A Systematic Review of Tech-supported Collaborative Creativity Practices in the Field of Education

Abstract

This study aims to make a systematic review of technology-supported collaborative creativity pedagogy and practices in the field of education by focusing on peer-reviewed articles published in journals between 2014 and 2019. The targeted educational levels were specified as elementary, secondary education and teacher education students. 21 studies were examined from different aspects: (a) forms of technology and technological features with pedagogical affordances and (c) teachers and students' roles, and the pedagogical approach, (c) problems and solutions. A narrative synthetic approach was employed to categorize, analyse and synthesize the data according to themes developed. The findings indicate majority of the studies employed different types of pedagogies, and yet all follow student-directed pedagogies or theories drawing on social-constructivism. In the selected studies, three teachers’ roles were identified: giving planned or explicit guidance, promoting dialogue between students during the process of creation and orchestrating collaborative creativity flow of students. And, students’ roles were also found to be in parallel with the teachers’ roles. With regard to forms of technology, among 5 major technological forms, web-based were the favoured technology due to its affordances. Besides, the selected studies showed there are teacher-related, student-related and techrelated problems, and students overcome these problems through solving the problem together, being considerate about their team members and valuing their teachers’ effort. Therefore, the papers selected for this review indicated that the problems were not perceived as obstacles to collaborative creativity both by students and teachers. Instead, they were considered as a means to boost collaboration and creativity.

Keywords

• collaborative creativity
• forms and affordances of technologies
• teacher and students’ role
• education