ABSTRACT. Mandated by the provincial Department of Education, Nova Scotia, Canada’s Action Plan for Education, 2015. The 3R’s: Renew, Refocus, Rebuild identifies four pillars for improving schools, with aims to heighten efficiency and accountability, aligning all ways of knowing behind literacy and numeracy while also improving inclusion, innovation, leadership, and teacher performance. With A modern education system as its cornerstone, this plan holds firmly to modernist, rather neo-liberal, principles and priorities. In the larger world, digital media and network spaces are reorienting how students perceive time as no longer modern, linear, abstract, and predictable but instead shaped into spaces that are non-linear, personalized, and unpredictable. This paper asserts that where socio-economic structures and challenges are shifting in pace with our perception of time, we increasingly need a citizenry with the creative capacities of adaptability, criticality, and imaginative problem solving. Wayne Constantineau and Eric McLuhan’s Human Equation describes a tetradic instrument that offers insights into how the four pillars described in the Action Plan interact. Weighing the Action Plan in relation to how students are being shaped in the digital age, the paper finds that where modernist principles lag constructivist pedagogies of improvisation and aesthetic-assemblages show promise to both accommodate shifting notions of time while setting the stage to nurture creative development. pp. 123–143

Keywords: modern education; nonlinear time; digital age; creativity; improvisation; constructivism, transformative learning

doi:10.22381/KC5220178