Using interactive technologies to promote a dialogic space for creating collaboratively: A study in secondary education

This research expands our understanding on the role of interactive technologies to draw learners into a dialogic space capable to promote ways of thinking creatively together. Grounded on dialogic theory, the research examines and characterizes the emergence of co-creative processes in an interactive technology framework. To this end, this paper reports on an empirical study with secondary-school students who followed a technology-enhanced dialogic pedagogy that promotes co-creativity in real secondary-education classrooms. Qualitative methodology was used to document real-life multimodal interaction. The video data was processed in different phases to develop an analytical framework capable of identifying strings of episodes indicating typical facets of technology-enhanced co-creative processes. Results provided seven typical co-creative facets: 1) collective framing of the task; 2) overcoming technological challenges; 3) engagement in generating a shared pool of ideas; 4) developing intersubjectivity; 5) fusing ideas for a new perspective; 6) evaluation of ideas and 7) making ideas a reality. Furthermore, the findings show that each co-creative facet covers specific objectives in the co-creativity cycle and presents distinct features along three key dimensions: a) co-creative processes involved, b) typical discourse features and, c) dialogic use of specific technology affordances (e.g. visibility, interactivity, responsiveness, multimodal representation, provisional, stability, re-usability) for co-creating. Future educational implications to design a more effective technology-enhanced dialogic pedagogy that can connect learners to their creative potential are also discussed.