Danah Henriksen

Danah Henriksen researches creativity across multiple areas of education, with a focus on creative teaching practices and skills, as well as creative thinking. Her work has examined creativity among exceptional teachers, through an in-depth qualitative study of the creative thought processes and teaching practices among nationally award-winning teachers, through the lens of transdisciplinary creativity. Her work considers the confluence between personal and professional creativity, to consider how excellent teachers translate their personal interests and avocations into creative teaching practices. Dr. Henriksen’s current work and research interests focus on several strands of research related to creativity, design thinking, and technology. In exploring creativity and trans-disciplinary thinking in 21st-century teaching learning, she focuses a major strand of her work on design thinking. She researches how design thinking provides a structure and framework for creative problem solving, allowing people to generate and refine ideas, and move between divergent and convergent thinking, to work through creative blocks and identify solutions. Dr, Henriksen considers design thinking for teacher education, using these cognitive processes to help teachers work through problems of practice in their own environments. A related strand of her work examines the relationship between creativity and mindfulness -- to consider how mindfulness and wellbeing practices relate to creative thinking, by reducing fear of failure, negative self-talk/judgment, and increasing empathy and perspective taking. She is interested in the application of mindfulness in schools to support student wellbeing overall and ability to learn and thrive creatively. See institutional profile.