Session Information
27 SES 02 A, Exploring Pedagogies of Dialogic Space
Symposium
Contribution
Education experts emphasise the urgency to cultivate explorative, creative habits of mind. As our previous work indicates, a major obstacle in this process is the predominant view of creativity as powered by the intellect (Vass et al, 2014; Vass & Deszpot 2015/2017). We address this concern by looking at embodied forms of creative ideation. Our first anchor is contemporary creativity research, emphasising the role of unconscious mentation in new discoveries (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Gelernter, 1994). We also draw on scientific inquiry into embodied learning (Damasio, 1994; Johnson, 2007). Music research, in particular, has revealed the embodied and affectively constituted nature of creative collaborations (e.g. Seddon, 2004; Clayton, 2007; Sawyer 2007). Our research focuses on the Kokas pedagogy: an experiential extension of the world-renowned Kodaly method of music education. The Kokas pedagogy facilitates a deep musical understanding through encouraging spontaneous, improvised movement. The Liszt Academy of Music (Hungary) has recently implemented a new Master’s unit on the Kokas pedagogy, making its core principles accessible through direct experiences and collective reflection. We focus on one particular cohort of this elective Master’s unit. Our work is informed by classroom ethnography (Barnes & Todd, 1995) and uses a quasi-ethnographic approach to the study of ongoing teaching and learning processes in their own context. The data include video recordings of all sessions, visual documentation of creative products (paintings, drawings), and students’ self-reflective compositions. Through the qualitative analysis of the data, we addressed the following research questions: • How does the sharedness of imagination emerge through movement and embodied dialogue? • What are the markers of such creative intersubjectivities in the movement, and how are they captured in the reflections? Our analysis highlights the infinitude of creative connectivity in the student cohort and reveals the importance – and inseparability – of physical and inner opening up. It shows that the evolving embodied connections between participants gradually expanded into a dynamic, unbounded dialogic space. Embodied dialogue – collectively enacted responses to music – was the catalyst of deep cohesion, creative connectivity and pedagogic metamorphosis. This has implications to research on creative teaching and learning, highlighting the potentials of experience-centred pedagogies in nurturing explorative, creative habits of mind. It also resonates with research on creative collaborations (Sawyer, 2007; Seddon, 2004) and with non-representational descriptions of the role of musical experience in embodied meaning creation (e.g. Johnson, 2007).
References
Barnes, D. and Todd, F. (1995). Communication and Learning Revisited. New York: Heinemann. Clayton, M. (2007). Observing entrainment in music performance: video-based observational analysis of Indian musicians’ tanpura playing and beat marking. Musicae Scientiae 11/1, pp.27-60. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. (25th Anniversary Edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Damasio, A.R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotions, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Gelernter, D. (1994). The muse in the machine: Computers and creative thought. London: Fourth Estate. Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body. Aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2007). Group genius. The creative power of collaboration. New York: Basic Books. Seddon, F. (2004) Empathetic creativity: The product of empathetic attunement. In D. Miell and K. Littleton (eds) Collaborative Creativity: Contemporary Perspectives. London: Free Association Books. Vass, E. & Deszpot, G. (2017). Introducing experience-centred approaches in music teacher education – Opportunities for pedagogic metamorphosis. Thinking Skills and Creativity. Vol. 23, 1-16.
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