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Researching creativity: an experiential methodology
By Lyndsay Grant, Learning Researcher, Futurelab |
Creative Partnerships brokers and supports partnerships between the creative community and schools, aiming to enrich children's school life with a wealth of cultural experiences and bring creativity into the heart of learning.
One of the questions facing any organisation with an aim of fostering creativity and creative learning is how to document, research and analyse 'creativity'. What is children's experience of such events and programmes? What have they gained? And how 'creative' was it?
Creative Partnerships in Bristol has been conducting a research and evaluation programme that aims to put creativity itself at the very heart of the research process, using creative processes and products as the raw data of research. Working with Andrew Morrish, an improvisation and performance artist, they have been exploring an approach that aims to understand something about the nature of a creative experience.
Andrew Morrish refers to the approach he employs as 'experiential methodology'. Rather than deciding in advance what can and cannot be counted as evidence or data, researchers take a gestalt perspective in which the totality of the experience is foregrounded. For example, in one case study the researcher asked 5 and 6 year-old children to draw pictures of 'something they remembered' about a dance and music workshop. This phenomenographical approach is based on the idea that the way individuals or groups choose to represent their experience can tell us something about how they are thinking about that experience. At this stage, the researcher had no idea what would emerge from the drawing, so there was no pre-conceived framework to analyse the frequency of figures, colours or shapes. Children's drawings were representations of their experience of the workshop, but also reflections on it, a creative learning experience in its own right.
The researcher then set about looking for ways to describe what this data was showing. At this stage of the research it is important to refrain from premature interpretation of the data. Analysis at too early a stage limits the possibility of finding out something new - because we are looking for interpretations that fulfil our predictions. Instead, the aim is to let the data speak for itself and tell us something that we didn't already know. Of course, it is impossible to ever completely bracket off our own perspectives when analysing data, but acknowledging and being explicit about our assumptions is important.
In this example, the researcher described the drawings as neutrally as possible, refraining from theorising about what the pictures might mean. She categorised the drawings according to formal visual elements, allowing the categories to emerge from what could be observed objectively rather than from premature interpretations. For example it could be tempting in some instances to interpret some of the signs in the pictures as being musical instruments or particular individuals, but this interpretation is so heavily based in the researcher's perspective that it was important to hold back until a fuller description of the data had been completed. Only once various categories had emerged from the data set did the researcher begin to tentatively extrapolate and make interpretations from the data about what these groupings might show. At the time of presentation, the research was very much work in progress and so interpretations and conclusions were not discussed.
The process outlined above has much in common with some methods of art criticism, particularly when looking at modern and abstract art, when asking the questions 'what is it?' and 'what does it mean?' doesn't easily yield answers. However, answers to these questions and tentative interpretations can sometimes emerge through a process of describing the elements of the work and reflecting on personal responses to it.
Another researcher focused her study on an individual case. The study began with the researcher training members of the school council in documenting techniques including digital photography, audio recording, keeping notebooks and making sketches etc in order to record events at their school. Emerging from this initial phase of the study, the researcher chose one individual from the school council to follow more closely. Danny (names have been changed for anonymity) was described as a confident but disruptive boy who found working in groups particularly difficult, and who needed a lot of individual attention.
Through dialogue and collaboration with the researcher, Danny chose how he wanted to represent his experience of learning, using and teaching the documentary skills he had gained. He made a composite photograph of himself and the researcher at a table poring over his digital photographs and notebooks, to which he gave the title 'past and present'. As the project progressed, the researcher discovered that Danny also had a talent for creating storyboards. Danny then used a storyboard approach to represent his growing experience and confidence in documentary skills, which he titled 'present and future'. The researcher became involved in a two-way dialogue with Danny, to the point at which she is learning storyboarding techniques from him as a method of presenting her research findings and reflections on her research experience.
As well as being the focus of the research, Danny was involved as a co-researcher, with the methodology and types of data generated emerging from the collaborative relationship and dialogue between the researcher and 'subject'. This approach again respects the whole of the creative and research experience, including the researcher's role within that situation, and so aims to show a picture of the totality of an experience, finding ways to represent it, and letting interpretations emerge from evidence. Again, as work in progress, conclusions and interpretations were not discussed, although a picture was emerging of the way in which Danny's new skills were giving him a way into interacting with groups and enabling him to have a vision of a successful and creative future.
Andrew Morrish's approach of experiential methodology values an appraisal of the whole nature of an experience, in which the researcher is required to listen to and sensitively respond and adapt to the emerging data. Holding off from early interpretation, allowing the methodology to emerge from the study and listening to what the evidence is saying gives a real opportunity to learn something new instead of merely confirming pre-existing assumptions or manipulating data in order to fit a theoretical framework. Perhaps of even greater significance, however, is the application of this approach beyond a specific research or evaluation programme, in the context of a reflective and analytical pedagogy. Bringing a creative research element into the teaching and learning experience gives the opportunity to be surprised, genuinely learning from and with children who are the focus of our research and teaching.
Links
For more information on this project, see www.creative-partnerships.com/content/researchAndEvaluationProjects/64931/?version=1 or contact Lara Van de Peer at Lara.VandePeer@creative-partnerships.org.
September 2005
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