Opportunities for creative transformations in the Kokas pedagogy

There is a wealth of socio-cultural research studying the social dimensions of learning and development, with an increasing focus on relationships and interactions with peers (Littleton & Mercer 2013). Yet, there is a paucity of socio-cultural studies exploring the embodied and affective dimensions of peer collaboration, especially in creative contexts (Vass et al, 2014). Our work offers a distinctive and timely contribution to socio-culturally framed research on children’s collaborative creativity. It focuses on young partners’ engagement in co-creation through collective experiences of being and becoming. Our research builds on observations of music-based movement activities involving 5-12 year-old children. We studied children’s creativity in vivo, as it spontaneously evolved during delicately scaffolded opportunities to experience and respond to music via improvised movement. The sessions were organised by Klara Kokas, grounded in her pedagogy of experiential music appreciation (Kokas 1999). There were 15 sessions (about 1.5 hour each) with about 15 regular attendees. We video-recorded and analysed children’s collective movement and collective reflections, the two central phases of the pedagogy. We used Transana for the qualitative analysis of the observational data. In this paper we discuss some initial findings and share our methodological problematisation on the basis of this first analytic phase.