Flossie Chua

Flossie Chua is a Principal Investigator at Project Zero, and her work focuses on understanding how people think about and experience complex ideas and challenges in different contexts, and how we can nurture good thinking and practices that develop not just better thinkers but also learners engaged by a range of topics, relating them to both individual and social needs and aspirations. More specifically, her projects explore ways that

• strategic and sustained engagement with transformative repair as an artistic practice can create supportive conditions for individuals and communities to find personal and broader purpose in times of unprecedented uncertainty and challenge, and design effective ways to “repair” their communities both literally and figuratively;
• more expert or sophisticated patterns of thinking and intellectual behavior might incline us to operate productively in relationship to our communities and the world;
• developing globally competent frames of thinking and participation might support experts, teachers, and learners to more effectively engage pressing global issues as responsible global citizens;
• catalyzing young people’s creative and civic capacities might prompt shifts in the way they see themselves in relation to others and in the way they apply creative impulses to civic challenges;
• visual art can function effectively and productively as a civic commons by expanding young people’s ideas about what art can be and who can make it, and helping them investigate civic themes and understand themselves as actors in public life;
• good ideas might be brought into action in the contexts of school leadership and student learning by understanding how entrenched beliefs create cognitive distortions and what we might do to avoid or correct them; and
• shared leadership structures in schools might support emerging practices of progressive pedagogies in schools.

Flossie has worked with Art21 Educators to support K-12 teachers to bring contemporary art, artists, and themes into classroom teaching and learning, and broaden their curricular focus to include inquiry into contemporary issues and questions that demand cross-curricular knowledge and ways of thinking through contemporary art. She is also currently working with BroadBand Collaborative and OAcademy to design reflective artistry practices that support and empower musicians to play leading roles as artists in orchestras and changemakers in communities. Flossie holds an Ed.D from Harvard University, and is also an Instructor in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.