Viewpoint: Generative Traversal Learning: Toward Creativity Through Meta-Space Navigation

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is reshaping both the production of knowledge and the meaning of learning, raising renewed questions about which forms of cognition remain distinctly human. Creativity has increasingly been positioned as a central educational objective; however, its theoretical grounding and pedagogical articulation remain incomplete. Existing approaches often encourage exploration within established representational structures, while offering limited accounts of how learners might move across such structures.This viewpoint introduces Generative Traversal Learning (GTL) as a conceptual framework for understanding creativity as an iterative movement between structured knowledge and a generative meta-space. GTL describes a learning process in which individuals depart from a given knowledge structure, engage a more abstract representational space from which multiple structures are possible, and return with reorganized understanding. Within this perspective, creative potential emerges through structured departure and return rather than unbounded exploration, positioning learning as a dynamic navigation across levels of representation.The paper advances a conceptual lens intended to help reorient discussions of creativity in AI-mediated education and to support future theoretical and empirical inquiry into traversal-based models of learning.