Collaborative Creativity in STEAM: Narratives of Art Education Students' Experiences in Transdisciplinary Spaces.

Current efforts to promote STEAM (STEM + Arts) education focus predominantly on how partnering with the arts provides a range of benefits to STEM students. Here we take a different IJEA Vol. 16 No. 15 http://www.ijea. org/v16n15/ 2 approach and focus on what art and art education students stand to gain from collaborating with STEM students. Drawing on a variety of student field texts, we present three visual-verbal, constructed narratives of art education students who, in the context of a transdisciplinary design studio, were challenged to experiment with collaborative forms of creative thinking. Their stories point to STEAM as an opportunity for art students to question the notion of the ‘lone artist,’ reflect upon the tension between product and process, and expand disciplinary-based understandings of creative thinking. These potential benefits align with contemporary visual arts practices that strive to move beyond the individual and embrace dialogue, collaborative action, and interdisciplinarity as vital aspects of the creative process. I like the idea of collaboration.because it pushes you. It's a richer experience. Frank Gehry (2008) As an art educator, I am relentlessly intrigued by the idea of creativity. Both engaging in artmaking and watching others create over the years has impelled me to consider how individuals conceive of creativity, how they see themselves as creative beings and, perhaps most importantly from my perspective as an educator, the facets of what and how we teach as supporting students’ creative development. During the fall of 2012, I was afforded the opportunity to teach, along with co-author Nicki Sochacka, a STEAM (an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics)-inspired course referred to as the Transdisciplinary Design Studio at a research university in the southeastern United States. It was in the context of this formative experience that I, as both a teacher and researcher with an interest in visual-verbal methods of analysis, became attuned to the notion of collaborative creativity—how individuals’ creative processes enmesh and collide as they endeavor to reach new and shared understandings. In particular, when the semester ended and I began to analyze the students’ field texts as part of my dissertation research, I was provoked by the way the creative process, often characterized and understood as an individual pursuit, was described 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2014 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA: Guyotte, K. (2014, April). Considering the Creative Self: A Visual-Verbal Narrative Inquiry. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 2 http://www.ted. com/talks/frank_gehry_asks_then_what/transcript? language=en 3 In this paper, the use of “I” refers to the first author’s (Kelly Guyotte’s) voice as this paper draws from her dissertation work. The dissertation was situated within a grant funded by the National Science Foundation under which Kelly was a research assistant. Therefore, this paper represents both Kelly’s inquiries into collaborative creativity (“I”) and the research team’s interest and collaboration (“we”) with regard to student learning and experiences in the Transdisciplinary Design Studio. Guyotte: Collaborative Creativity in STEAM 3 by many of the students as a collective action that emerged as they explored design challenges within interdisciplinary groups. Perhaps it is unsurprising that this notion was not immediately visible to Nicki and me while we taught the design studio. As Eisner (1960) pointed out, it is difficult to see the creative process “qua process” (p. 28). Instead, he wrote: “We must infer the nature of the process from what we can observe” (ibid.). In line with Eisner, it was through a post factum visual-verbal analysis of a collection of the students’ visual-verbal artifacts from the course that Nicki and I were able to observe the students’ narratives of creativity and the creative process. These narratives painted a unique and unexpected picture of STEAM as a space that cultivated a collaborative approach to creativity. In this article, my co-authors and I draw on a variety of student field texts to present three visual-verbal, constructed narratives of art education students who, in the context of the Transdisciplinary Design Studio, were challenged to experiment with collaborative forms of creative thinking. This unique visual-verbal methodological approach (Guyotte, 2013) afforded us the opportunity to consider how students told stories of their interdisciplinary collaborative experiences and how those experiences impacted their perceptions of creativity. Their stories have important implications for art educators, proponents of STEAM education and, more broadly, for society where the need to find collaborative and creative solutions to complex challenges is becoming increasingly critical. Collaborative Creativity The belief that learning is a sociocultural and co-constructed activity (Vygotsky, 1978) is often cited as the impetus for fostering collaboration in the classroom. Through such collaboration, students bring together varied life experiences, knowledge, and approaches to meaning making in the shared pursuit of a learning goal often put forth by the instructor. While the notion of collaboration is not new in educational contexts, it does stand in contrast to many traditional perceptions of the visual arts in higher education. In these disciplinary experiences, students often speak of autonomy in their studio courses—retelling the longstanding narrative of the lone artist, physically or mentally isolated, deeply engaged in her/his own creative process (Thomas & Chan, 2013). This perception may be rooted deeply in the American psyche as a recent study found a bias towards single-artist works of art when compared to collaborative works (Smith & Newman, 2014). This study found that the same work of art presented by researchers as a single artist-creation was evaluated as higher quality than if it were presented as a group undertaking. Interestingly, these perspectives juxtapose contemporary visual arts practices that strive to move beyond the individual and embrace dialogue, collaborative action (Bourriaud, 2002), and interdisciplinarity (Sandell, 2011) as vital aspects of the creative process. In other words, contemporary visual arts are becoming a space where the possibilities in learning and creating move beyond the “I” of creation, and towards the “we” (Glăveanu, 2011). IJEA Vol. 16 No. 15 http://www.ijea. org/v16n15/ 4 In this paper, we draw upon a sociocultural perspective where collaborative creativity is understood as inherently social, existing between the individual and ‘the other’ (Glăveanu, 2011). Csikszentmihalyi (1990) was an early proponent of creativity as functioning within a system, which encompasses the individual as well as other external, social structures including the field and the domain. Arising from interactions with structures such as these, the study of collaborative creativity seeks to explore creativity as situated across individuals who are engaged in a collective pursuit (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). Hargrove (1997) described collaborative creativity as: an act of shared creation and/or shared discovery: two or more individuals with complementary skills interacting to create a shared understanding that none had previously possessed or could have come to on their own. Collaboration creates a shared meaning about a process, a product, or an event. (p. 4) This perception builds upon similar approaches to collaborative learning, examining creativity as intersubjective (Glăveanu, 2011) where individual experiences, knowledge, and creative process merge and contribute to a holistic and collective creative effort. In addition to being intersubjective, collaborative creativity emphasizes creativity as process. Littleton and Miell (2004) explained, “inherent in contemporary approaches to collaborative creativity is an emphasis on studying the processes involved rather than a sole focus on examining the quality of the product of creative endeavors” (p. 1). This process focus was reinforced in the curriculum of the Transdisciplinary Design Studio as Nicki and I made a conscious effort to withhold the students from solution-finding (further explained in the design challenges below) and instead encouraged them to embrace the exploratory nature of problem finding—“the way problems are envisaged, posed, formulated, [and] created” (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976, p. 5). Through engagement in the creative process, problem finding is often discussed as a preparatory, yet recursive activity (Runco & Nemiro, 1994) as well as involving divergent thinking (Runco & Okuda, 1988). Nicki and I found that asking the students to engage deeply and thoughtfully with the early stages of the creative process cultivated a space where they had permission to explore, consider multiple and conflicting viewpoints, and come to understand the collective nature of the group design challenges. Unlike the visual arts, literature on collaborative creativity is prevalent within the performing arts (e.g. Burnard & Dragovic, 2014; Kenny, 2014; Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009). Jazz ensembles, theatrical productions, dance, and other improvisational performances rely upon artists to engage in a joint creative process through which individuals are mindful to both their own actions and the ways in which their actions function within a larger system (Chappell, Craft, Rolfe, & Jobbins, 2012). In this way, collaborative creativity might be likened to an assemblage, where seemingly disparate objects are thoughtfully brought together to comprise Guyotte: Collaborative Creativity in STEAM 5 a conceptually or aesthetically harmonious whole. Extending the assemblage analogy, this article seeks to explore