Learning to teach: enhancing pre‐service teachers’ awareness of the complexity of teaching–learning processes

Abstract

Interest in story in teaching has been linked to teacher research (Carter, 1993; Elbaz, 1991), to teacher education (Connelly &; Clandinin, 1994), to curriculum (Britz‐man, 1989; Gudmundsdottir, 1991c), and to school change (Giltin, 1990). I wish to argue here for a link between story and one form of teacher reflection, for portfolio construction, unlike more conventional forms of teacher development, encourages teachers to tell the story of their classrooms and to frame that story in particular ways. I wish to argue here for a view that constructing a portfolio shifts the ownership of learning to the portfolio‐maker and that in this constructing, we can trace a teacher's developing understanding of pedagogy. Specifically, my aim is to illustrate the narrative dimensions of a self‐generated portfolio question — its interpretations, the reflections upon its meaning, and its transformations of pedagogical understanding — as this text becomes pedagogy and pedagogy becomes text. This interpretive process is illustrated through a case study of Ellen Nicol, a secondary English as a Second Language teacher, in her graduate teacher education year and her first 2 years of classroom teaching. Ellen's pedagogical text, her question, is reinterpreted with major changes each time she comes to understand more completely the richness and complexity of her classroom. Each new transformation and reinterpretation serve as guide for selection of materials, for selection of pedagogy, and for assessment of success. Each new collection of pedagogical information serves as impetus for possible reframing and transformation of the text.     

Communities of innovation: Individual,group, and organizational characteristics leading to greater potential for innovation

In this paper I will explain what I see as some of the core attributes of Communities of Innovation, or communities fostering collaborative creativity, and what we have learned from the research literature about each attribute. There is a critical need to design learning environments that foster creative thinking in students, particularly in the area of collaborative creativity. Many of the current problems and challenges graduates will face in society and industry are too large to be faced alone. However, the research and pedagogical understanding of how to develop skills in collaborative creativity is still underdeveloped. In seeking to understand what collaborative creativity would look like in education, I reviewed the literature on organizational and social creativity, along with social learning theory, to develop a framework of characteristics common to most environments that foster collaborative creativity in students (West, 2009). This framework describing Communities of Innovation explains some of the similar characteristics at the individual, group, and organizational levels of innovative communities.     

Qualifying resistance: Some comments on methodological dilemmas

This essay raises questions about the category of "resistance" in educational research and the methodological dilemmas posed by its interpretation. It suggests that psychoanalytic theory provides a way of thinking about resistance that might be helpful for thinking about the gap between the narration of experience and the interpretation of experience. The essay provides a brief overview of conceptualizations of resistance in educational research, discusses the notion of the psychoanalytic dialogue and the qualities of resistance it offers, and brings a psychoanalytic understanding of resistance to bear on a research story that, at first glance, does not appear to qualify as a story of resistance. Finally, the essay explores the implications of these interpretive strategies for critical education research.     

Creativity: An essential component for effective leadership in today's schools

One of the most contentious areas in creativity theory is the question of domain specificity. How we conceptualize creativity — as something that transcends content domains, or as something that varies depending on the domain in question — has important implications for both creativity research and creativity training programs. The Amusement Park Theoretical (APT) model of creativity is the first creativity theory to successfully bridge the gap between these contrasting views of creativity. The APT model uses the metaphor of an amusement park to explore creativity. There are four stages: Initial requirements, general thematic areas, domains, and micro‐domains. The first level (initial requirements) is very general, and each subsequent level gets more and more domain‐specific. The APT model can provide a powerful framework for creativity assessment, selection of students for gifted education programs, and the development of creativity training programs.     

Tackling multimodal news: Some implications of critical analytical research on the ‘children overboard’ affair

Abstract

Accounting for front‐page news puts pressure on analytical resources, especially when news‐making is characterised by features such as overt political intervention in visual (photographic) and verbal (attribution) news data; explicit references to and investment in visual news to support political claims about news‐makers; and significant changes over time to a story, moving it from public scandal, through media disclosure to political defence. This article offers an account of how I tackled these analytical challenges in my research into the ‘children overboard’ affair in Australian newspapers.

The affair was generated from a false claim by Liberal Party ministers that asylum seekers threw their children overboard to coerce the Australian Navy into rescuing them. The story became front‐page news in October, 2001, helped to provide the Coalition with another term in office and greatly influenced public discourse about refugees and border protection. The article shows how I analysed semiotic resources such as voicing (in verbal news) and framing (in visual news) to track changes in this affair. It argues that political interventions in these semiotic resources (what I call ‘first‐order discourse') were pivotal in the management of news about asylum seekers. The article concludes by highlighting some implications of the methodology for critical analysis of multimodal news discourse.     

Connections teachers make between creativity and arts learning

Background: Creativity is often cited as one of the capacities that needs to be actively encouraged in all aspects of schooling. However, what creativity is and how it may be promoted through formal teaching and learning approaches remain contested. There are also differences between educators in terms of how they understand, discuss and conceptualise this complex concept.

Purpose: This paper focuses on the difficulties associated with talking about creativity in education. It considers the ways in which schoolteachers who are involved in the area of arts education understand, describe and discuss the concept of creativity and how it interacts with their classroom practice.

Sample: Twenty-three educators who taught Arts (either as generalist primary classroom teachers or as specialist teachers), and the leadership team from a Kindergarten to Year 9 (pupil ages 5–15) school in the suburbs of a city in the Australian state of Victoria participated in the project.

Design and methods: In this phenomenological study, data were gathered from participants through questionnaires, discussion groups, email prompts and reflective journals. The material was analysed qualitatively.

Findings: By examining the teachers’ dialogic and discursive responses about creativity, it was possible to capture some broad ways in which the participants spoke about creativity. Data were analysed thematically and grouped into categories that represented the connected ‘creative orientations’: thinking orientations, action orientations, emotion orientations and skill/outcome orientations.

Conclusion: There is a need for educators in and across a range of discipline areas to share, map and think about creativity. The approach adopted in this exploratory study offers a way that could be used to focus discussions and help facilitate educators’ talk about creativity.     

Relationship of creativity and critical thinking to pattern recognition among Singapore private school students

Abstract

Cognitive pattern recognition is known to be an important skill for academic subjects such as mathematics, science, languages, or even humanities. In this study, we investigate the relationships between creativity, critical thinking, and pattern recognition among 203 private school students in Singapore. The instruments used include a creativity test (modified Creativity Selected Elements Questionnaire), a Critical Thinking Test (modified Cornell Critical Thinking), and a pattern recognition test. The main data analysis is done using the SMART-PLS structural equation modeling software. The results of the study reveal that creativity is a weak predictor of pattern recognition (β?=?0.131, p?>?0.05, f² = 0.024) but critical thinking is a good predictor (β?=?0.517, p?<?0.05, f² = 0.374). An implication of the research outcome is that more training on critical thinking should be given to the students to improve their pattern recognition ability.     

PhD by Publication: innovative approach to social science research,or operationalisation of the doctoral student … or both?

ABSTRACT

The PhD by Publication offers doctoral students an opportunity to focus on publishing during their candidature. A considerable body of literature has explored questions of legitimacy, consistency and quality of this model of scholarship, while students have reflected on how this approach helped build a publishing track record and develop skills associated with writing scholarly articles [Jackson, D. (2013). Completing a PhD by publication: A review of Australian policy and implications for practice. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(3), 355–368; Robins, L., & Kanowski, P. (2008). PhD by publication: A student’s perspective. Journal of Research Practice, 4(2), 1–20]. However, there is a need to explore how this approach both shapes and reflects the student experience of doctoral studies. This auto-ethnographical article analyses my own experience of the PhD by Publication. On the one hand, this method suited my multidisciplinary research topic and approach to research and assisted the flexibility and creativity of my research. On the other, I began to view my value as a researcher and the value of my research, in terms of the quantitative performance metrics of research in output, citation counts and h-index. Concept of performativity, I analyse how the PhD by Publication potentially reshapes what it is to be a doctoral student, and how the value of doctoral students is construed by themselves and others within their university.     

Partners in creativity: action research and creative partnerships

The Government's recent Creative Partnerships initiative in England represents part of the resurgence of interest in creativity which was stimulated by the NACCCE's 1999 National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. 1999. All our futures: creativity, culture and education, Suffolk: DfEE Publications.  [Google Scholar] All our futures report. However, many questions remain about the impact and processes of creative partnerships. The field of creativity research has been dominated by two key questions: how should creativity be defined and is it possible to teach creativity? Much has been written which attempts to shed light on the answers to these questions so it is important that creative partnerships' work is understood in the context of what it already known from research and theory. A welcome aspect of Creative Partnerships is the desire to ensure an evidence base to support the creative work happening in schools. Frequently this evidence base has been built in part by using action research methodology which has a strong track record in the context of practitioner research. This paper reports on work done with Creative Partnerships which involved the use of an action research framework to support creative work. It is concluded that there are potential problems with assuming that creativity will be enhanced by approaches such as multiple intelligence without careful thought about the way in which creativity is defined. It is also shown that action research does have the potential to enhance creative work but that one of the most important aspects of this is the relationships that are built between mentors and teachers.     

Creativity: a challenge for contemporary education

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I comment on the objective of cultivating creativity in general and in schools in particular. I start by tracing the historical origin of this objective, then discuss a select set of relevant issues, including what can be considered the best practices for achieving this. I conclude by contemplating the potential for globalisation of this objective, and the portability of general pedagogies and specific approaches to cultivating creativity between different educational systems.     

Rigoberta Menchú and David Stoll: Contending stories

This paper reconnects the major texts, Rigoberta Menchú's autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchu & Debray, 1984) and David Stoll's Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans (Stoll, 1999) with the historical contexts and continuities in which they have been and are active. Its interest is in examining them in the connections between popular on-the-ground struggles in Guatemala and the textual representations entered into in ideological struggles in North America. The writer does not dissociate herself from the latter. She takes up her position on the progressive side, recognizing Menchú's story, with all its problems, as speaking from native peoples' experiences of repression and struggles in the highlands of Guatemala. Her interest is in how Stoll's text goes to work on Menchú's, in the implicit historicity of his study that is submerged by his claim to an objective empiricism, and in how his "findings" have been progressively attenuated as they pass through media versions to simplified representations and coffee-shop gossip. While Menchú's story and vivid presence had breached the wall of silence constructed against news of the U.S. involvement in repression in Central America, Stoll repairs the breach by destroying her credibility and the credibility of her story.     

Increasing the Depth of Field: Critical Race Theory and Photovoice as Counter Storytelling Praxis

Thru the Lenz was a youth participatory action project in which a group of urban high school students explored their lives and communities through art, photography, and narrative. Drawing on data from Thru the Lenz, I deploy CRT to reimagine the research space as a place for counter storytelling. Majoritarian stories are stories that invoke and perpetuate white privilege, are based on racist ideology, are pervasive and are told by whites as well as people of color (Solórzano and Yosso in Qual Inq 8:23–44, 2002a). Counter stories are a method and a tool that enable a deeper understanding of the stories the youth co-constructed though their photos and narratives and also challenge the majoritarian stories told about them, their school, and community (Solórzano and Yosso in Qual Inq 8:23–44, 2002a). Specifically, I present the research praxis organized in the form of an emerging counter story based on two key themes: good community and successful school. When constructed using a CRT framework, the students’ stories about their educational experiences provide a strong critique of neoliberal education reform. I conclude with a discussion of the tensions and challenges of engaging in counter story as critical, emancipatory praxis that elucidates the linkages of personal experiences and macro policies (Stovall in Race Ethn Educ 9:243–259, 2006).     

Developing knowledge intensive ideas in engineering education: the application of camp methodology

Background: Globalization, technological advancement, environmental problems, etc. challenge organizations not just to consider cost-effectiveness, but also to develop new ideas in order to build competitive advantages. Hence, methods to deliberately enhance creativity and facilitate its processes of development must also play a central role in engineering education. However, so far the engineering education literature provides little attention to the important discussion of how to develop knowledge intensive ideas based on creativity methods and concepts.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate how to design creative camps from which knowledge intensive ideas can unfold.

Design/method/sample: A framework on integration of creativity and knowledge intensity is first developed, and then tested through the planning, execution and evaluation of a specialized creativity camp with focus on supply chain management. Detailed documentation of the learning processes of the participating 49 engineering and business students is developed through repeated interviews during the process as well as a survey.

Results: The research illustrates the process of development of ideas, and how the participants through interdisciplinary collaboration, cognitive flexibility and joint ownership develop highly innovative and knowledge-intensive ideas, with direct relevance for the four companies whose problems they address.

Conclusions: The article demonstrates how the creativity camp methodology holds the potential of combining advanced academic knowledge and creativity, to produce knowledge intensive ideas, when the design is based on ideas of experiential learning as well as creativity principles. This makes the method a highly relevant learning approach for engineering students in the search for skills to both develop and implement innovative ideas.     

Identifying and developing creative giftedness

To a large extent, creativity is a decision. Children as well as adults are creative, not by virtue of an innate ability, but by virtue of a set of decisions. In essence, they decide for creativity, rather than an innate set of abilities deciding whether they are creative. Thus, creative giftedness is not a fixed trait, but a decision‐making skill that can be developed. In this article, I present ten decisions people can make to decide for creativity. Included are teaching examples of these decisions as well as teaching activities to facilitate students' learning how to make these decisions.     

Reframing hostility

This paper comments on the Annette Hemmings's paper entitled, 'Youth culture of hostility: Discourses of money, respect and difference.' The paper briefly looks at Hemmings's findings, in particular those related to identity development. However, the major focus is on reframing methodological aspects of Hemmings's study. In particular, the paper examines challenges facing cultural outsiders doing research; the dynamic and multiple roles of the researcher in discourse analysis (i.e., participant, observer, and subject); and a theoretical rationale for including the researcher as subject in research, which is based on Foucault's notion of how discourse systems impact the construction of people's sense of social, political and cultural realities.     

Writing creatively in a museum: tracing lines through persons,art objects and texts

Creative writing is often thought of as an individual and solitary pursuit. This is partly owing to Romantic (and still popular) notions of creativity as residing in highly gifted individuals, but also to the widely held belief that writing is a lonely rather than a social activity. The research presented in this paper provides a unique insight into the creative process by tracing the way one poem is produced by a member of a creative writing class based on a major urban art gallery. Based on a 5‐year ethnographic study of this class, it employs interview material, field notes, photographs and creative writing as data. Using theories from both the “anthropology of writing” (Barton and Papen, 2010 ; Latour and Woolgar, 1986 ) and the “anthropology of creativity” (Ingold, 2007 ; Hallam and Ingold, 2007 ), I argue that creative writing is a relational and temporal process involving complex and multiple claims for agency. I also go on to show that when the text moves from a private to a public context, these multiple agencies are encompassed and erased under the umbrella of individual authorship.     

The Creative Path: An Interview With Dean Keith Simonton

Creativity tests measure specific cognitive processes such as thinking divergently, making associations, constructing and combining broad categories, or working on many ideas simultaneously. They also measure noncognitive aspects of creativity such as motivation (e.g., impulse expression, desire for novelty, risk‐taking), and facilitatory personal properties like flexibility, tolerance for independence, or positive attitudes to differentness. Raters can score the various kinds of test with substantial levels of agreement, while scores are internally stable to an acceptable degree. The tests also correlate to a reasonable degree with various criteria of creativity such as teacher ratings, and are useful predictors of adult behavior. Thus, they are useful in both research and education. However, they are best thought of as measures of creative potential because creative achievement depends on additional factors not measured by creativity tests, such as technical skill, knowledge of a field, mental health, or even opportunity. However, the multidimensional creativity concept they define indicates that assessments should be based on several tests, rather than relying on a single score.     

Creativity and Unpredictability in School Achievement

Abstract

In each of the 9th (N = 75) and 11th (N = 84) grades and on each subtest of the ITED battery, overachieving and underachieving groups were identified by using the predicted scores plus and minus one SB as the cutting points. When these two groups were compared on tests of creative thinking, the mean scores did not show any consistent trend across the different achievement areas to favor either one of these groups. Because of the low correlations between IQ and creativity (.12 in 9th, "-.01 in 11th) and achievement and creativity (—.02 to .21 in 9th, —.16 to .07 in 11th), results of analyses of covariance, controlling for IQ, did not affect the findings.     

Teachers' Prior Experiences and Actual Perceptions of Professional Identity

Abstract

After a review of literature, 14 items were generated which represent teachers' professional identity. The participating teachers (n = 28) were requested to express and clarify their actual perception for each item. In addition they were asked to draw so‐called story‐lines from the present to the past and to clarify the highest and lowest points in these lines. The respondents were secondary school teachers with an average teaching experience of 21 years. All of them perceived their actual professional identity as positive. The teachers' stories of their experiences demonstrate so‐called progressive rather than regressive lines in their careers. Some teachers also demonstrate so‐called stability story‐lines, i.e. lines without high(est) and low(est) points. It is argued that—in the long term—these and other research findings can be relevant to those who are responsible in schools for the further development of teachers' careers.