Building a creative community : emergent practices and learning at a seven-week innovation camp
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Supporting creativity and innovation has emerged as a top priority across fields from Education to Environmental Sciences and even the Humanities. Accordingly, there has been a recent surge of experimental contexts to spark and sustain creativity and innovation. The Globul5 innovation camp, an extreme example of such an exploration, provided an unstructured context for twenty-eight young adults as they lived and worked together in a factory for seven weeks to redesign "the future of work." Through analysis of field notes, video records, photographs, and interviews, I investigated the conditions of the camp design, the community's emergent collaborative practices, and the residents' learning processes. The research questions guiding this study are: 1) What were the incoming conditions of the innovation camp? 2) How did collaborative teams address challenges that arose at the camp? 3) How did participants forge individual learning pathways at the camp? 4) What insights about creative collaboration did participants articulate after the camp? Results of this research suggest that the relational intensity and lack of structure at the camp posed challenges to team project work; however, a significant factor of the residents' learning may be attributable to these challenges and the resultant need to invent ways to manage them. Residents learned through observation, experimentation, critical reflection, and reflective discourse; ultimately, they described the camp as a transformative learning experience (Mezirow, 1991). Residents adapted, adopted, and developed practices at the camp to manage their collaborative work, including a ritual for abandoning projects that were failing due to attempts at consensus, methods for differentiating idea generation and idea evaluation, and implicitly designated spaces for open and informal communication. Based on post-camp interviews, residents came away from the Globul5 experience feeling increased confidence and having convictions about how to best support creative collaboration. The residents articulated insights related to: 1) how to support critique while maintaining group cohesion, 2) how to structure teams in order to foster autonomy and productivity, 3) how to find a common vision while valuing multiple perspectives, and 4) how to simultaneously achieve a sense of flexibility and clear direction. Results indicate that residents may have developed repertoires of collaborative practice (Barron et al., 2009), or adaptive understandings of how to apply practices and insights to future collaborations.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Rogers, Maryanna McConnell |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Barron, Brigid |
| Thesis advisor | Barron, Brigid |
| Thesis advisor | Goldman, Shelley |
| Thesis advisor | Schwartz, Daniel L |
| Advisor | Goldman, Shelley |
| Advisor | Schwartz, Daniel L |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Maryanna McConnell Rogers. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Maryanna McConnell Rogers
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).
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