Creativity in classroom zones and interstitial zones

The Ph.D. Dissertation investigates if, how and where creative processes emerge in connection to “the Project” (Projektopgaven) in 9th grades at three Danish Schools. My approach to creativity is that it emerges in interactions and expressions in school contexts and thus creativity transcends a solely elitist phenomenon related to explicit creative domains and persons.
My understanding and approach to creativity is related to Sawyers conception of everyday creativity – within practised way of knowing and organising in school-contexts. Furthermore, based on my empirical studies, I consider creativity as depending on recognition.
Based on empirical data and contextual creativity theories, my argument is that creative processes in the institutional contexts of schools must be considered as two social and cultural spheres of teacher-pupil relations and pupil-pupil relations and interactions. During fieldwork I observed that social spheres, called classroom zones and interstitial zones respectively, are as social organisation related to the contextual school logic.
My approach to understanding creativity and creative processes is contextual and related to social spheres and cultural organised groups of pupils, which form and create situated ways of knowing.
The classroom zones are mostly related to an academic domain and the interstitial zones to an artistic domain. In the interstitial zones, pupils relations and interactions sometimes are expressed as improvisations based on their shared and distributed cultural repertoire, which considered as a creative way of knowing, in this dissertation is called “interstitial zone creativity”. Interstitial zones in this school-context are pupils ‘own’ spaces in time and place.

The Projekt is chosen as field of investigation considering its potentials as a frame for pupils investigation, corporations and influence on their organisation of work processes. Based on a short term fieldwork at an International School in Holland, the organisation of Projektopgaven is being compared to the organisation of “Personal Project” at the International School.
On a general level the social school logics influence how pupils work and are being supervised and evaluated in classroom zones, which to some degree influence interstitial zones as presence modes and ways of knowing in the periphery of the school logics.