Cultural Cognition and Creativity

About the Book

Based on the premise that art and culture are intrinsically related, the effect of art on cognition of children may be explored adopting a cultural perspective. Art embodies cultural meanings historically and socially aggregated from human activities. Through art, children have excellent learning opportunities to unravel connotations from cultural points of view. Students take charge of their learning according to their dispositions. Through integrated, multidimensional learning experiences, students probe different knowledge domains. Cultural understanding of art is a cognitive undertaking of imagination and creativity upon which sound foundations for lifelong learning are built. Social and cultural knowledge could play a crucial part in harnessing the cognitive ability of children in the process of art learning by helping them to shift the emphasis from individually free expression and creation to a more meaningful, and comprehensive visual communication.

About the Author

Henry Yau Tai Tung, (Ed.D) began his academic career from 1999 when he founded the Climax Learning Centre with his wife Jennifer, working together in the much desired tutorial business in Hong Kong until 2005 when he moved to settle with his family in Vancouver of Canada. Between 2000 and 2010, he pursued his study in education and earned his Masters and Doctoral Degree in Education in 2003 and 2010 respectively. During the same period, he set up Essence of Learning and Culture, a not-for-profit organisation devoted to research for the betterment of learning through arts and culture based educational programs and curriculums for children. Since 1990, he has been working as full-time and freelance translator for various publishers and the media business. He was a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists in UK (CMIL) – an internationally recognised institution of linguists and translators – for over 20 years. His interest is in developing more effective means for teaching and learning, particularly English language education for Asian students through the immersion of cultural and artistic contexts. He has published a number of booklets and pictorial collections for his daughter Rachelle since she began to draw at the age of three. From 2005, he has been working for the celebrated Hong Kong artist and photographer Water Poon in the production of bilingual texts for his range of publications. Culture and Creativity is Henry’s latest work to explore the intricate associations of these two seemingly unrelated subjects through different theoretical perspectives, drawing on the data of children’s pictorial representations collected from several researches.