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Creativity is a critical skill across disciplines and contexts, and it is an important trait for humans to survive and thrive, personally and collectively. The fast-paced culture of business innovation has sought to promote and reward creativity as a coveted thinking skill. Creativity in and of itself, however, is a value-neutral construct, because novel and effective ideas may also have negative consequences. This darker aspect of creativity has come to the forefront in many recent cases, particularly in contexts involving digital and networking technologies, where the rapid pace of technological change does not encourage the kind of deliberative thinking necessary for nuanced and ethical business decisions. The authors consider why education is essential for expanding the ethical capacity of creative agency in business, describing the need to bring creativity and ethics together in educational opportunities and cultural values. The authors explore the idea of ‘wise creativity’ and the need to infuse more human-centred learning from the arts and humanities into business fields. Further, the authors suggest better practices for creative business education, such as: infusing real-world ethics learning into business education and professional development; infusing the liberal arts curriculum in business; offering opportunities for arts-based approaches in business learning; and instilling genuine mindfulness training in business education environments. The authors’ focus is on a shift away from a culture that values creativity purely as an instrumental approach for greater profitability, and towards one that values wise and humanizing creativity for good business practices that consider societal and individual wellbeing.

Emerging economies are becoming less reliant on funding from foreign agencies. One of the consequences of this is the formation of more self-funded international partnerships offering new models of inter-university partnerships. This chapter offers a perspective on such an on-going collaborative international partnership between two institutions of higher education – one in the United States and the other in India. It describes the context in which the partnership was formed, the manner in which it evolved over time as both partners faced barriers, and challenges to the instantiation of the original vision. Sakamoto and Chapman’s (2010) Functional Model for the Analysis of Cross-border Partnerships is used to analyze and organize the key factors that have played roles in the development and success of the partnership. In addition, the chapter focuses on one component of the partnership activities, the short-term professional development visits to the United States for educators from Indian partner institution. Drawing on participants’ experiences from both sides of the partnership, this chapter presents the expectations, challenges, and opportunities this partnership has offered to members of both universities. The chapter ends with recommendations to establish or improve international collaborative university partnerships.

Purpose – To examine the potential social media has for increasing pre-service English language arts (ELA) teachers’ language interest, awareness, and content knowledge by engaging them in an ongoing collaborative effort to seek out, make observation about, and highlight contemporary examples of language, literacy, and culture in action in global media using Twitter as a platform.

Design – The research design was qualitative and included a thematic analysis of Twitter posts from the pre-service teacher participants during the semester, informal feedback about the experience during the semester, and written reflections at the end of the semester. Students worked independently on the assignment throughout the semester, outside of a few brief, and informal check-ins during class by the instructor. At the end of the semester, students completed an open-ended survey to reflect on their experiences with and takeaways from participating in this Twitter-based language exploration activity. The theoretical frameworks that were foundational to the study included the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) framework (Koehler & Mishra, 2008) and Andrews’ (2006) criteria for language exploration and awareness.

Findings – The findings of this qualitative study indicate that engaging pre-service teachers in an ongoing collaborative effort to promote language, literacy, and culture via social media has great potential in terms of students increasing not only their knowledge of language and language awareness, but also their TPACK overall. Specific examples of how participants responded to the experience are provided.

Practical Implications – This study contributes to the literature on the potential impact of social media on content area learning and teacher preparation by providing concrete, research-based suggestions for how both English teacher educators and middle and secondary ELA teachers can engage in collaborative efforts to learn more about, expand definitions of, and promote aspects related to ELA content, like language awareness, variety, and dialect. It includes recommendations for both teacher educators and middle and secondary ELA teachers to expand their notions for defining and teaching aspects of language that go beyond a narrow focus on grammar and to consider ways that social media and digital literacies can enhance these efforts.

Social studies educators have displayed an interest in student-created multimedia, including digital documentaries. The research community has responded with a small but growing body of studies, but the literature to date has not explored students‘ perspectives on these assignments. This study combined classroom observations, document analysis, and student interviews to examine students‘ views of technology, the curriculum, and their final products. The findings reveal that students come to technology-based, content-driven assignments with prior conceptions of both the technology and the content. These expectations shape student actions and transform the assignment, in some cases surpassing curricular expectations. Evidence from students‘ products, classroom observations, and interview data, however, also suggest that student agency was limited by the classroom reality of mimetic learning. The results of this study have various implications for teacher educators and educational researchers interested in leveraging technology to improve learning. They must acknowledge the dynamic nature of classroom interaction and the impact student choices have on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). Technology integration occurs in the operational curriculum, often in unpredictable ways. Based on our study we know that student preconceptions and desires impact the learning goals. By better under-standing the role of student agency, teachers can plan for instruction that uses digital history to effectively teach content.

We describe a special education teacher and a history teacher who, together, gave specific learning disabled (SLD) and emotionally disabled (ED) students the opportunity to make historical documentaries in a self-contained special education classroom. Students were diverse in race, gender and disability. Findings indicated documentary making yielded positive outcomes for students as well as for the teachers. By selectively appropriating desktop documentary making technology, teachers engaged students in a technology-based project. Documentary making also opened opportunities for teachers’ close interaction with students, while still managing a potentially disruptive classroom. Students, who struggled with reading and writing, completed an engaging, lengthy, complex history project and exercised historical thinking skills. This study has implications for using documentary making technologies for engaging and refining students’ historical thinking skills.

This chapter offers reflections on the successes and failures of integrating the micro-blogging platform Twitter into a first-year university class. Twitter, intended as a way to answer the question “What are you doing?” is now used in originally unexpected ways. Broadly speaking, Twitter's popularity can be traced to three factors: conversation between users; a decentralized ecosystem of third-party applications; and as a result, the distributed nature of the users. Adopted by educators in higher education, Twitter has been used as: an object for study, a tool to communicating classroom announcements, as a way to enable student to reflect on their learning, a chance to get instant feedback from students, and as the specific tool used to facilitate in-class conversations. The ongoing use of micro-blogging also appears to have an ability to change the social dynamics of a classroom, expanding the social of the classroom beyond the physical. While identifying Twitter's limitations, the chapter outlines the most significant outcome from the author's integration of Twitter: an evolution of blended learning, proposed as a plesiochronous learning model, where learning occurs outside the classroom, with learner and instructor in different places but occurring at (virtually) the same time.

The chapters in this book focus on how university-school partnerships can be used to foster academic and program development. The introductory chapter is oriented around three key questions: How do we define innovative international university partnerships? Do these innovative international university partnerships really work? What factors contribute to the success of these collaborations? In addressing these questions, this chapter presents a framework that addresses a taxonomy for innovative programs, elements to develop partnerships, ideas for sustaining collaboration, and challenges that might surface during implementation. In this volume a range of perspectives is presented using case studies and empirical research on how university partnerships are being implemented internationally. These findings suggest that university partnerships have great potential to enhance and even transform colleges and universities.