Teaching in a Networked Classroom

Jonathan Savage, Clive McGoun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317450764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The pace of technological change has made the immediate and long-term future difficult, if not impossible, to predict. Teachers are forced to imagine the world they are preparing their students to live in. In this situation creativity becomes a vital resource for enabling uncertain futures to be embraced and an important attribute for students to have both for their learning and their employability in the future.

In this book, the authors argue that creativity is a social and collaborative process that can be enhanced through online and digital technologies. Filled with case studies and practical tasks, it shows teachers how they can develop an approach to teaching and learning with digital technologies that is inherently social, collaborative and creative. Including case studies and practical examples of projects and lessons throughout, the chapters cover:

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• Learning in a networked society

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• An examination of sharing practices and how knowledge can be shared more effectively

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• Potential pitfalls of virtual learning environments and public social networking sites

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• Using digital media to plan schemes of work and lessons

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• How to facilitate meaningful collaboration and discussion through digital media

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• Creating online environments to enable students to share their understandings and learning

Bringing together key ideas about creativity, collaborative learning and ICT in the classroom, this timely book will be an invaluable resource for all teachers.

1	Understanding creativity

KEY QUESTIONS

■ Why is it so difficult to define creativity?

■ What is the orthodox view of creativity in UK education?

■ How do teachers understand creativity?

■ What is social about creativity and why does it matter?

Introduction

In this chapter, we turn our attention to questions of creativity in education. We begin with some examples of how creativity has been considered within higher education, before moving our thoughts to the context of formal schooling. But before we do that, a Reflective Task!

REFLECTIVE TASK

Spend a few moments thinking about how you would define ‘creativity’. What are the key words or phrases you would include in your definition?

In 2002, the Imaginative Curriculum Network¹ was established by the Higher Education Academy as home to a community of people interested in developing the creativity of students in higher education. The impulse behind the network was a recognition that UK universities were not valuing creativity in ways that would guarantee its place in the curriculum. Proponents of creativity argued that this would be costly in a world where increased complexity and speed of change demands those human qualities and dispositions that are not covered by curricula which emphasise skills and outcomes. Very similar arguments have ranged in recent discussions about the role and purpose of a National Curriculum within the school context. However, what exactly was it that people were not valuing? What is meant when we talk of creativity?

Norman Jackson from the Network began asking these questions of academics working in British universities. He discovered that a number of ideas were commonly associated with creativity (Jackson 2003). Over the past year we have informally replicated Jackson’s work by talking to teachers and colleagues with whom we work, and have come up with very similar findings. Below is Jackson’s list of common ideas together with glosses informed by our own conversations and email exchanges with teachers and lecturers.

Originality

Creativity is about adding something that wasn’t there before. Some people are seen as ‘original’, they don’t repeat what has already been said but are able to add something new. Originality is something that some people, special people, possess.

Being imaginative

Imagination plays a crucial part in people’s conception of creativity. Again, this is understood as a disposition: some people have a great imagination and can often think beyond the immediately obvious into a realm that is new. Others can’t; their imagination, like a pipeline to the source of creativity, is easily blocked.

Exploring for the purpose of discovery

A creative mind is a curious mind, constantly pushing the boundaries and taking risks in order to experience new things. When those new things can’t be discovered, they have to be created. It takes great energy and confidence to explore, to discover. Often the institutions in which we work make it difficult to explore and can seem threatened by it, preferring instead to manage exploration that ultimately maintains the status quo.

Doing/producing new things

Creative people invent stuff – things and ideas, but these are special people, with special powers. Invention just comes to you, at moments you might least suspect. If, though, it doesn’t, you can’t chase it.

Doing or producing things no-one has ever done before

Creative people generate innovative ideas. Innovation is the current buzzword with which activities are associated to make them sound valuable.

Doing or producing things that have been done before, but differently

It is much easier to think outside the box when you step outside the box. Cross-disciplinary work, the fertilisation of one idea in a particular area by ideas that have been generated in a completely different area, can provide new pathways for solving problems.

Communication

Unless an idea is shared, the creative process is somehow incomplete.

It is instructive that these understandings of creativity include such common elements. How do Jackson’s thoughts about creativity relate to your response to the opening Reflective Task?

We do seem to have a shared frame through which we view the idea of creativity. However, this is just the idea of creativity. As Jackson points out, this list needs to be seen and evaluated in the context of actual practice. Therefore he turns to studies (McGoldrick 2002; Oliver 2002) that asked academics in the United Kingdom a more specific question: ‘What does being creative mean when you design a course?’ Interestingly, context seems to have little impact on their answers. Very similar associations are made, with the addition of promoting the idea of ‘graduateness’ (defined as the ability to make connections between what has been learnt and how to transfer that knowledge to other situations), and being able to produce a narrative of the work which complies with the institutional requirements of course design. The latter clearly expresses that moment of ‘creative compromise’ where fiercely held personal ideas meet institutional regulations and expectations.

Jackson and his colleagues in the Imaginative Curriculum Network discovered that UK academics and students, whilst sharing some ways of thinking about creativity, found it difficult to specify a conclusive single definition of the concept. Again, this reflects research reported in a number of reviews of creativity published in the past fifteen years (Boden 1991; Loveless 2002; Craft 2003). There is an assumption that creativity involves novelty and originality; usefulness and value, but synthesising those terms into a convincing definition has proved elusive. We really are not sure what is meant by creativity. Is it the ‘product’, some tangible thing that is new and useful? Alternatively, is it the ‘invention’ and the process leading up to the invention (Runco 2007: 385) that we should think of as creativity? Or is it some kind of cognitive process that has intrinsic value?

Is all creativity the same? Researchers of creativity often make a distinction between a kind of everyday creativity which allows us to improvise our lives in the midst of constant change, and ‘extraordinary creativity’ which is ‘the sort of publicly acclaimed creativity which changes knowledge and/or our perspective on the world’ (Craft 2003: 114). A similar idea is often expressed by the terms ‘eminent-level creativity’, those discoveries that are particularly important for society, and ‘non-eminent-level creativity’, our innate ability to adapt to different circumstances that has given us evolutionary advantage (Richards 1999). Is there a sense of elitism creeping in here? The mundane, evolutionary survival behaviour disappearing into the background of the everyday, whilst the extraordinary creativity, the person with unusual, special talents, emerges as the real creative? Could it also be that this idea is reinforced by associating the real creative with the arts, rather than science or technology?

These questions and the tensions they produce are not new. In 1999, a report called All Our Futures, published by the UK National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, argued the case for a more ‘democratic’, inclusive understanding of creativity, ‘one which recognises the potential for creative achievement in all fields of human activity; and the capacity for such achievements in the many and not the few’ (NACCCE 1999: 31). The report emerged against a background of economic stagnation in the UK and the fear that economic progress and prosperity would be thwarted unless the potential of every young person could be harnessed. Its solution was to make recommendations for a national strategy, both in content and pedagogy, addressed to the government, educators, parents … ‘everyone’ (the report was, after all, called All Our Futures) for creative and cultural education.

The definition of creativity contained within the report is succinct:

Our starting point Our starting point is to recognise four characteristics of creative processes. First, they always involve thinking or behaving imaginatively. Second, overall this imaginative activity is purposeful: that is, it is directed to achieving an objective. Third, these processes must generate something original. Fourth, the outcome must be of value in relation to the objective. We therefore define creativity as imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value. (NACCCE 1999: 30)

This definition has become so influential in subsequent educational policy that it has acquired the status of orthodoxy. It might have begun as an indicative, stipulative definition designed, perhaps, to encourage exploration and empirical investigation, but through transformation, repetition and modification it has acquired the status of truth. This is what creativity is; now, how do we go about teaching it? It was used by the QCA’s 2004 report Creativity: Find it, promote it (QCA 2005), which translated the definition into practice through prescribed activities. The report Nurturing Creativity in Young People (Roberts et al. 2006) used it in a policy framework. Ofsted referenced All Our Futures in its Learning: Creative approaches that raise standards (Ofsted 2010). At least, a discussion of the definition is de rigeur in most educational textbooks, and its baseline definition is constantly referred to in designing and assessing curricula and classroom tasks. What began as a stipulative definition has morphed into sets of orthodox principles. As orthodoxy, the definition has become common sense. Although teachers may find it difficult to articulate an abstract definition of creativity, we would argue that it is NACCCE’s definition that, implicitly, is used in classrooms when creativity is introduced, discussed and assessed.

However, is it right? Must the product of imaginative activity have an objective? Must it have value? Whose objective? Whose value? Is creativity really about producing something original?

The rest of this chapter makes a case for disturbing the ‘common sense’ that is expressed in this orthodoxy around creativity. We want to replace the frame we currently use to look at creativity with another, one that will lead us towards a more distributed and socially networked understanding that can, we argue, respond more effectively to the ways we are increasingly living and learning.

Connecting

Instead of trying to define creativity, Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson 2010) looks at how we talk about creativity, at the metaphors we commonly use to describe the moment when a great idea emerges. So, we talk of the light-bulb moment, the eureka moment, the flash of inspiration, the epiphany. These ways of talking actually frame what we see and understand. They privilege a particular view of creativity. This is the view that an idea is a single thing, which occurs at a single moment. According to Johnson, the metaphor is unhelpful if not completely misleading. He suggests that ideas are in fact networks. At a primary, neurological level, an idea starts out as new connections between neurons in the brain. As an organ built on the basis of its ability to constantly create new connections between neurons, this is simply what the brain was built to do. If that is how new ideas happen, then the most important question becomes how to get yourself into an environment where new connections between neurons in the brain are most likely to be formed. A metaphor, which, he argues, more closely encapsulates this process is the swarm.

We are familiar with the idea of swarming – that collective behaviour that leads to the uncanny coordination of collective action when, for example, a flock of starlings turn and twist over the landscape, or when the queen bee leaves the colony with a group of worker bees to create a new home and more nectar stores. Johnson argues that this metaphor is useful in helping us to understand the process of creativity, which thrives not in flocks or colonies but in networks. It is in networks where the connections between ideas and people can thrive, and sometimes produce a great idea. The problem is that when we explain where a great idea came from, instead of describing the uncanny coordination of collective action, we tend to revert to the ingrained metaphor and talk about the flash of inspiration. Therefore, after the seminar where, through debate, discussion, argument and deliberation, the great idea emerged, we might very well recount it as ‘that moment when Dave had a flash of inspiration and came up with that great idea’. It is difficult to think of creativity without that metaphor.

Johnson argues that not only is the metaphor misleading, history also shows how wrong the frame produced from it is. From examples as diverse as Tim Berners-Lee’s idea for the World Wide Web to Darwin’s idea of natural selection, Johnson shows how the idea is very often manifested as a hunch. This hunch, however, is not a flash, but more like a lingering, slow-burning feeling or intuition that can live in the back of the mind for decades before it becomes accessible and useful. That is because good ideas arise from the collision of smaller hunches that eventually connect together to become something bigger than themselves. It is a rule well known in Hollywood: you do not have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas (Tharp and Reiter 2006: 97). Of course, you need an environment with physical spaces for those collisions to take place. In the Enlightenment, the collisions took place in the coffee houses of London. Ideas were discussed and debated, leading to innovations in science, business and politics. The cultural innovation of the 1920s, during the period we refer to as modernism, took place when writers, poets and artists of every type hung out in the same cafes in Paris. These were inter-disciplinary or even anti-disciplinary spaces, public spaces where a real mix of people discussed ideas, foregrounding some and forcing others into the background to wait, perhaps until the time was ripe for them. These were the social networks of their day. Support networks amongst friends, yes, but also networks that encouraged connections between divergent people and ideas. We will discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 3, but here it is key for Johnson’s argument that what he calls ‘liquid networks’ allow for the movement of information from one conte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding creativity
• 2 Networks, creativity and learning
• 3 Sharing and curating
• 4 Teaching and learning in a networked age
• 5 You are not a gadget
• 6 Developing a networked approach to education
• Appendix 1: Mozilla’s web competencies
• Appendix 2: Tools for creating a personal learning network
• Index