Cultivating Creativity in Methodology and Research

In Praise of Detours

Charlotte Wegener, Ninna Meier, Elina Maslo, Charlotte Wegener, Ninna Meier, Elina Maslo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319602158
• eBook ISBN: 9783319602165
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a variety of narratives on key elements of academic work, from data analysis, writing practices and engagement with the field. The authors discuss how elements of academic work and life – usually edited out of traditional research papers – can elicit important analytical insight. The book reveals how the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that often occur in research life, the 'detours', can potentially glean important results.

The authors introduce the process of 'writing-sharing-reading-writing' as a way to expand the playground of research and inspire a culture in which 'accountable' research methodologies involve adventurousness and an element of uncertainty. Written by scholars from a range of different fields, academic levels and geographic locations, this unique book will offer significant insight to those from a range of academic fields. 

© The Author(s) 2018

Charlotte Wegener, Ninna Meier and Elina Maslo (eds.)Cultivating Creativity in Methodology and ResearchPalgrave Studies in Creativity and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60216-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It Happened’

Ninna Meier¹ , Charlotte Wegener² and Elina Maslo³

(1)

Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(2)

Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

(3)

Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Ninna Meier (Corresponding author)

Charlotte Wegener

Elina Maslo

Keywords

CreativityTheorisingResearch methodsCreative practicesLearningStoriesDetoursMethodologyCreative potentialResearchScientific workAcademiaAcademic cultureReadingReflectionWritingThinkingWordingActingSharingMasteryInnovationLifePlaceSpaceTimeBodyMateriality

Ninna Meier

is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University, Denmark, where she teaches and supervises students in organisational sociology. She has carried out qualitative field studies of organisation and management of healthcare work since 2009, first focusing on the managerial work of clinical managers in the front line of hospital wards and then focusing on the leadership and coordination practices inherent in making healthcare work coherent across geographical, organizational and professional boundaries. She is particularly interested in how researchers may facilitate impact of their work in practice, especially the role of writing herein; a topic she has blogged about on LSE. Her latest book with Charlotte Wegener is called The Open Book: Stories of Academic Life and Writing or Where We Know Things—a book they did not know they were writing until one day it was done. Currently, they are developing both ‘Open Writing’ and ‘resonance’ conceptually and as a field of research, a method of inquiry and community of academics across disciplines and countries.

Charlotte Wegener

is an associate professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her work concerns innovation with a specific focus on education, workplace learning and research methodology. Charlotte runs writing workshops for doctoral and master students, faculty and practitioners . She is passionate about writing and has explored the art and craft of writing in several ways. She seeks to expand academic writing as both process and product by involving fiction, music, dreams and everyday life experiences. She has published blog posts on the London School of Economics Impactblog and Review of Books. She is also the co-author of The Open Book: Stories of Academic Life and Writing or Where We Know Things. Together with her long-time writing friend, Ninna Meier, she has developed the concept of “Open Writing”—a project devoted to the creation of a new research field and joyful writing practice.

Elina Maslo

is an associate professor at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, where she mainly teaches second language learning and teaching courses at the Masters Programme for teachers of Danish as a second and foreign language. She conducted her PhD project at the Institute for Pedagogy and Psychology at the University of Latvia (2003). After almost ten years in the field of learning languages in and outside the formal educational system, exploring successful learning spaces in practice, she is now devoting herself to discovering and theorizing transformative dimensions of learning spaces. Her main research interests are learning spaces—multiple, diverse, changing, fluid, complex, always in construction—in and outside the school and at the workplace. Elina is an active member and European co-coordinator of the ASEM LLL Hub research network on workplace learning.

End Abstract

Creativity in research is much in demand and always lauded. Every year, the top creative universities are ranked, and at all career stages, from student to experienced professor, academics want to—and are expected to—be creative. Most researchers have more or less explicit creative practices , but many do not know exactly how to cultivate creativity , let alone how to teach it. Based on a view of creativity as a socio-cultural act (Glăveanu 2014, 2015), with this book we wish to give space to fresh voices in the discussion of researcher creativity . The book introduces the idea that creativity in research is not a method or a set of techniques we apply to our work . Manuals on creativity and innovation often report the creative processes in terms of stages (Wegener 2016) or as the ability to perform divergent thinking (Glăveanu et al. 2016). A creative research practice springs from a curious, sensitive and playful life as a human being. Plans are fine. However, if we are preoccupied with how things were supposed to play out, we may not see and take in the inspirational sources right in front of us (Meier and Wegener 2017). We may think that we need to clean up the mess, get a grip and get back on track before we can proceed with the (tidy) research . We may even think that other researchers are much more successful in this respect. They are not.

Recipes for creativity rarely take into account the learning potential in other people’s actual practices , messy and unfinished as they may be (Tanggaard and Wegener 2016). Accordingly, this is not a recipe book but a book of stories . The book offers a collection of personal, theorised essays about the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that are often erased from traditional representations of research methods . Reading over “Method” sections, it seems that epistemological struggle is something to be solved, with only the outcome worth reporting. To follow the traditional format for presenting method and analysis , scholars may feel they have to create a certain type of narrative about the research process in which some things are included and others left out. A tidy, edited account feels safer because the story of what ‘really’ happened may seem too intuitive, messy or serendipitous and thus at risk of being discarded as unscientific or irrelevant, or too personal. However, as Weick (1995) famously suggests, sense-making occurs retrospectively and is tied to action :

How can I know what I think until I see what I say?

This often-cited quote is fascinating because it reverses some taken-for-granted premises for scientific work . If we need to see what we say in order to know what we think, then we must act first and then understand. We must do things and then find out what we have been doing—because the sense we make of what we did (or of what happened) depends on how we word it. Yet, these utterances will rarely be final, conclusive and exhaustive. As researchers (and as human beings), we are in a continual process of voicing in order to see our thoughts and find out more about our research topic (and about life ). When ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Editors’ Introduction: The Power of ‘Showing How It Happened’
• 1. Different Vantage Points, New Insights
• 2. Research Life: Life and Research
• 3. How We Know: Making Sense of Methods and Field Work
• 4. Coping with Complexity: Writing to Understand What We Do
• Backmatter