Reframing Creativity as the Biography of an Idea: Developing Learning Narratives that Describe Creativity as a Distributed and a Participatory Process [Dissertation Oral Defense]

Date: 

Monday, April 14, 2014, 4:00pm to 5:30pm

Location: 

Harvard Graduate School of Education, Monroe C. Gutman Library, GCC Area 3, 6 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138

Fostering creativity through education has long been a priority. Despite this imperative, many educators and policymakers retain traditional, individual-based understandings of creativity that are both out of synch with contemporary systems-based creativity theory and incongruous with the increasing emphasis on group invention and geographically distributed teams seen in business, education, and government. Through this qualitative investigation of group-generated ideas this study establishes an empirically grounded theoretical framework that provides multiple pathways to creative participation for a wide variety of learners within an array of content areas. The study examines three core questions: (1) What are the observable ways individuals participate in and contribute to the ongoing development of group-generated creative ideas? (2) What types of individual and group learning take place during the development of group-generated creative ideas? (3) How does what individuals and groups learn throughout the process of developing group-generated creative ideas inform and influence the evolution of the ideas being developed? By applying a biographical approach to the case study method, I track the evolutionary arcs of “Reverse Outlet” and “Static Fashion” two innovative project ideas developed by teams of young people at the Boston ArtScience Prize—an afterschool program committed to the development of creative ideas at the cutting edge of the arts and science. The unfolding histories—or biographies—of these ideas serve as learning narratives that describe the various ways in which individuals participate in the development of creative ideas—and the learning that accrues to those individuals along the way.