The Shaping of Creative Experience and Possibilities in the Art Classroom: Grounded Narratives

Abstract

Thomas identifies four creative functions—Authoring, Brokering, Provocation and Instilling—that are distilled and interpreted from the results and media data which are used as the basis for clustering eleven grounded narratives. These grounded narratives highlight the central importance of paradox and ambiguity in the misrecognition that is built into their structure and without which they would shatter. They enable the exceptional to be rendered comprehensible and deviations from those more widely accepted narratives of student creativity to be made intelligible. Motives, desires and beliefs have a dramatic quality and are built into the circumstances and action. Desires often deviate with the beliefs of the teacher and students. Actions repeatedly reflect conflicts between desires and beliefs that require subtle negotiation.