborative

2006

The PIVOTS partnership has developed the Science & Theatre Magic Program, a service learning summer program of multidisciplinary, magic-themed science exploration. Faculty participants mentor teenagers, who in turn create and stage a day-long adventure that brings younger children from Philadelphia by train to an "American School of Magic." The creation of the magic school gives powerful expression to the youth voice inherent in the service learning paradigm: ownership of the design in the context of meaningful service sparks active learning. The result is a memorable, scienceinspired, interactive educational performance that connects the diverse populations of teens and the children served in an immersive urban and suburban setting. The program makes significant inroads in realizing the PIVOTS ultimate goals of engaging students in highly motivational multidisciplinary STEM programs and activities that promote positive images of STEM professionals and thus attract and retain interest in STEM careers. (www.csc.villanova.edu/~map/pivots/) Index Terms -Service-learning, Creative design experiences, Magical illusion, K-12 initiatives and partnerships, Theatre.

2013

University of Toronto Quarterly

We established the Creativity Everything lab at Ryerson University in 2018 as a place that would support and unlock ‘all kinds of creativity for all kinds of people’. In this article, we detail the transdisciplinary roots of our work, and outline some of our activities and the thinking behind them. As a team of researchers developing projects and experiences that embrace a wide range of creators and creative practices, we are fashioning the lab to facilitate the actions of doing and making in a range of spheres: in everyday life, professional creative practice, and in learning and research. Three case studies – our ongoing efforts at supporting learning for students, a research project on platforms for creativity, and the community outreach of the 2019 Creativity Everything FreeSchool – explore how teaching, research, events, and collaborations in multiple media intersect in a multifaceted system for relating to and engaging with creativity. Our studies suggest that creative practic...

2016

The Media Innovation Studio’s founding aim in 2012 was to work across disciplines to explore the potential of creative and digital technologies to bring about positive change. Our ‘action research’ approach is lodged in a desire to create inclusively-designed prototypes as responses to real-world issues. Originally positioned within the University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLan) School of Journalism and Media, and now part of the College of Culture and the Creative Industries, the Studio’s remit is to inhabit ‘liminal spaces’ between disciplines. It hopes to explore, research and innovate within the digital ecosystem evolving around us. The human race is more socially, economically, politically and technologically interdependent than at any time in its history. Yet, inequality, instability and unsustainability remain. Collectively, the Media Innovation Studio is trying to understand whether technology has a contribution to make to resolving this broader set of fundamental social iss...

2016

… Research-led Practice in the Creative …, 2010

Research is often characterised as the search for new ideas and understanding. The language of this view privileges the cognitive and intellectual aspects of discovery. However, in the research process theoretical claims are usually evaluated in practice and, indeed, the observations and experiences of practical circumstances often lead to new research questions. This feedback loop between speculation and experimentation is fundamental to research in many disciplines, and is also appropriate for research in the creative arts. In this chapter we will examine how our creative desire for artistic expressivity results in interplay between actions and ideas that direct the development of techniques and approaches for our audio/visual live-coding activities.

2015

This article introduces the Hong Kong Baptist University’s Heritage project (http://heritage.lib.hkbu.edu.hk/), a multi-disciplinary online showcase for curriculum-related creative outputs that were produced by faculty and students of the university. Initiated and led by the University Library, this project was a collaborative effort with six academic departments, synthesizing technology and creativity and bringing great benefits to the institution. The article introduces the project and discusses three major challenges, namely technology, staff motivation, and librarian stereotype. It also presents statistics to show how this project enhanced teaching and learning, encouraged inter-departmental collaboration, enhanced library visibility, contributed to institutional reputation, among other benefits.

In the past decades magic has become an important field of academic study. The definition of the term remains fluid, as it also was in antiquity. What constituted “magic” (and religion) changed not only according to time and place, but also according to the group or person who defined it. Today magic is studied both as a theoretical construct and as a tradition of texts (written or recited), artefacts, and practices. One feature that awaits further development is the complex interrelation between magical texts and artefacts from different cultures, across time and space. It is high time that this interrelation is explored systematically, in a structured and methodical manner. Our “Structuring Magic” workshop aims to lay the basis for this. “Structuring Magic” will take steps towards creating an infrastructure for the systematic cross-cultural study of magical texts from antiquity to the modern day, within Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. The aim of this infrastructure is to allow magical texts and artefacts to reveal larger stories of intercommunal relations, interlinguistic contact, and the processes of transmission and transformation of ritual practices over thousands of years. While such a feat would be unthinkable several decades ago, the novel tools and methods of digital humanities (DH) and computational linguistics turn it into a real prospect. The workshop intends to: 1. Devise the model of a digital infrastructure for the analysis of magical texts and artefacts, using methods and tools from computational linguistics and digital humanities. 2. Devise an initial index of motifs that appear in magical texts, similar in concept to folklore indices. 3. Establish an interdisciplinary academic network for the study of magic.

Proceedings. Frontiers in Education. 36th Annual Conference, 2006

The PIVOTS partnership has developed the Science & Theatre Magic Program, a service learning summer program of multidisciplinary, magic-themed science exploration. Faculty participants mentor teenagers, who in turn create and stage a day-long adventure that brings younger children from Philadelphia by train to an "American School of Magic." The creation of the magic school gives powerful expression to the youth voice inherent in the service learning paradigm: ownership of the design in the context of meaningful service sparks active learning. The result is a memorable, scienceinspired, interactive educational performance that connects the diverse populations of teens and the children served in an immersive urban and suburban setting. The program makes significant inroads in realizing the PIVOTS ultimate goals of engaging students in highly motivational multidisciplinary STEM programs and activities that promote positive images of STEM professionals and thus attract and retain interest in STEM careers. (www.csc.villanova.edu/~map/pivots/)