Distributed Creativity and Expansive Learning in a Teacher Training School’s Change Laboratory

Abstract

Our chapter presents a case study of distributed creativity and expansive learning in the context of a teacher training school in Finland facing transformational needs due to a curriculum reform. We report on an analysis of a Change Laboratory (CL) process of six meetings involving a group of teachers, their headmaster, and researchers. Drawing from sociocultural theories on creativity and the theory of expansive learning, we set out to explore how creative acts emerged during the CL and how the interactive creative process contributed to expansive learning. Our findings illustrate that the creative learning process was socio-materially mediated through the participants’ discourse and tool use. The multiple consecutive creative acts, taken by the participants, generated “creative leaps,” which contributed to expansive learning actions and the materialization of the process into creative products. Consequently, the creative process resulted in a new tangible artifact: a shared pedagogical leadership model and a new collective conceptualization of the leadership activity for the school community. Our findings point to the need to analyze creativity not purely as independent actions but also as a collective activity. Our study offers a novel analytical method for analyzing and conceptualizing processes of distributed creativity as a learning activity in organizations. Our study also contributes to the understanding of creativity as a distributed process intertwined with expansive learning.