Group items tagged

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning. That's one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down - or, in this case, lay down - to turn out a piece of fiction."