Collaborative creativity among education professionals in a co-design workshop: A multidimensional analysis

Educational change in schools calls for collaboration-based creative actions from teachers. However, most studies on collaborative creativity focus on students’ creative teamwork, whereas research on collaborative creativity among teachers is scarce. Drawing on group creativity studies and scholar Keith Sawyer's (1999, 2012a) concept of constraining shared frames, this paper discusses a qualitative case study on collaborative creativity among education professionals who have co-designed pedagogical activities related to environmental education. In this study, we asked the following: 1) How are individual creative acts negotiated in the co-design process? 2) How does a constraining shared frame of collaborative creativity emerge in the group's co-design process? 3) How does the material tool (i.e., the Storyboard) mediate the group's co-design process? To address these questions, a framework was created and used for analyzing participants’ collaborative creativity across individual, social, and material dimensions. The individual dimension focused on participants’ generative-evaluative creative acts and the mobilization of their pedagogical design capacities. The social dimension directed attention to participants’ negotiation of evidence and the emergence of a constraining shared frame of collaborative creativity. The material dimension focused on how material tools, especially a tool called the Storyboard, mediated the participants’ negotiation and creativity. Our findings unpack the multidimensional and tension-laden nature of creative processes among education professionals and widen the understanding of forces that both constrain and enable collaborative creativity. Our study also points to the significance of co-design tools that facilitate multiprofessional negotiation and transcend constraints.