MA Research Subject

At the beginning of my journey to prove my hypothesis of getting creatives involved in building a brand or project that was outside their expectations or typical routine for the sake of improvement, I looked for research that revealed the benefits of collaboration itself. 

The first paper I looked at opens up by using the term Gotong Royong, the collaborative spirit of Indonesia, and how some are feeling that it is getting lost in the harsh pressures of modern life which tends to be more individualistic.

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"This is obtained based on the results of previous research that found 21st-century skills are less applied in the learning process in the classroom, be it communication, collaboration, critical thinking, or creative skills. Teachers realize that the learning steps have not yet led to the development of 21st-century skills” (Anneke, 2014).“The same statement also explains that the fading ability of collaboration, especially in the younger generation, needs to be watched out for." (Abdul Rahman 2022) 

With another passage describing the effect of collaboration in learning environments

“It is very rational to apply the collaborative model because working together feels lighter than working alone (Nuramalina et al., 2019). This follows the results of a study that showed that collaborative learning had a significant effect on the student learning process. The learning process is more active with collaborative activities such as discussion activities to solve everyday problems.” (Abdul Rahman 2022)

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In another great study, Creativity in Collaborative Learning across the Life Span by Margaria Romero, a section about the collaborative creative process cites a variety of sources in bringing to light necessary aspects to consider when trying to produce the highest levels of creative output from a group.A shared history with rich emotional scaffolding using complementary discussion and proper utilisation of other’s perspective is paramount in ensuring the emotion dynamics creates an environment where the members of the group feel safe and have no fear of being emotionally hurt, it is this fear which is most detrimental to the creative process. ‘By collaboration we do not refer only to a sense of belonging or cooperation, but rather to the co-construction of shared understanding’ (Roschelle & Teasley, 1995)

In a survey conducted by Srinivas Rao in 2017 revealed that 96% of the people they interviewed who invest in development seminars, goal setting and courses failed their personal development goal after the 90 day time period, an article by Ron Carucci in the same year sources this data to argue why self-improvement should be a group activity, saying that humans are infamously bad at observing our own reality and abilities to calibrate where we are effective or not, and that to properly understand this we need help from those on the recieving end of our behaviour 

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Theory of blended knowledge from a book called Creative and Collaborative Learning Through Immersion by Anna Hui gives insight on how the combination of diffenent types of knowledge create greater outcomes of understanding and promote creative productivity. I believe this can be applied to group learning with each member of a group having a different advantage in one type of knowledge as well as different perspectives to create a blended knowledge outcome, allowing the whole group to develop in ways they wouldn’t have alone. 

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