Current Projects

CReST PROJECT

CReST Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Teacher Project in Arts Integration

CReST is a two year funded grant from the Windgate Foundation to develop the first-ever culturally responsive and sustaining online art integration course for teachers. We will use research to inform and develop the course in two ways: First, we will conduct and analyze ethnographic interviews with diverse visual artists from around the world whose work is posted on the new website Artura.org. Secondly, we will use a Creative-Cultural Praxis framework based on the seminal work of Paolo Freire (1997/200) linking creative identity to cultural liberation. Research on intersectional oppression, multicultural education and positive youth identity will also be integrated into the course.

Another aim of the CReST Project is to expand online professional development courses in arts integration from Oregon teachers to Philadelphia art teachers. Both Oregon and Philadelphia art teachers will take the course and we will interview teachers on their preparedness for teaching culturally relevant and sustaining art. Interviews with both the artists and the teachers will inform a CReST Teaching Guide for dissemination. We plan for the course to be micro-credentialed through the Drexel School of Education’s Professional Education Service office for a wider national audience of teachers

ARTIST INTERVIEW PROJECT

Documenting legacies, creating digital assets & linking cultural and creative identity

This two-year multipronged interview project will document the legacies and culturally sustaining practices of Artura.org Artists, provide new digital assets for the Artura.org website, and build new research linking cultural and creative identity. This work will include initiating and completing 20 artist interviews per year. The purpose of the interviews is to richly delineate and contextualize culturally sustaining practices and contributions of diverse artists rooted in their voiced experiences.

Article in Drexel NOW:

​“This project really is a triple win: it lets Drexel shine as an interdisciplinary group while advancing the work of our partner Brandywine as well as our respective fields. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for providing resources to conduct ethnographic interviews with 40 Artists. This grant will build upon our other sponsored research project with Brandywine. We enjoy working with Mr. Edmunds, who is an exceptional community leader not just in Philadelphia but in the international art world. With this work, we aim to bring his vision to light to share the incredible narratives of the Artists as they discuss how their culture empowers their creativity. The interviews help unlock the keys to learning about artists, to diversify the canon of White European art taught in schools today.”

PROJECT N.I.C.E.

N.I.C.E. New Indicators of Creative Experience 

Our understanding of the how feedback can be beneficial or detrimental to student creativity is inchoate. For example, our team’s past research shows that engineering students perceive a chilling effect on their creativity in the presence of instructors. This presents a conundrum-how do we teach for creativity if students feel demotivated?

The NICE Project: Conjoining Phenomenological and Psychophysiological Measures in Engineering Design will use a novel multimethod paradigm to capture the potential impact of different kinds of feedback on creativity using objective (implicit) as well as phenomenological (self-report) measures. Engineering design students will be randomly assigned to anticipate one of three types of feedback (faculty, peer, self-reflection) upon completion of solving an engineering design problem. Self-report measures of affect, beliefs about creativity, as well as objective measurements of stress response to feedback captured by electrodermal responses, will be collected.

​We hypothesize that anticipating faculty feedback may be associated with higher skin conductance response, but also higher novelty ratings of the participants’ creative output, as assessed by an independent rater. These results aim to contribute important knowledge toward understanding the role of feedback for creativity in the classroom. Research outcomes include faculty development and research mentoring of students in novel multimethod modeling conjoining psychophysiological and phenomenological research leading to student-led conference proposals and manuscripts. Broader educational impacts include curriculum development, instructional modeling and contribution towards a student-focused Creativity Consortium across Drexel programs and regional universities.

Past Funded Projects

Make SPACE

Jen Katz-Buonincontro, Co-PI: MakeSPACE: Schoolwide Place-based Access to Creative Engagement. $2,499,000.00. U. S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement. Arts in Education Dissemination Grant. October 01, 2018 - October 01, 2022. PI Ross Anderson and Co-PI Tracy Bousselot.
 
MakeSPACE is a 4-year Arts-Integration project serving four rural school districts in Oregon using Dr. Katz-Buonincontro’s research as well as research on Art Core project, arts integration, creativity. The grant’s components include:
  1. Production of new research on Arts-Integrated into Science, Math and Reading
  2. Development of an online course and Summer Institute for teachers
  3. First-ever national arts-integration micro-credentialing for teachers
  4. New research on teachers’ beliefs about teaching for creativity (scale developed by Dr. Katz-Buonincontro and Dr. Rick Hass)
  5. Mixed methods experiment on learning arts-integration in schools

CIRGE Program

​Jen Katz-Buonincontro, Co-PI: Creative Interdisciplinary Research in Graduate Education [CIRGE] Program. National Science Foundation: National Research Training Program. April 01, 2019-April 01, 2022. $499,000.00. PI Fraser Fleming, CO-PI Paul Gondek, Co-PI Dee Nicholas, Co-PI Dan King.
​
Creative Interdisciplinary Research in Graduate Education(CIRGE, pronounced surge) is a team-based, interdisciplinary Graduate Minor starting at Drexel. The CIRGE faculty members work collaboratively across colleges to develop two new research courses to train graduate students hailing from any Drexel college to be creative, team-based, interdisciplinary problem solvers. Creative Interdisciplinary Team Research: Principles and Practice, course #1, will incorporate Dr. Katz-Buonincontro’s research on Creative Mindsets as well as other research. Enhancing the Creativity of a Major Research Idea, course #2, will include Dr. Katz-Buonincontro’s methods for teaching research as well as panels of researchers and industry experts. These new learning experiences NSF grant will foster:
  • The cognitive habits and strategies to more creatively approach research questions.
  • A deep understanding of the broad range of cognitive approaches that can be used to address research creatively.
  • A broader capacity to creatively approach research issues within their particular discipline.
  • The tools to address interdisciplinary research problems and to experience working on interdisciplinary teams.
  • Katz-Buonincontro, J. What Counts Matters: Assessing and Measuring Creativity in Photography Students. Office of the Provost Summer Research Grants. $7,000.00.
  • Katz-Buonincontro, J., Hass, R., & Perignat, E. (February 17, 2017). A Mixed Methods Study of Education Students’ Beliefs about Teaching for Creativity. School of Education Research Initiative. $6,794.93. Partners Buonincontro, J., (2017). What counts, matters: Measuring Critical and Creative Thinking in:
    • Maciej Karwowski, Professor, and Head, Creative Education Lab at the Maria Grzegorzewska University, Poland
    • Lisa Min Tang, Associate Professor, Business Psychology, University of Applied Management, Germany
    • Todd Kettler, Assistant Professor, Gifted Education, University of North Texas
    • Rick Hass, Assistant Professor, Psychology, Jefferson University
  • Co-Principal Investigator, Establishing a research collaboration between Engineering, Engineering Technology and
    • Cognitive Science Faculty: Integrating creativity into undergraduate course projects. (September 01, 2012-September 01, 2014). Research Initiation Grants in Engineering Education. National Science Foundation Directorate for Engineering, Engineering Education and Centers, with Dr. Abieyuwa Aghayere, PI, Dr. Gary Friedman, Co-PI, Dr. Vladimir Genis, Co-PI, Dr. Fredericka Reisman, Evaluator, Dr. Youngmoo Kim, Senior Investigator. Budget Amount $157,297.00. 
  • Principal Investigator, Playing to See: A Digital Game Based Learning Project with the Ensembles of the Barnes ​Foundation (April 01, 2013-April 30, 2014). This grant produced an interactive three-dimensional mobile application Keys to the Collection, focusing on creativity and aesthetic understanding, for students aged 7-14, with Dr. Aroutis Foster, P.I. $245,000.00.This Research and Development Project is the seminal project of the Drexel-Barnes Partnership, established September 2012, founded by Dr. Katz-Buonincontro and Dr. Foster.

AWARDS

Daniel E. Berlyne Award for Outstanding Research by an Early Career Scholar
February 2016
American Psychological Association,
​Division 10: Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.

THE KEYS TO THE COLLECTION

Playing to See: A Digital Game Based Learning Project with the Ensembles of the Barnes Foundation
Collaborators:
  • Dr. Aroutis Foster
This grant produced an interactive three-dimensional mobile application Keys to the Collection, focusing on creativity and aesthetic understanding, for students aged 7-14. This Research and Development Project is the seminal project of the Drexel-Barnes Partnership, established September 2012, founded by Dr. Katz-Buonincontro and Dr. Foster.