Edward Clapp:
How understanding your profile participation, how you uniquely can contribute to the development of ideas, how understanding participation can help you understand your purpose. So how does your profile participation help you understand or see or define your purpose? And how you can uniquely contribute or benefit yourselves, the people you work with, the people you love in the world going forward.

Matthew Worwood: 
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett :
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett :
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education, will be.

Matthew Worwood: 
Talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity, all with.

Cyndi Burnett:
A goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood: 
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And if you are interested in participatory creativity in the classroom, you’re going to love this episode because. Because we have a returning guest to the show.

Cyndi Burnett:
Yes, we have a very special return guest, Dr. Edward Clap, who is a principal investigator at Project Zero. And he is interested in exploring creativity and innovation, design and maker centered learning, contemporary approaches to arts teaching and learning, and diversity, equity and inclusion in education. In addition to his work as a researcher, Edward is also a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Edward’s most recent books include Participatory Creativity, Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom, and Maker Centered Learning, Empowering Young People to Shape Their Worlds. And just recently, he completed the Participatory Creativity Guide for Educators with Julie Raines. And so today we’re going to talk about his latest work and what he’s been up to since we last spoke with him back in season two.

Matthew Worwood: 
Yes, season two. Season three. We should do a shout out to Julia Raines, who couldn’t join us today, but she was planning on being on the show. But we’re at that busy time of the academic year when so many fires start to emerge and you suddenly have to find yourself putting a whole bunch of them out. We did want to do a shout out to Julie as well. So, Edward, welcome back to the show.

Edward Clapp:
Thank you so much, Cindy. Thank you so much, Matt. It’s Such a pleasure to be here. I’m so delighted to return to the show and to talk to you today about the Participatory Creativity guide for educators.

Cyndi Burnett:
Let’s start back. We had you on the show back in season two or three to talk about participatory creativity, and you were working on this book with Julie. So tell us and refresh our minds and what is participatory creativity and what does it mean in the classroom?

Edward Clapp:
So that’s great, Cindy. And yes, I think I’m going to do that in just a second. But first I want to say, who is Julie? So Julie Raines is my good friend and colleague. And what was really exciting about this project that she and I engaged in together is that after the first book was published, which was called Participatory Creativity Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom, a few years later, the publisher reached out and said, hey, the book’s selling beyond our expectations. Do you want to do a volume two? And I said, not so much a volume two, but I’d rather do a more practitioner guide, because the first book was more of a theoretical book. It was more academic in its context. You know, by then a community of practice had emerged around this work, and Julie was one of the people at the forefront of that community of practice. So I naturally reached out to her and by this point we were great friends and colleagues.

Edward Clapp:
So Julie is a person who’s in the classroom, she’s in schools every day, whereas I have more of an academic role. So the two of us, you know, once we got together and thought it through, said, well, let’s do this guide for educators instead of doing a volume to the original book. And that’s how this whole thing emerged. So that is who Julie is for those of you who are thinking about that out there in the listenership. But to your question, Cindy, thank you so much. So the way that Julie, myself and our colleagues describe participatory creativity is this. Participatory creativity is the process of engaging a distributed network of individuals in the development of creative ideas. Young people and adults play a variety of roles when they participate in creativity, each leveraging their own talents, skills, background experiences, and cultural perspectives.

Edward Clapp:
So what we mean to do by taking this more participatory stance on creativity is to move from an individual based or a more possessive role or approach to understanding creativity to more of a participatory stance or approach on understanding creativity. So, you know, we’ve heard from colleagues in the past moving creativity out of the skulls and skins of individuals and placing creativity in a social space. And when we do that, we democratize creativity in this way, making it something that all people can access, not just something that some people are good at and could participate in.

Matthew Worwood:
And I do want to just do a follow up before we get into the book, because after your episode, Cindy and I had quite an in depth debrief around some of the things that you raised in that episode. And also we had some emails from some of our listeners who were, I think, particularly curious in some of the things that you raised. And I do want to kind of go back and revisit those conversations because we didn’t have a chance to do that at the time. But I think one of the key pieces is this idea that an idea doesn’t necessarily belong to one individual, which I think sometimes is great in the classroom, because sometimes we can be emotionally connected to an idea. I think many educators can relate to providing feedback about a student’s idea only for the student to get very disappointed because they feel that the idea is connected to them in some way, they’re emotionally attached to it, and therefore they feel like it’s actually a personal attack on them at times. And so disconnecting the idea from the person, I think has its benefits from that perspective. But one of the things that I think you bring up and became a big part of our conversation is the evolution of the idea over time because lots of people, to use words from your framework, are participating to the development of that idea and it doesn’t necessarily belong to one individual. But then if you don’t mind, just go back.

Matthew Worwood: 
You also have spoken about within the evolution of the idea. We’ve got to remember where we come from as well, because ideas don’t come out of nowhere. So could you talk a little bit about that as well?

Edward Clapp:
Absolutely, absolutely. I’m so glad you brought that up, Matt. I really appreciate it and I appreciate the comments and thoughts and questions from all of your listeners. So indeed, we do talk about the locus of creativity being centered on an idea. And within creativity studies, you know, not to get too deep in the weeds, but some of you will know, and some of you, this might be new information. You know, people kind of argue over, or creativity theorists argue over the. The many different P’s related to creativity. So people processes, products, you know, where does creativity live? And we let go of the P’s and instead invest in an I and that it is ideas.

Edward Clapp:
So people aren’t creative. I’m going to say that again. People aren’t creative. So I’M not creative. Neither Cindy, nor Matt, nor anyone else, nor, you know, anyone we can think of throughout history is creative. Children are not creative. We don’t believe that anyone is creative. We believe that ideas are creative.

Edward Clapp:
And the reason that we make that shift is to say that if we move away from this idea that people are creative, then we put creativity in this other space where everyone can equally participate in the development of creativity, and that is within the space of ideas. So, Matt, you use the word evolution several times, and we use the word biography. We talk about the biography, the life story, the history of an idea. And indeed, it does evolve and change over time. It has a long past. It has a future ahead of it. It has a present that is here and now. And this comes from a place when many years ago, I would say about 20 years ago, myself and some colleagues that I was working with at the time were really, you know, looking at creativity studies.

Edward Clapp:
And a popular way to study creativity was to look at the biographies or the life histories of supposedly creative individuals. And when researchers looked at the biographies or the life histories of those individuals, what they were looking for was the secret sauce. You know, what is it about these people that have significantly contributed to creativity in some way? What is it that makes them unique? What is that secret sauce? And they never, ever found the secret sauce, because there is no secret sauce. The individuals who are most known for creative ideas are as unique as those ideas are themselves. So we said, instead of looking at the individuals who are known for creative ideas, what if we told the histories, what if we told the life stories, the biographies of those ideas that they’re most known for? So, to use a very obvious character, if we looked at Albert Einstein, which many people have done, and looked for his secret sauce, instead of telling the life history, the biography of Albert Einstein, which many people have done, what if we told the history, what if we told the life story of some of the ideas he’s most known for? So what if we told the life history, or this biography of the idea of the special theory of relativity? So if we tell the biography of the special theory of relativity, we’ll see that many people have contributed to that idea over time in a variety of different ways. So that’s what we intend to do by telling the biography of ideas, the evolution of ideas. If we do that, we can break down how many people have contributed to the development of those ideas over time. They’ve done so in unique ways that leverage their different backgrounds, their skill sets, their cultural perspectives, their talents and expertise, and we can open up creativity to young people in ways that might have otherwise seemed exclusionary.

Edward Clapp:
So whereas the figure of Albert Einstein might seem special or even genius and unreachable, if we think about the ideas that Einstein’s most known for, we’ll see that there’s many ways to contribute to those ideas. And we can do that for any number of individuals and any number of ideas. Break it down to the ideas, focus on the ideas, so that young people see that they can play a role in developing creative ideas. It’s not about unique talent or expertise or giftedness. It’s this more democratic and inclusive approach to creativity.

Cyndi Burnett:
So, Edward, I would really like to bring this into the classroom. What I’d like to know more about is how do you bring this type of participatory creativity into teaching and learning, particularly within the environment? So I’m a teacher. Imagine I teach elementary school. What advice? Where would I start to bring participatory creativity into the classroom?

Edward Clapp:
This is a fabulous question, Cindy. Thank you so much for asking. So the new book, one of the things that most excites us about it is that it’s a guide for introducing participatory creativity into the classroom. It’s explicitly designed for educators. The book is designed in a way that it includes many different pictures of practice. I think there are 10 or 12 different pictures of practice that show what creativity and action look like, or specifically participatory creativity and action look like in a variety of different classroom contexts. Some of those focus on educators incorporating these concepts into their classroom. But there are a handful that also show how young people themselves have embraced the idea of participatory and creativity and incorporated that into their work.

Edward Clapp:
Coupled with that, there are at least a dozen tools within the new book that educators can use to bring participatory creativity into the classroom. So to specifically answer your question, Cindy, so there are several tools that introduce participatory creativity into the classroom. Two that I’ll mention include one that is something we call the participation tracker. And a participation tracker is a tool that educators can use or young people themselves can use to understand and track how young people are playing different roles when they engage in participatory creativity, and then establish what we call a profile, participation, a map, or an understanding of the scope or spectrum of how each young people engages in this work. Another exciting tool that we introduce is something called stakeholder mapping. The stakeholder mapping tool really takes apart the biography of an idea, and that idea can be something that stretches over a long period of time or it could be something that’s contained to a 45 minute classroom experience. And we just look at the different stakeholders that are involved in that work and how they participated in that work. So those are just two tools that are samples of how to incorporate participatory creativity into the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
Okay, so I think I got this. So let me see if I could put this on a bow. So let’s imagine the three of us are in a classroom with Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith puts the three of us into a group where we’re working on a creative process of some sort. What might we be building?

Matthew Worwood: 
Okay, so, Cindy, how about Mrs. Smith’s objective is to double the number of subscribers we have to the Fueling Creativity and Education podcast. That’s the context. Mrs. Smith has three students and they’re given a somewhat ill defined assignment that they have to double the number of subscribers to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And they’ve got to generate, you know, a list of ideas by the end of the week. That’s the context, Edward. And we’ll say maybe this is a high school classroom because they may be doing some marketing business.

Cyndi Burnett:
I was going to say that that’s pretty sophisticated for some elementary school students. So, yeah, high school.

Edward Clapp:
So given the sophistication of the challenge and that, let’s say it’s a high school classroom, as Matt has suggested.

Matthew Worwood: 
No, I’m not happy with this. It’s an elementary school classroom, but they’re honest students. Okay, so we’re just having fun today. Let’s just say it’s a K through 12 environment. Mrs. Smith, mixed group of students. Okay. We’ve got high schoolers and elementary school students working together.

Edward Clapp:
Guys, if it’s okay with you, I’m clearing my calendar for the rest of the day and going to hang out with you guys. I love this conversation. I love this question and the way that it’s been fleshed out. I really think that what Mrs. Smith has done here for her elementary school students to double the or increase the number of listeners to the podcast is what she’s doing is she’s offering a design challenge. And it could be really anything in that sort. It could be, you know, find a way to transport this milk bottle across the room, you know, without it touching the floor. It could be any number of things, but here, you know, the challenge is to increase listenership to the podcast.

Edward Clapp:
So I think the challenge is a lot less important than the process. And what Mrs. Smith might do is use any number of tools to see how young people work together in order to solve this design challenge. She might be, you know, mapping the different stakeholders involved, understanding how young people participate in this design challenge, what roles they play, how those roles shift in time as they engage in the design challenge. She might be really looking at the social dynamics. So how do young people socially negotiate engaging this design challenge? She might be looking for, where do new ideas come from? So as young people engage in this design challenge, do they just kind of riff? Do they make things up? Do they work with materials? Do they go on the Internet and search for things? Does one kid say, oh, my dad taught me this, or my grandmother, you know, used to do this, and this is influencing my thinking. So I think, you know, where it comes down to here is what are the pedagogical tools beyond the Design challenge that Mrs. Smith has presented? What are the pedagogical tools that Mrs.

Edward Clapp:
Smith is going to use to really support the participatory development of this idea? And the idea is increasing listenership for the podcast and just to kind of.

Matthew Worwood: 
Talk a little bit on the mapping out stakeholders. If I understand this rightly, within this learning experience, there might be a recognition. Maybe it’s the development of a visual or other type of guide where we say, okay, Matt and Cindy have presented the challenge. This is what Cindy wants. This is what Matthew wants. But likewise, someone in the group has also perhaps made a reference that, well, this is what my favorite podcast do. And then we have someone who’s an expert in social media that provide some ideas that they say, and slowly what it almost becomes is a pot of all these different kind of contributions. And I would.

Matthew Worwood:
I would say to a certain extent, verbal contributions, and then also to a certain extent, maybe the expression of knowledge that then contribute to the development of an idea. And the mapping of the stakeholder piece, in essence, is almost in some ways a reflective activity as well. Making connections. I always remember Steve Jobes when he got interviewed in the Wire magazine many years ago. He said, creativity is just about making connections. And it’s almost about challenging existing students to recognize all of the different connections that are made. And if I continue this tangent as well, Stephen Johnson wrote a book saying, where do good ideas come from? And that’s coming to my mind as well right now because he spoke about the, I believe, the English coffee house during the period of enlightenment in the 1600s. And he kind of said this was a place where ideas came to have sex.

Matthew Worwood:
Like, without this one piece and another piece, you didn’t have the idea. There was a need to bring Multiple people to contribute, I’m going to say to the conversation, to share their thoughts, to share their knowledge. And that is what the development of an idea is. So is this, this kind of participatory culture and how it might. Because it’s a little different, you know, if I was to assign, for example, mapping out stakeholders as a reflective activity, it’s still a design challenge. But I’m adding, I’m infusing what I think is, I’m not sure I’ve heard of that assignment before. Is that, is that kind of a good summary? To a certain extent. Even though I went off and threw too many examples in.

Edward Clapp:
I love this example. And Matt, if we think of you and Cindy as kind of two members who are participating in the development of this idea, say you’re in Mrs. Smith’s classroom, you can be considered what we would call primary stakeholders. You’re the closest to the development of the ideas, but you’re also working with colleagues or fellow students. They are also primary stakeholders and they’re working on the development of these ideas. But once we get kind of beyond that perimeter of the primary stakeholders, now we’re thinking about secondary stakeholders who are contributing to the development of those ideas. And that might be people the young people have engaged with. They might be family members, they may be members of the community, but they might be.

Edward Clapp:
And this is what it most excites me about the contemporary moment that we’re speaking about. They might be non human actors or artificial intelligence. And we have to think about when we engage in the act of creative idea development, to what degree do we engage non human actors? Stuff things, systems. And to what degree are we currently or have the potential to engage with artificial intelligence as a member of our creative network?

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, that’s really fascinating, Edward, because I was sitting here thinking, so is participatory creativity, does it have to be in project based learning? But if I think about it with machines, then I think about like Matt and I are working on the book Fueling Creativity in the Classroom based on all the tips that we’ve been given by all of our interviewees. And I’ve been using generative AI to help me think through some things. And I can see how it’s participating in the creativity, but it’s not project based. But I can see how it’s adding to my ideas as it’s developing. So it’s like ChatGPT and myself working through something. Then Matt picks it up and looks at it and there’s this whole layering of this idea and what will ultimately become our book is because of not only Matt and I, but 100 people that we’ve interviewed along with generative AI, helping us synthesize all that information to.

Matthew Worwood: 
Come in, though, Cindy, and just add to that a little bit with the reference to generative AI. And I don’t know if this is where participatory creativity might go in the future in regard to AI, but at this time, most of the contributions that generative AI is going to share with you is actually contributions that other people have shared on the World Wide Web. Right? So, I mean, that definitely makes it a lot harder to a certain extent to track the idea, though they do provide some links. But even as an individual interacting with the AI tool, there’s an argument to be said that I’m still interacting with ideas that have a biography that exists behind the screen and on the World wide web, from individual bloggers to researchers, podcasts like ourselves, that probably, even though we don’t like to believe it’s true, probably our podcast episodes have been transcribed and found their way into these training models as well. So all of that is still participatory creativity, even it’s just happening through the AI. Is that right, Edward? Or am I a little bit off with that analogy?

Edward Clapp:
I think you’re spot on, Matt. I would say anytime we prompt AI to give us a response to something, we’re inherently engaging the process of participatory creativity. You mentioned networks and connections previously, Matt. We’re tapping into this rich network of information that’s generating out a product that is contributing to the development of an idea that we’re prompting it to think about. So Julie and I feel that participatory creativity is very important to think about as generative AI and other similar tools start to emerge or become more common practice today. Because anytime we ask AI, generative AI, to give us a solution to a problem we have or to contribute to an idea, it’s tapping into that rich network, it’s tapping into all of those connections. And I, you know, I know many people feel different ways about generative AI. I’m a big proponent of it.

Edward Clapp:
I think we need to think about it a little more and understand how it takes shape, but it’s not going away. And it’s just another form of bringing in these non human actors, which are actually just algorithms, but algorithms made by people. And they’re participating in that process as well, in engaging in creativity, the development of creative ideas. I think what we really need to do, though, is to help our young people understand what exactly they’re doing when they’re prompting generative AI to assist them with creative tasks, or any tasks for that matter, and to understand the network of information and ideas that’s coming to them, where it’s coming from, and to the best degree that they can to network, map out, and track the influence of those ideas.

Matthew Worwood:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, Curiosity to Create.

Cyndi Burnett :
Curiosity to Create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative Thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community, all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode.

Matthew Worwood: 
Now, just to bring this back onto participatory creativity for a moment, if listening to this classroom, even if we had Mrs. Smith here, what I would say is that just listening to it, my gut feeling, if I was to kind of also in addition to these activities, is for Mrs. Smith to probably help the students recognize the importance of making connections, but more importantly also recognize that multiple connections can be made. And likewise our background and our perspective are going to influence the connections that we make and to a certain extent influence the decisions of what connection we want to prioritize over other connections. But those connections, whether we said it was a group of three students, but if it was a group of five or a group of seven or in a class of 20, we are all going to make unique connections. And it’s the sharing and identifying and also to a certain extent, choosing those connections, I think is a big part of participatory creativity. And I would argue to a certain extent, from my perspective, how I’m hearing it is an important piece to the puzzle. If I was to apply this framework in a classroom environment.

Edward Clapp:
Absolutely, Matt. And I think that there are some ways that participatory creativity can get misconstrued by folks. And one of the ways is to say that it’s not about the individuals, it’s about groups. And if we start to spread out what a group is, we start to lose the individual within the groups. And to some extent it is about groups connecting and networks. That’s very important. But actually participatory creativity really hones in on individuals. So it’s pro.

Edward Clapp:
It’s in support of individuals. But it’s anti individualism, if that makes sense. So it’s not about focusing on the individual as being the creative maker, the genius, the Albert Einstein, the Vincent Van Gogh, the Charles Darwin, the Steve Jobs, the other dead white guys. It’s not about the focus on individual genius, but it is focused on individual contribution, individual talent. How are you special? What do you have to bring to this experience? So if it’s in the group of three kids, five kids, seven kids, 20 kids, or a gajillion kids, if we’re using generative AI in the classroom, it’s important for Mrs. Smith to remember to bring it back to focusing on Matt and Cindy and understanding how Matt and Cindy have unique profiles of participation, which is one of our four key concepts. How do Matt and Cindy have profiles of participation that make them unique in how they contribute to the development of creative ideas? Because that’s going to benefit Matt and Cindy as they develop through life, through school, and then enter careers in understanding who they are, how they participate in the world. And maybe we can push, and this is kind of a push into the next book or the next series of books.

Edward Clapp:
How understanding your profile participation, how you uniquely can contribute to the development of ideas, how understanding participation can help you understand your purpose. So how does your profile participation help you understand or see or define your purpose? And how you can uniquely contribute or benefit yourselves, the people you work with, the people you love in the world going forward.

Cyndi Burnett:
Can you give us an example of a profile participation?

Edward Clapp:
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Absolutely. So in the original participatory creativity book, there is a case study or a biography of an idea that is called Static Fashion. And Static Fashion is about a group of five young people that come together in an after school program and they are challenged with developing some form of approach to developing energy for the future. So those group of young people are trying to figure out how they can develop a textile, some kind of fabric that can be used within clothing to generate electricity, that can then be used to power their devices. So there are five different young people participating in the development of this idea. And they each play different roles.

Edward Clapp:
And those roles, while they could be seen as unidimensional, they’re not at all. Those young people play many different roles. And we use a tool like the participation tracker to see what are the significant moments of participation for each of those young people. And if we track them down and we see, well, how are they participating when they engage in these significant moments of participation, we’ll see that, okay, yes, one student participates in this way, the majority of their time, maybe 60% of their time, but also across their other significant moments of participation, they participate in different ways. So let’s say there’s one student, her name is Jenny, and the majority of Jenny’s time, she’s participating as a project manager. So this is a group of teenagers, and Jenny’s, like, got the notebook, she’s got the clipboard, she’s keeping the kids on task, she’s challenging them with different questions and everything. So her significant moments of participation are really geared towards being a project manager. But if we would look across the different ways that Jenny participates, we’ll see that, yes, she predominantly participates as a project manager, but we don’t want to box her in in that way.

Edward Clapp:
Instead, if we look across her different ways that she participates, we’ll see that she also engages as a social negotiator, she also engages as a technician, she also engages as a researcher. So we see the full profile of her participation, and we can see the breadth of how Jenny can engage with the development of creative ideas in different ways at different times over the course of the development of an idea.

Matthew Worwood: 
We’re getting a little bit tight for time. I do think Mrs. Smith should actually do that project over the podcast because trying to come up with electricity from your clothes to power your devices seems a little bit more beneficial to the students than doubling our subscribers. So, Mrs. Smith, if you’re listening, great to change your project. This has been really fascinating, Edward, and I think that what’s great about participatory creativity for me is I do think there’s some relationship with some of the sociocultural perspectives of creativity and the importance of the environment. But what I like about it from A K through 12 setting is not overthink it. Just, this isn’t about business.

Matthew Worwood:
It’s not necessarily about identify, trying to measure contributions. It’s almost against the current US culture, which is it’s all about the individual and entrepreneurialism and making money and bettering yourself. I think what I really like about it, and in some ways it goes back, we recently we just finished an interview with Dr. Robert Sternberg, who was talking about transformational creativity. It’s not just about you. It’s about how your contributions benefit other people. And what I think is important for teachers to go away is, again, and you say it brilliantly, it’s just a case of make it about the idea, don’t make it about the individual. Make it about the idea, because it’s the idea that ultimately is going to go and Create the change that benefits other people.

Matthew Worwood: 
And great. If there’s a couple of individuals that benefit in other ways from that, brilliant. But in a classroom environment, I think in particular, let’s just make it about the idea and also some of the activities that you’ve shared in this podcast episode and also within your book. I’m probably going to bring this up in the debrief, but I think there’s some really great critical thinking approaches to better understand how I engage in groups, how I contribute to the creative process, and learn to value the contributions that everyone in the group makes. I want to commend you for that work because I think in a classroom environment in particular, I think we should be doing more on that as opposed to this individualism that we, I think, without meaning to typically promote.

Cyndi Burnett:
I also just want to build on that, which I see less challenges that students face when they’re looking at when the idea fails. Because when the idea fails, it’s not about I have failed, it’s the idea has failed. And therefore all of those things that contributed to that idea failing wasn’t just me being a failure, which I think is something we’ve talked a lot about on the show.

Matthew Worwood: 
I love that.

Edward Clapp:
Okay, guys, so, so much rich stuff here. This is really exciting. And Matt, to one of your points, you know, kind of the focus on ideas and how ideas can help shape our worlds. Yes, yes, entirely, yes. And that is going to be one of my big tips, is to focus on ideas and focus on ideas that young people can work on, but not to lose the individuals in those ideas, but instead to help individuals understand individual students or individual, you know, adults, you know, the people you work with every day, the people in your family, the people in your community, the people that you love and care for. How do those people individually contribute in unique and special ways in ways that make them special and really show how they shine? How does that support their understanding of who they are and what they have to contribute to their world? So in third grade, in Mrs. Smith’s third grade, second grade, first grade classroom, whatever classroom Mrs. Smith has, if she can show young people how they have this broad spectrum of ways that they can participate in creativity that really make them shine, she’s doing something incredibly special for that individual and for that individual’s colleagues, and that will carry through with that person as their profile participation changes over time.

Edward Clapp:
And my hope is that a profile participation will develop into a sense of purpose and that young people will leave K through 12 education driven to contribute to the world in a way that they feel like they are being their best selves. They’re not fitting a societal mold, they’re just understanding themselves, understanding that there are many ideas that they can contribute to and that there are unique ways that they have something special to offer to the development of that idea. On the point that the two of you mentioned, I wrote an article not too long ago. It was called Don’t Call It Collaboration, Moving Away from a Collaborative Approach to Productive Development of Teams or something to that effect. And the example I used, and this is very specific to me in the place I am in my life right now. I have a four year old and a seven year old and they’re, you know, venturing into Sports. And my 4 year old plays soccer and my 7 year old is just playing field hockey for the first time. But you know, kind of if we think about the peewee leagues and something like soccer, it might look like everyone going for the ball all the time together, everyone doing the same thing together at the same time.

Edward Clapp:
And that’s indeed what soccer for four year olds looks like. But if you look at the professional level, when you look at a soccer game or to our friends in other countries, when you look at a football game, it might look to the naive viewer that everyone’s going for the ball at the same time. But the person that has a more sophisticated understanding of the sport really understands that people play different roles when they’re on the soccer pitch. But those roles aren’t fixed or unidimensional. They change and they merge and they are dynamic as the situation changes. And that’s a lot how I like to think about participatory creativity. I like to think about it as a soccer game where the young people on the field understand that they have different positions that emphasize their strengths. But at the same time, when the ball’s in play, they can be dynamic with those different strengths and opportunity.

Edward Clapp:
They’re not restricted to sit back in the field and just hang out there. The metaphor falls apart when we think about the goalie, but other than that, just to think about how dynamic our roles are. And we have different strengths and that’s why we are in those roles. But we can flex those strengths when different occasions arise for us to address a particular opportunity.

Matthew Worwood: 
Well, Edward, thank you so much for that. And I don’t know if you remember, but we got into trouble last time with the, with the sports analogy, so I’ll have to stay away from that one. But we really appreciate you coming back on the show. I think this has been another really fascinating episode, and I’ve certainly written a whole bunch of different notes for our debrief session. And as a reminder to those of you that are listening, if you’re interested in buying the book, we will include a link in our show notes. And if you’re interested in coming on the podcast, or if you’re Mrs. Smith and interested in sharing a little bit more about what is actually happening in your classroom, you can reach out to Cindy and myself@questionsuelingcreativitypodcast.com My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Edward Clapp:
And I’m Edward Clapp.

Cyndi Burnett:
This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity 2 Create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.