Creativities

This project asks ‘How is interdisciplinary collaboration "taught" in HE institutions?’ and ‘What pedagogical models can be identified and developed?’ Performing and Creative Arts departments in HE institutions engage students in collaborative practice within a singular discipline or across disciplines, through interdisciplinary or hybridised art forms, as curricula or extra-curricula activity. Where students are engaged with interdisciplinary collaboration within the curriculum, tuition may involve case studies of collaborative partnerships, psychometric tests, a trial and error approach to throwing creative individuals together, or any combination of these. This project aims to bring together ideas and modes of practices used in HE institutions and to present, as far as is possible, an overview of the current practices where interdisciplinary collaboration is a focal point of the learning activity. In brief, and in the context of Performing and Creative Arts departments ...

ABSTRACT Career creativities are recognized as a key attribute for music graduates; however, they are rarely an explicit component of music higher education. This chapter reports on a study in which higher education music educators devised creative teaching and learning strategies in order to develop students’ career creativities. The chapter draws its material from a multi-institution study across four Australian universities, each of which developed different ePortfolio initiatives with performing and creative arts students. Each institution introduced ePortfolio as a personal learning space, encouraging students to think and reflect on their studies, identity and futures. The study provides an innovative example of career creativities in higher education. Implications include potential for students to utilize ePortfolio artefacts to adopt reflexive practices from their first year of study; to develop multiple personas as they develop identity salience; and to engage explicitly in the crucial area of career creativities, which are explored and detailed.

This chapter considers the benefits of extra-curricular interdisciplinary collaboration in HMEIs, drawing on theories of learning through apprenticeship, community based learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Lave & Wenger,  1991; Green, 2002), literature on collaborative emergence and distributed creativity (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009), musical creativities (Burnard, 2014), and collaborative learning in Higher Music Education (Hakkarainen, 2013). In particular, it explores how music technology students can build their funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992) about collaboration and develop their skills and confidence through enterprise creativity. It explains how this can be fostered by five conditions: where the institution by provides a platform for networking and sharing ideas, through offering a community, nurturing the gift of confidence (John-Steiner and Mahn, 2002), providing students with authorship, and by enabling greater risk taking (due, in part, to the absence of summative assignment criteria). Presenting a specific collaboration hub as a case study, the chapter explains how one specific platform, and associated set of conditions, provides permission to play and learn through messy but developmentally valuable extra-curricular education. It also offers insights on creativity, enterprise and collaboration from six of its members of this community; raising questions about their self-awareness and learning through breadth of experience and innovation. Considering the broader implications for creative practice within and beyond a HMEI, this chapter raises questions that may guide new research on extra-curricular collaborative play and enterprise development in HMEIs.

Music education is supported by an increasing range of digital technologies that afford a remarkable divergence of opportunities for learning within the classroom. Musical creativities are not, however, limited to classroom situations;
all musicians are engaged in work that traverses multiple social and physical settings. Guided by sociocultural theory of human action, this paper presents a case-study analysis of two computer-based composers creating one soundtrack together. Analysing how collaborative work was undertaken in all of the naturally occurring settings, this paper shows how the students’ interrelationships with technology constituted their understandings, creative output and their ecology of practice. The research contributes new knowledge about how digitally resourced creating is shaped by remote, remembered, hypothetical and imagined digital technologies. It also shows how technology-mediated co-creating is a complex
interactional accomplishment, implicating the value of long-term multisetting digital co-creating to higher mental development through discourse within music education.

Keywords: music; computer-mediated music; sociocultural theory; interthinking; creative process

The authors are members of punk rock trio the Eruptörs. Both also teach in higher education – one in popular music, and the other in management and marketing. Writing from personal experiences in the band, we also draw on theoretical perspectives from our respective, intersecting fields to explore the Eruptörs’ collaborations, networks and creativities in the “DIY” underground punk rock scene. The paper thus provides cross-disciplinary insights into the internal and external cultures of the Eruptörs, and explores their relevance for music education. The authors conclude that scholars and practitioners in music education and beyond could benefit from further exploration and reflexive practice that incorporates models and syntheses introduced in this paper.