| R. Keith Sawyer |
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| R. Keith Sawyer |
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| Back-to-school WUSTL experts available for comment on issues children and parents face each fall (http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/9730.html) Aug. 8, 2008 -- Your kid just got beat up by the fifth-grade bully. Or perhaps you aren't sure the lunches are healthy enough for your child to be eating. Maybe you've even noticed a change in your child's behavior after returning to school. Washington University has several experts that can comment on any one of these concerns, as well as many others that arise when children are going ... back to school, whether it's kindergarten, high school or college. |
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| A toy story Finding educational toys is not hard; key is keeping child's age in mind (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/12032.html) July 17, 2008 --
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| Power of collaboration Being more creative in everyday life is simple, says author of 'Group Genius' (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/9421.html) May 14, 2007 --
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| A toy story Finding educational toys is not hard; key is keeping child's age in mind (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/4232.html) Dec. 6, 2006 --
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| Learning at a deeper level Discovering why study groups are more effective (http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/5642.html) July 17, 2006 --
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| The hidden secrets of the creative mind
Time Magazine Jan. 11, 2006 -- What is creativity? Where does it come from? The workings of the creative mind have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 25 years by an army of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience. But no one has a better overview of this mysterious mental process than WUSTL psychologist and education professor R. Keith Sawyer, author of the new book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. In a Time interview, Sawyer shares some of his findings and suggests ways in which we can enhance our creativity not just in art, science or business but in everyday life. |
Despite almost 30 years of supporting research—and enthusiastic adoption by teachers—these techniques are still controversial. With math education, for example, traditionalists pejoratively refer to constructivist methods as "new new math" or "fuzzy math," and advocate a "back to basics" return to a drill-and-practice model of learning, which is focused on the isolated, individual learner. This controversy relates to many current policy issues—not only teaching practice, but also assessment, accountability, diversity, and learning styles. How can we determine the appropriate role for collaboration in education?
My work explores this important educational issue by examining a poorly-understood aspect of collaboration: the discourse and interaction patterns that occur within the group. My studies of collaborative processes can be grouped into three research foci:
1. Discourse processes in collaborating groups
2. Creativity and collaboration
3. Child development and collaboration
I take an interdisciplinary, problem-focused approach, combining these three research foci to better understand how collaboration works.
1. Discourse processes in collaborating groups
In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, many studies demonstrated improved learning from collaboration. Most of these studies used pre- and post-tests and measured learning outcomes by comparing groups—for example, a class using collaboration versus a class with only individual instruction, or two classes with different collaborative group designs, such as mixed ability versus equal ability. In these outcome-focused approaches, collaboration itself was treated as something of a black box: there has been very little study of the processes within collaborating groups. My work extends these approaches by studying the discourse and interaction patterns of collaboration. By using research methodologies of discourse analysis and conversation analysis, originating in linguistics and sociology, I study the creativity of collaborating groups and the symbolic communication among participants. My perspective on the interdisciplinary study of discourse is perhaps best represented by my 2001 book Creating Conversations.
I focus on discourse processes to better understand several assumptions that educators have made about the construction of knowledge in collaborating groups: for example, that the flow of the collaboration is not deterministic, that the teacher's instructions must leave room for creative exploration, and that collaboration is an emergent process—with a result greater than the sum of the parts. To explore these assumptions, I have developed a new theoretical model of collaborative emergence in several journal articles and in my fourth monograph, Group Creativity (forthcoming). The key elements of the theory are (1) a model of the detailed relations between successive turns of action, elaborating on a combination of established theories of conversation in sociology and anthropology, and (2) a model of how the overall collective work of the group emerges from successive individual actions. To theorize this latter process of emergence, I explored theories of emergence in three disciplines: sociology, philosophy of science, and computational modeling of social groups.
A key finding of studies of emergence in sociology and philosophy of science is that sciences of higher levels may have autonomous laws and properties that cannot be easily reduced to lower-level sciences. For example, philosophers of mind generally agree that mental properties cannot be easily reduced to neurobiological processes, due to the complex dynamical nature of the brain. Drawing on these arguments, I developed an analogous argument that properties of collaborating groups—such as the topic discussed, the insights that emerge, the collaboratively determined framing of the task, the opportunistically emerging plan of action—are emergent from the conversation of the group, and yet are difficult to reduce to properties of the group's members (such as their internal goals or mental representations).
In my most recent journal submission, "Study group discourse," I combined the methodology of conversation analysis with my theory of emergence to explore the educational benefits of collaborative dialogue in a four-student study group (American Educational Research Journal, under review). Through a close analysis of transcripted dialogue, I revealed emergent group patterns and I showed how these emergent patterns contributed to learning, even though the participants did not intentionally create these patterns and were not consciously aware of them. These beneficial patterns were fundamentally group phenomena, and could not have occurred through individual study.
2. Improvisational creativity and collaboration
The guiding insight of constructivism is that children learn best when they create their own knowledge; thus learning is thought to be a fundamentally creative process. As a second research focus, I have studied some of the most creative collaborating groups—jazz and improvisational theater ensembles. I became interested in improvising groups because they represent the purest form of collaboration—they are unstructured and egalitarian. I reasoned that by focusing on pure improvisation, I could identify essential elements of the collaborative process, elements that might be obscured in groups with well-defined tasks or goals, status asymmetries, or a predetermined routine, script, or plan.
My most extensive study of improvisational collaboration was a study of Chicago improv theater groups that resulted in my third monograph (Improvised Dialogues, 2003). As with my other studies of collaboration, I focused on discourse processes and collaborative emergence in these groups. I used my theory of collaborative emergence to analyze how improvised dialogues result in the emergence of a final performance that no single performer could have planned or predicted. In my fourth monograph, Group Creativity, I combined findings from my studies of improv theater and of jazz to develop a novel approach to the study of collaborating groups in general. For example, in the concluding chapter I outlined the implications for educational collaboration and other everyday groups. In addition to its implications for the study of collaboration, this line of work has been recognized as significant for the field of creativity research more generally; I have recently received a contract from Oxford for a new overview of contemporary research in the field, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation.
My study of improvised dialogues has provided me with valuable perspectives on discourse processes and on how performances collaboratively emerge from the collective actions of participants. The principles of improvisation that I learned have many implications for classroom collaboration; for example, I am working with Professor Margaret Finders, our director of teacher education, to use improvisational acting principles to teach teachers how to lead more effective discussion sessions.
3. Child development and collaboration
Although constructivism has been influential in developmental psychology and education for over 50 years, contemporary researchers continue to elaborate the ways that knowledge emerges in development through creative, constructive processes. The contemporary paradigm of socioculturalism is a social form of constructivism, and my work falls in this tradition. Socioculturalists focus on the social and cultural contexts of learning, and study how learning occurs in group settings.
My first book, Pretend Play as Improvisation, combined child development and educational perspectives to study children's pretend play groups. As in my other studies, I focused on the discourse processes of these children, and how emergent group patterns contributed to their learning of social and conversational skills. In the forthcoming co-authored book Creativity and Development (Oxford) I draw connections between creativity in collaborating groups and the social construction of knowledge. This work elaborates the constructivist insight that development always involves creative processes. And in a forthcoming article, "Improvisation and narrative" (Narrative Inquiry) I use my children's play dataset to address a key concern in the field of emergent literacy: how does children's social pretend play contribute to literacy skills? I use my theory of collaborative emergence to reconceptualize the developmental relationship between collaborative play and narrative development.
Because my theory of collaborative emergence emphasizes the social and cultural dimensions of collaboration, it has potential implications for other sociocultural research. My studies of emergence have provided me with new perspectives on several unresolved theoretical issues in socioculturalism; the potentially broad impact of my theoretical approach is demonstrated by recent articles published in theory journals (Human Development, Culture & Psychology). In Spring 2002, the issues identified in these two articles were the topic of a two-month discussion on a widely-subscribed Internet newsgroup, XMCA (moderated by Michael Cole of UCSD).
Summary: Integrating perspectives on collaboration
How can we best teach our children? What is the appropriate role for collaboration in classrooms and in other learning environments? These questions, like many pressing practical issues, require a problem-focused approach that draws on theory and method fromdiverse disciplinary perspectives. The above three research foci draw on multiple disciplinary traditions, and I have combined these traditions to develop an interdisciplinary study of collaboration. I have enjoyed the interdisciplinary environment of the College of Arts and Sciences; I have adjunct appointments in psychology, PNP, and STA, and I have attended colloquia in all three over the years. Contacts with our top scholars in these areas have contributed to my research.
In my attempt to better understand how collaboration works, I have moved beyond my home disciplines of psychology and education to explore sociology, philosophy, and computational modeling. Although my purpose in exploring these disciplines was ultimately to develop educational theory, I also engaged in foundational work in these fields. I have published articles in sociology and philosophy journals, and I have presented talks at conferences on computational modeling of social groups. Yet in all of these cases, my goal has remained constant: to use each of these traditions to better understand how collaboration works.
In Spring and Summer of 2002, I began three different collaborations with colleagues, all designed to apply my theory to collaboration in educational settings. With Professor Jay Scribner at University of Missouri Columbia, I am exploring how the implementation of educational policy initiatives is mediated by dialogue among teachers and administrators within schools. With Professor Margaret Finders of Washington University, I am exploring how teacher-training programs can best instruct teachers in how to lead collaborations in classrooms, drawing on insights derived from my studies of improvisational theater groups. With Professor Marlene Scardamalia of University of Toronto and Kit Klein of Washington University, I am exploring how my theory could be applied to the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment called Knowledge Forum, by observing classrooms at the Compton-Drew Investigative Learning Center in St. Louis. This last project is closely related to recent initiatives in the Department of Education that focus on science, math, and technology education, and I am preparing a new course as part of that initiative, "Foundations of Educational Technology." In the longer term, I hope to combine the findings from these new projects with my recent publications to generate a book tentatively titled How Collaboration Works.
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