Exploring processes of collaborative creativity—The role of emotions in children''s joint creative writing

This paper reports a study on children's classroom-based collaborative creative writing. Based on socio-cultural theory, the central aim of the research was to contribute to current understanding of young children's creativity, and describe ways in which peer collaboration can resource, stimulate and enhance classroom-based creative writing. The study drew on longitudinal observations of ongoing classroom activities in year 3 and year 4 classrooms, working with 24 children (12 pairs) aged 7–9 in England. The pairs’ collaborative creative writing sessions were observed and recorded using video and audio equipment in the literacy classroom and in the ICT suite with 2–4 recordings per pair. A functional model was developed to analyse cognitive processes associated with creative text composition (engagement and reflection) via the in-depth study of collaborative discourse. Based on the analysis of paired talk, the study has identified discourse patterns and collaborative strategies which facilitate sharedness and thus support joint creative writing activities. A key finding was the centrality of emotions in the observed creative writing sessions. This paper discusses the role of emotion-driven thinking in phases of shared engagement. The study has implications for creativity research and pedagogy, revealing the special features of shared creative thinking. It also contributes to the current methodological debate about how best to analyse collaborative discourse, highlighting the need to explore the generalisability and domain specificity of existing characterisations of productive groupwork.     

The resources and obstacles of creative collaboration in a long-term learning community

In the framework of a subject-centred socio-cultural approach, this study investigates creative collaboration and the resources for and obstacles to it in a long-term learning community of ten teacher students. The study focuses on five different learning situations over a 2-year period. The data were taken from teacher students’ evaluations and accounts (on given criteria) of their videotaped group-learning sessions, and their reports of the obstacles to creative collaboration. Using the students’ evaluations of the five videotaped group learning situations, the sessions they assessed as the least and most creative were compared, the aim being to discover the most important situation-specific contextual resources for collaborative creativity in the learning settings addressed. The findings showed that creative collaboration was manifested by the presentation of alternative views, and in most situations also by the production of new ideas. However, it was less evident that group discussion would in every session reveal contradictions or lead to the disclosure of opposing views concerning different meanings; nor would it necessarily create an elaborated understanding of the learning topic. The main obstacles to creative collaboration were related to the emotional atmosphere and power relations of the group. A comparison of the contextual conditions of the least and most creative evaluated situation illustrates that the least creative situation was characterised by participants’ disputational talk, aimed at invalidating opposing opinions. Here, the group atmosphere was emotionally charged in a negative sense, and mutual care taking was lacking. The unsafe atmosphere made group members afraid of being emotionally bruised by other members. The most creative situation was characterised by complementarity in participants’ talk and by inclusive utilisation of each other's views. The shared history of the group was an extremely important resource for group dialogue, allowing alternative future scenarios to be constructed reflectively. The emotional scaffolding between students was rich, and the tutor's resources were utilised. Results are discussed in terms of complementarity, emotions and power relations.     

Peer facilitated writing groups: a programmatic approach to doctoral student writing

Very few empirical studies have investigated programmes in which doctoral students act as peer facilitators in faculty writing groups. We report on the development of a centrally delivered doctoral student writing programme in which twenty student participants were mentored and provided with the resources to initiate their own faculty-based doctoral writing groups. ‘Legitimate peripheral participation’ was used as a conceptual lens to interpret the data collected during the establishment and evaluation of the programme. All student participants in the preparatory training course, which was developed in consultation with postgraduate students and research supervisors, went on to become doctoral writing peer facilitators of peer writing groups. Insights from seven of these showed how a well-structured and supportive programme harnessed the benefits of peer learning by bringing personal rewards to participants and building institutional capacity around doctoral research writing literacies.     

Becoming creative practitioners: elementary teachers tackle artful approaches to writing instruction

The “creativity gap” is a distressing discrepancy between the ostensible value educators place on creativity and its absence in schools. How do teachers take on the attributes and skills of a creative practitioner? What struggles do they face in doing so? This case study examines the practices of six early elementary teachers who embarked on a professional development experience through which they learned arts-based strategies for prewriting activities. They purposefully practiced cultivating an environment in which student imagination would feed the generation of ideas and details in prewriting exercises. Findings indicate some teachers embraced this departure from the norm, recognizing how loosening their reigns emboldened “voice and choice” in student writing. Others experienced difficulty taking risks and developing spontaneity for accepting and responding to student ideas. Finally, teachers grappled with converging creative practice with everyday practices in the classroom.     

The Story Engine: offering an online platform for making ‘unofficial’ creative writing work

This article describes the outcomes of a research project conducted at the Ministry of Stories (a London‐based writing centre) which sought to develop an online, mentor‐assisted, writing platform. Across a 3‐month period, at four different sites across the UK, more than a hundred Year 7 pupils took part in the project, using the platform to write stories and get feedback from mentors who came from a variety of backgrounds. For reasons of space, pupil/mentor interactions are not discussed extensively in the article; however, these stories were collected and analysed alongside a range of other survey and interview data to establish how creative writing might be developed through online mentoring, the use of an online interface and the intersection of both these tools. The article seeks to answer some questions raised by the data collected in the project, and in turn, uses both the questions and the data to interrogate some of the discourses which surround the teaching of creative writing both in and outside the classroom, and in particular the tensions that occur between the teaching of writing skills, ‘official versions’ of writing in the classroom and children's use of their own cultural resources in creative writing.     

Students' perceptions of Wiki-based collaborative writing for learners of English as a foreign language

This study proposes a Wiki-based collaborative writing approach to the writing process for EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. A five-stage computer-mediated collaborative writing project including collaborative planning, partitioned drafting, peer-revising, peer-editing, and individual publishing was blended with on-campus English composition course. Fifty-one L2 learners at a university in central Taiwan participated in this project. Procedural scaffolding and collective scaffolding were provided to promote students' self-regulation and thus to foster the development of students' writing skills. A cross-referencing questionnaire survey was adopted to investigate students' perceptions of Wiki-based collaborative writing and students' perceptions of their work in each stage of collaborative writing. As the results indicated, a high percentage of students' satisfaction showed positive perceptions of this Wiki-based collaborative writing environment, and the instructional design of implementing a Wiki-based collaborative writing project with a five-stage writing process does assist EFL learners to accomplish a collaborative writing task on the internet with less limitation of time. This article also points to new possibilities for future research.     

内隐认知理论对中学写作教学的启示

语文写作教学通常以显性知识为主,直接面向应试,偏重于偏颇的理性分析,人文精神失落,中学生写作情感荒芜,文过虚饰,语言低俗无物。本文以内隐认知理论分析写作教学问题,提出四点总建议:尊重自主写作,提高感悟能力;重视情景体验,建立真情实感;进行环境熏陶,培养高尚情操;阅读名著经典,建立刺激阈限。     

Teaching poetry: writing poetry — teaching as a writer

This paper considers the ways in which the authentic strategies and struggles of the creative writer in formulating a text, can be translated into classroom activity. It explores four activities which derived from my own practice as a writer, and demonstrates the process of adapting, trialling and evaluating them in a range of different classroom settings. The paper attempts to answer the questions: w ere these ‘real‐life’ processes successful as a basis for learning activities? How did the learners respond and what can we learn from heir responses? The paper concludes with the premise that being congruent with one's own ‘real‐life’ strategies can indeed lead to valid learning activities, and that these activities help us to deconstruct many of the myths about what it means to be creative.     

A synthesis of research concerning creative teachers in a Canadian context

Effective teachers are often creative ones, yet an examination of creative teaching is largely invisible in the North American creativity literature. Even within education there is little about teachers’ own creative practice. Nonetheless, there are benefits to studying creative teachers: in education it can explicate ways of enhancing teachers’ creativity and enriching praxis; and in psychology it can extend our understanding of social and interpersonal creativity, as well as everyday creativity. This paper reviews 12 Canadian case studies of creative teaching conducted by a creative teaching research group. An in-depth elaboration of two themes, creative person and community, is presented.     

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

Towards an eclectic framework for teaching EFL writing in a Chinese context

The challenges of writing itself and lack of appropriate teaching methodology demotivate EFL （English as a Foreign Language） learners in some Chinese universities to write more, especially as the only incentive for students to write is the compulsory tests. The main objectives of this article are： （1） to discuss the background of the EFL learners in Chinese tertiary education and then to elaborate on their needs and problems for EFL writing; （2） to review the existing approaches to teaching writing; and （3） to propose and justify an integrated model on the basis of these approaches for teaching EFL writing in the Chinese context.     

Golden times of writing: the creative compliance of writing journals

This paper examines the history, rationale, uses and abuses of writing journals in primary classrooms. We argue that writing journals form part of a pedagogy derived from an understanding of how children can be motivated to express themselves, independently of teachers. Moreover, they demonstrate the power of welcoming children's home cultures into the classroom. However, we also wish to argue that the use of writing journals is part of the teaching profession's ‘creative compliance’ that can still contribute to the marginalisation of effective educational practice. We document how, in some schools in England, writing journals have been reduced to token gestures towards creativity and independence and in effect collude with and support what is increasingly becoming a pedagogical hegemony.     

A systematic review of visual representations for analyzing collaborative discourse

Visual analytics combines automated data analysis and human intelligence through visualisation techniques to address the complexity of current real-world problems. This review uses the lens of visual analytics to examine four dimensions of visual representations for analysing collaborative discourse: goals, data sources, visualisation designs, and analytical techniques based on 89 studies. We found visual analysis approaches to be suitable and advantageous for decomposing the temporality of collaborative discourse. However, it has been challenging for current research to simultaneously consider learning theories and follow visualisation design principles when adopting visualisations to analyse collaborative discourse. At the same time, existing visual analysis approaches have mainly targeted learners or researchers in online contexts and mainly focused on mirroring collaborative discourse rather than providing advanced affordances such as alerting or advising. Informed by these findings, we propose a possible future research agenda and offer suggestions for the features of successful collaboration to guide the design of advanced affordances.     

Towards a framework for creative online collaboration: A research on challenges and context

The OnCreate project was initiated by ten universities with expertise in collaborative work in online-based learning environments and explores the specific challenges of implementing university courses in creative disciplines in such an environment. The first research phase comprises a literature search on creativity and its contextual factors in online collaboration in an educational setting. From this research a first set of possible key challenges and contextual key factors has been selected and applied to categorize the results of interviews and surveys on current good practice in creative online collaboration among experienced online teachers from the partner universities. From the key findings we formulate hypotheses to guide future research towards a framework for creative online collaboration. At the same time, the results can serve as inspiration for the educational practice. Notable observations of the good practice research among the partner universities are that they realise innovative collaboration concepts usually on mashed-up environments of state-of-the-art web services rather than on the omnipresent learning management systems (such as Moodle or Blackboard). Also, they show a paradigm shift from teaching to coaching and promotion of an open peer-review culture among the students.     

Peer collaboration in solving qualitative physics problems: The role of collaborative talk

This study investigated whether and how peer collaboration facilitated students' problem solving in physics. A qualitative physics test was administered to two Secondary 6 (Year 12) classes, with half of the students in each class randomly assigned to take the test individually and the other half to work in dyads. The abilities of the individuals and dyads were matched such that there was no significant difference between their physics examination grades. The test results show that the dyads performed better than the individuals on each problem and the test as a whole. The rich collaborative talk of the dyads shows that peer collaboration provided students with experiences of co-construction and conflict that were conducive to successful problem solving. However, it was found that co-construction could lead to correct as well as wrong solutions and that conflict and co-construction could occur in the same instance rather than as separate activities. The study also found that students' success in problem solving depended not so much on their ability but on how they interacted and whether and how they invoked the relevant physics principles and strategies.     

Using rubrics in student self-assessment: student perceptions in the English as a foreign language writing context

The instructional value of rubrics for promoting student learning and aiding teacher feedback to student performance has been extensively researched in th educational literature. There is, nonetheless, a dearth of studies on students’ rubric use in second/foreign language contexts, and fewer studies have investigated the factors affecting rubrics’ effectiveness for promoting student learning. The paper reports a classroom-based inquiry into students’ perceptions of rubric use in self-assessment in English as a Foreign Language context and the factors moderating its effectiveness. Eighty students at a Chinese university participated in the study. The data collected included their reflective journals and six case study informants’ retrospective interviews. Results showed that the rubric was perceived as useful for fostering the students’ self-regulation by guiding them through the stages of goal-setting, planning, self-monitoring and self-reflection. Both within-rubric and rubric-user factors were identified as affecting the rubric’s effectiveness in student self-assessment. The findings are discussed with reference to the design features of rubrics. Implications are drawn for formative rubric use in student self-assessment.     

Musical collaboration outside school: Processes of negotiation in band rehearsals

This paper presents a study of a series of band rehearsals run by five young people as they practised for a gig together: preparing new songs as well as developing their existing sets. The analysis specifically explores the ways in which the band members collectively develop and evaluate their musical ‘works in progress’. Their interactions were distinctive: with evidence of emotive, highly critical and sometimes conflictual dynamics in places. Within and through such processes the band members constructed a musical ‘shared knowledge’ which resourced the negotiation of their emergent band identity.     

Negotiating epistemological challenges in thinking and practice: A case study of a literacy and inquiry tool as a mediator of professional conversation

This study examines how a Humanities team engaged in professional conversation to refine and implement a literacy and inquiry tool in an Asian Studies curriculum. Drawing on socio-cultural perspectives of teacher learning and theories of tools as mediators of action, this case study investigates the ways this community of practice discussed their understandings of contexts, curriculum, and classroom practice to implement the literacy and inquiry tool. Such practices hold promise for the design of professional learning experiences where teachers engage in conversations about key tools they can use in their practice and assume more control of their own professional learning.     

Primary pupils' creative writing: enacting identities in a Community of Writers

This paper focuses on a Community of Writers creative writing project where 25 primary school pupils from lower socio‐economic backgrounds took part in creative writing workshops over a 2‐week period at a higher education institution. Using practitioner enquiry and discourse analysis, this paper views identity as participation in ‘figured worlds’ and highlights the relationship between the children's creative writing outputs and their shifting identities (Holland et al., 1998 ). A case is made that children's authentic creative writing can be nurtured by a community that promotes intertextuality and ‘hybridity’ (Bakhtin, 1981 ) as well as balancing pedagogical ‘structure’ and ‘freedom’ (Davies et al., 2012 ) in order to provide textual space for writers to enact different identities. At a time when the global figuring power of performativity (Ball, 2003 ) actively restricts the ways in which teachers and children interact, this paper also presents an informed argument for the value of school–university research partnerships.