R. Keith Sawyer

Creative Teaching: Collaborative Discussion as Disciplined Improvisation

Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight into these methods, the “teaching as performance” metaphor must be modified: Teaching is improvisational performance. Conceiving of teaching as improvisation highlights the collaborative and emergent nature of effective classroom practice, helps us to understand how curriculum materials relate to classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art.

Teacher Teams and Distributed Leadership: A Study of Group Discourse and Collaboration

Purpose: This article explores distributed leadership as it relates to two teacher teams in one public secondary school. Both situational and social aspects of distributed leadership are foci of investigation. Methods: The qualitative study used constant comparative analysis and discourse analysis to explore leadership as a distributed phenomenon. Data from field notes and video recordings of two teacher teams during one semester were used. Findings: Three constructs emerged that informed our understanding of collaborative interaction within each professional learning team: purpose, autonomy, and patterns of discourse. Purpose and autonomy, manifest as organizational conditions, largely shape patterns of discourse that characterize the interaction of the team members. We argue that the nature of purpose and autonomy within a teacher team can influence the social distribution of leadership. Conclusions: The nature of teams in shared governance structures—the fact that teams can organize to either find or solve problems—has important implications for the creative and leadership capacity of individual teams. Thus, structures and social dynamics of distributed leadership must be attended to and not taken for granted. Implications include (a) conceptualizing leadership in terms of interaction, (b) needing to help teachers become aware of conversational dynamics that lead to or subvert effective collaboration, and (c) needing to help principals become more aware of their role in helping to establish clarity of purpose and appropriate levels of autonomy, so that teams may engage in work that leads to effective and innovative problem-finding and problem-solving activities.

Creativity and development

1. Emergence in Creativity and Development 2. Creativity in the Making: Vygotskys Contemporary Contribution to the Dialectic of Development and Creativity 3. The Development of Creativity as a Decision-Making Process 4. The Creation of Multiple-Intelligences Theory: A Study in High-Level Thinking 5. Creativity in Later Life 6. Key Issues in Creativity and Development

Group creativity: musical performance and collaboration

In this article, I focus on three defining characteristics of group creativity: improvisation, collaboration and emergence. To demonstrate these three characteristics, I present several examples of group creativity in both music and theater. Then I explore how structure and improvisation are always both present in group creativity. Improvisations contain elements of structure and structured performances contain improvisational elements. I conclude by suggesting some implications for musical education and for education in general.

The Mechanisms of Emergence

This article focuses on emergence in social systems. The author begins by proposing a new tool to explore the mechanisms of social emergence: multi agent–based computer simulation. He then draws on philosophy of mind to develop an account of social emergence that raises potential problems for the methodological individualism of both social mechanism and of multi agent simulation. He then draws on various complexity concepts to propose a set of criteria whereby one can determine whether a given social mechanism generates emergent properties, in the sense that their explanation cannot be reduced to a mechanistic account of individuals and their interactions. This combined account helps to resolve the competing claims of methodological individualists and social realists. The author’s conclusion is that the scope of mechanistic explanation may be limited due to the extreme complexity of many social systems.

Nonreductive individualism. Part I. Supervenience and wild disjunction

The author draws on arguments from contemporary philosophy of mind to provide an argument for sociological collectivism. This argument for nonreductive individualism accepts that only individuals exist but rejects methodological individualism. In Part I, the author presents the argument for nonreductive individualism by working through the implications of supervenience, multiple realizability, and wild disjunction in some detail. In Part II, he extends the argument to provide a defense for social causal laws, and this account of social causation does not require any commitment to intentionality or agency on the part of individuals.

Sociology and Social Theory in Agent Based Social Simulation: A Symposium

A lengthy and intensive debate about the role of sociology in agent based social simulation dominated the email list simsoc@jiscmail.ac.uk during the autumn of 2000. The debate turned on the importance of models being devised to capture the properties of whole social systems and whether those properties should determine agent behaviour or, conversely, whether the properties of social systems should emerge from the behaviour and interaction of the agents and, if so, how that emergence should be represented. The positions of four of the main protagonists concerned specifically with the modelling issues are reprised and extended in this symposium.

Unresolved Tensions in Sociocultural Theory: Analogies with Contemporary Sociological Debates

Socioculturalists are divided on two of the foundational theoretical claims of the paradigm: a process ontologyof the social world; and the inseparabilityof the individual and the group. A process ontology holds that only processes are real; entities, structures or patterns are ephemeral and do not really exist. Inseparability is the claim that the individual and the social cannot be methodologically or ontologically distinguished. To clarify the different stances toward these claims held by socioculturalists, I draw on the contemporary sociological debate between Anthony Giddens and Margaret Archer. Giddens’ structuration theory holds to a process ontology and to inseparability, while Archer’s emergentist theory rejects both. I borrow the terms of this debate to clarify the tensions among several prominent socioculturalists, including Cole, Lave and Wenger, Rogoff, Shweder, Valsiner, and Wertsch. I argue that a strong form of inseparability is theoretically problematic and empirically untenable, and I conclude that socioculturalists can resolve these tensions by adopting an ‘analytic dualism’ that retains key sociocultural commitments.

Durkheim’s Dilemma: Toward a Sociology of Emergence

The concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheims theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheims work has been neglected. I reinterpret Durkheim in light of theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind, and I show that Durkheims writings prefigure many elements of these contemporary theories. Reading Durkheim as an emergentist helps to clarify several difficult and confusing aspects of his work, and reveals a range of unresolved issues. I identify five such issues, and I show how Durkheims writings on emergence suggest potential responses. There can be no sociology unless societies exist, and … societies cannot exist if there are only individuals.

Improvisational Cultures: Collaborative Emergence and Creativity in Improvisation

I was delighted to read Becker’s (this issue) insightful and broad-ranging comments, especially since they touch on parallels that I’ve been exploring in my own work—between jazz, improvisational theater, and everyday social life. Becker identifies several fruitful areas for future research, and my comments will focus on these areas and how they connect with my own recent research. I focus on two key themes of Becker’s article. First, Becker’s title tells us that his focus will be on “etiquette.” Etiquette is collective social knowledge—“no one taught us these rules”—the rules are learned through long years of socialization. The etiquette of jazz is “aggressively egalitarian,” and Becker connects this egalitarian ethic to the processes of musical interaction during a collaborative jazz performance. Jazz is fundamentally an ensemble art form, and everyone involved in the improvisation is constantly offering new ideas—“tentative moves, slight variations”—and each musician is listening closely to the others. The performance that results is truly a group creation, a collective social process that I call collaborative emergence(Sawyer, 1999). Second, Becker emphasizes the preexisting structures that guide an improvisational performance. It’s a common misconception about improvisation that performers simply play whatever pops into their heads, that “anything goes.” Improvisation, although it involves spontaneity and extemporizing, doesn’t mean that there is a total lack of structure. In fact, all genres of musical performance include some structures that guide the performance (Sawyer, 1996). Likewise, in jazz, musicians follow shared structures—typically by agreeing on a song and then improvising together within the harmonic structure of that song (although the melody and rhythm may be completely improvised). Becker notes that the use of these shared structures reflects an etiquette vis-a-vis the audience; because a knowledgeable audience is also familiar with these structures, they will better be able to understand the performance and to appreciate how it is different from similar improvisations (cf. the conventions of Becker, 1982). Almost all jazz musicians also rely on licks—a less-pejorative term for what Becker calls cliches—short melodic lines that can be used at many different points during a solo and that are worked out and refined in the privacy of rehearsal. Only the dedicated fan will recognize these licks; most audiences will not be able to tell which portions of a solo are completely new and which are licks that have been used many times before. Jazz musicians know that they need these licks to perform effectively, but they have mixed feelings about relying on them too much; they