Vygotsky and Creativity

The second edition of Vygotsky and Creativity: A Cultural-historical Approach to Play, Meaning Making, and the Arts presents an enriched Vygotskian perspective on children's and adults' symbolic engagement with imagination, artistic expression, and multi-modal forms of expression. Artists, psychologists, and educators present their research and practice in different learning environments and analyze their findings with a reliance on cultural historical activity theory. The connections between creative expression, learning, teaching, and development are situated in a theoretical framework that emphasizes the social origins of individual development and the arts. The authors share a view of learning as an imaginative process rooted in our common need to communicate and transform individual experience through the cultural lifelines of the arts. Vygotsky and Creativity, Second Edition includes the additional work of internationally known Vygotskian scholars whose contributions enhance theoretical, expressive, and pedagogical views on creativity, play, and the social construction of meaning making.

M. Cathrene Connery, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Literacy and Children’s Literature at Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland. A bilingual educator and advocate, she has drawn on her visual arts education to inform her research and professional activities in language, literacy, and sociocultural studies on behalf of culturally and linguistically diverse children and their teachers across the United States.

Vera John-Steiner, Ph.D., Emerita Presidential Professor of Linguistics and Education at the University of New Mexico, served as an authority on creativity, collaboration, and cultural-historical activity theory, having published and presented internationally for the past 50 years. Dr. John-Steiner sustained a lifelong interest in dance.

Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Ph.D, is a founder and a deputy editor-in-chief of Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal. A former Fulbright Scholar, she is interested in dialogic meaning-making, creativity and democracy in education and human development. Her articles on critical dialogic pedagogy, drama in education, and democratic educational approaches have been published in various journals and books related to play and education.