Arguably one of the most important activities of a university is to provide environments where students develop the wide variety of social and intellectual skills necessary for giving and receiving feedback. We are not talking here about the kinds of activity typically associated with the term “feedback” - such as that which occurs through individual course evaluation questionnaires or more universal systems such as the National Student Survey, but the profoundly creative and human act of giving and receiving feedback in order validate, challenge and inspire. So as to emphasise we are talking about this kind of feedback, we coin the term “creative feedback” to distinguish it from the pre-conceived rather dreary compliance-inflected notions of feedback and set out in this paper to characterise its qualities. In order to ground and motivate our definition and use of “creative feedback” we take a historical look at the two concepts of creativity/creative and feedback. Our intention is to use this rich history to motivate both the choice two words, and the reason to bring them together. In doing so we wish to emphasise the characteristics of an educational philosophy underpinned by social interaction. By describing those qualities necessary to characterise creative feedback this paper sets out an educational philosophy for how schools, communities and universities could develop their learning environments. What we present here serves not only as a manifesto for designing learning environments generally but as a driver for designing technologies to support online social learning. Technology not only provides us with new opportunities to support such learning but also to investigate and evidence the way in which we learn and the most effective learning environments.
When the word feedback is mentioned in universities - as happens now with increasing frequency - there are usually one or two winces around the room. The problem it is a word that has become associated with compliance, with checking competency, with measurement and judgement, with having to go through the motions of various government or funding body processes and, perhaps too, with feeling beholden to open up channels of communication so as to hear things that we would rather not have to hear. This is a pity, and especially so at universities, because feedback is central to learning. Not just to learn a discipline, but to learn about the way we are, to learn about the way we think, to learn about the way we interact and about the way in which we produce and value our work. Whether that work is an analytical or interpretive essay, whether it is a poem or a composition, whether it is a new performance or a new artwork, it is only through actively seeking feedback both from others and from ourselves that we learn.
At one level it is clear that without the on-going feedback that we sense and perceive from our environment we could not operate or survive. Without basic perceptual acts such as seeing, hearing and touching we couldn’t function for very long. However, feedback is
This philosophy is very strong in the Art department at Goldsmiths, where the emphasis is very much focused on developing communities of feedback. This department is especially interesting because of its reputation for producing world-class artists that have become important cultural and creative pioneers in the UK.1 In our observations, first, second and third year undergraduates come 1 (Damien Hirst, Malcolm McClaren, Mary Quant, Lucien Freud and Anthony Gormley are all alumni of the Art department. Other alumni include Laurie Provoust who currently holds the Turner prize and Steve McQueen who won a Bafta and Oscar for best film with “12 years a slave”. The question to us is whether developing communities of creative feedback is the key to the Art department’s success.) together weekly in order to give feedback on a small selection of undergraduates work. The students clearly worked as a group in balancing praise and criticism, combining the emotional and analytical, and moving from the sociological to the political. In all these open conversations students are learning about how to give and receive feedback to each other and understanding the ever present gap between any intention behind an artwork, and the perception by others. One of the most fascinating aspects observed in these sessions was the ability of students to take a sufficient emotional distance in order to be open to feedback, and to experience it freely without personalising anything. This ability is not only key in terms of learning how others experience their work but becomes an important skill for artists moving into a professional sphere with the free-for-all comment and criticism that social media now encourages.
Arguably then, a learning institution’s key objective is to provide the kind of supportive and trusting environments where students can develop their ability to give and receive feedback in a culturally-aware, sensitive, mindful, critical and challenging way. We certainly think so, and would like a label to describe the kind of feedback we have in mind, and for this we choose the term “creative feedback”. In this paper we provide a historical account of the notions of creative and creativity in order to justify the use of this term in an educational context. Moreover, by using this term explicitly the hope is we can rescue the concept of feedback from its often rather dreary compliance-inflected interpretation. In what follows we will call upon our experience as educators spanning mathematics, psychology, psychotherapy, music and computer science, to try to explain what we mean by creative feedback and to justify our use of this term. To do this we need to take a brief historical look at the concepts of “creative” (and the related “creativity”) and “feedback” – particularly though not exclusively in an education context - in order to explain exactly what we mean by these terms and why we are bringing them together specifically. The aim of the historical analysis is to give currency to the use of the term and the underlying manifesto for learning. We clearly need to be mindful of using the word “creative” when it is used so loosely, and for so many different educational, marketing and political reasons. We not only have creative writing and creative learning but now we have creative musicianship, creative computing and creative financing, not to mention the growing importance given to “creative industries” and economic arguments about why they are such an important part of our future. The word is in danger of being no more than what is approved of, and we wish to recover an older and fuller meaning for our purposes.
Aims. In this paper we set out to characterise creative feedback as the basis of an educational philosophy that is inspired by the American psychologist, philosopher, and educationalist John Dewey. The idea that follows naturally from this is that we structure schools, learning groups and universities as “communities of discovery”. There are a number of motivating factors for the work in this paper described next.
The first is the desire to build educational environments (which include online environments) that give more people access to developing “creative feedback” skills. Creative feedback belongs to what Dewey called “creative intelligence” which is a part of all human thinking and is available to everyone. A strong part of our individual learning journey is gaining an understanding how others see us. The way we think, the way we behave, what we produce. This understanding is such a crucial part of learning that we want to build environments that encourage students to be aware of how others see them. As George Herbert Mead wrote, "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings" [42: p5]. If this is true, the relation to other people is grounded within a framework of feedback and the individual mind can only exist within such a framework.
Next, we want to emphasise that “creativity” depends on feedback from the world rather than being something that is an intrinsic quality that resides within individuals. It depends on feedback both in the act of creation itself, and also the social feedback that is received once it is made available to others (which may or may not amount to acclamation as great art).
As stated above feedback is not often seen as a creative endeavour but rather as being quite mechanical (tick boxes and scores) and about compliance (such as is often the case when making module feedback forms available to students). The impact of this notion of feedback on tutor/tutee relationships can often be dire. We explicitly introduce “creative feedback” to mitigate against this commonly held view of feedback and, in addition, to move away from another commonly held conception about feedback that it only exists in terms of praise and punishment. Furthermore, we want to emphasise how we are immersed in feedback as biological and social beings and we wish any definition to encompass this. Most educationalists like us want to promote effective education as available to everyone rather than a middle-class luxury and technology clearly has an important role here. However, technology also provides opportunity to bring communities of learners together and, moreover, serve as a test-bed from which we can start to evidence the benefits of social learning over the individual, rotelearning and exam-based methodology that so dominates current political thinking. It also provides us with exciting new possibilities for understanding the way in which we learn. One of the drivers in our own research, for example, is to develop learning analytics and methodologies that can enable us to correlate creative feedback with learning.
The ability to use technology to understand and support social learning depends on whether we can construct systems that encourage humans to give and receive creative feedback. In order to achieve this we need participatory design methods working with a variety of user groups in order to design software that can support creative feedback across a whole range of disciplines (e.g. poetry, music, design, digital art). We believe a historical and educational underpinning is necessary to drive the principled design of such systems that not only support creative feedback but also allow mixed human and computational societies. One of the practical questions that we are addressing in the design of novel education systems that enable social learning is how to build autonomous artificial systems that can help exemplify creative feedback in a learning community.
OF
AND
The Education Wars. Ever since people started arguing about
education, there has been an angry debate that is still not resolved,
and is especially marked today in England. On the one hand the
Secretary of State for Education crusades for even more frequent
and stringent examinations and inspections in the State-based
schools, creating what his critics call “exam factories” [
In this paper we aim to show how technology can contribute to the fostering of creativity in education in a way that can satisfy both the jeremiads of Professor Robinson and the ministerial anxieties of Michael Gove. But first we need to be clear about what kind of learner we have in mind, Dewey’s or Thorndike’s, since this determines what we mean by creative and creativity, and the deployment of these terms has provided a map of the hidden agendas of Psychology and Educational Theory during the 20th century.
Importance Of Measurement. In 1911 Thorndike published his
puzzle box experiments in Animal Intelligence, and developed the
theory that learning is initially guided by random trial and error
learning, rather than rational intelligence. For Thorndike and later
many Behaviourists, the unit of behaviour was the stimulus
response (S-R) connection, treated as a kind of reflex. Thorndike’s
view was that learning takes place by establishing connections in
the brain and these connections are stamped in through a system of
reward and punishment. Applied to education it was argued that the
randomness of the trials in initial learning showed that little is to be
gained by relying on the prior capacities of the novice learner.
Connections were treated as ”atoms of the mind”, and Thorndike
speculated that “the vague gross feelings of the animal sort might
turn into the well-defined particular ideas of the human sort, by the
aid of a multitude of delicate associations” [58: p289]. This is
Thorndike’s Connectionism, and it has been one of the main models
guiding studies of learning throughout the 20th century, though it
was quickly found that the S-R scheme needed to be extended to
SO-R [
But Thorndike was not only one of the founders of S-R theory, he
was also a pioneer of mental testing as a way of classifying
individuals for social control, and therefore for assigning numbers
to the “O” variables in the S-O-R scheme. Thorndike greatly
admired the work of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822-1911)
who spent much of his life studying and measuring human variation
and its genetic basis after reading Origin of Species. As part of this
interest Galton became the first to use questionnaires and statistics
for the measurement of human differences and Thorndike in turn
became a champion of measurement in Psychology and Education.
In 1904 he published An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and
Social Measurements [
The main concern for the teacher therefore is to guide this action toward educational goals, and to avoid stifling freedom through the indiscriminate “stamping out” of what Thorndike referred to as “profitless” acts. For Dewey these “profitless” acts are part of what 3 Thorndike’s S-R connectionism also involved a rudimentary form of feedback. Reward and punishment applied to isolated SR connections are feedback. But Dewey seemed to have in mind what we now think of as a self-organising system, in which the parts, which we may for convenience label stimulus, response, feedback, etc., cannot usefully be isolated and studied as “laboratory preparations” outside the system. The knowledge gained by an inquiring child involves, not a changing array of S-R connections, but an evolving place within a system that includes its social and physical environment. he called inquiry and to stamp them out is to suppress inquiry and to stunt human development.
Who Has Won? In Psychology and in Education, Thorndike has won hands down: One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realises that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost [33: p185].
But as Lagemann goes on to point out, Dewey paradoxically
remains a significant figure in education, dominating discussion in
schools of education, and pointing to an ideal, even if it is
Thorndike who prevails in practice. But occasionally an indirect
Deweyan light shines through. A possible example of this was the
dramatic reception in the West of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal
Development (ZPD). Dewey had a strong influence on Russian
education in the 1920’s when Vygotsky was developing his ideas,
[
In Psychology too, Dewey has been lurking in the background, and
his influence became more apparent once the notion of feedback
spread after the publication of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics [
More generally, affinity with the Dewey scheme rather than
Thorndike’s shows itself when the organism, animal or human, is
treated as essentially in the world, active and subject to continuous
feedback as it acts, rather than a static processor of information.
Examples of this Deweyan scheme are Gibson’s sensori-motor
systems as a model for perception [
the notion of formative assessment - the Deweyan influence penetrated deep into the heartlands of Thorndikean territory, measurement and educational testing.
The psychologist L.L.Thurstone studied at Chicago with a close
colleague of Dewey’s, George Henry Mead, and spent most of his
career there. Early on in his career he proposed a Deweyan model
of ongoing behaviour as an alternative to the S-R scheme [
But after the widespread acceptance of the Theory of Evolution by
the end of the 19th century, the world itself could be seen as creative
through variation and selection, with no help from God. This is how
it is used in the title of Bergson’s Creative Evolution [
Dewey’s Creative Intelligence was published later in 1917, and the word “creative” in the title was not being used to pick out one kind of intelligence amongst others, but to emphasise that human intelligence is inherently creative through a natural process of deliberate variation and invention. This could be the herald of a new beginning for education, since according to the traditional philosophies, “If ever there was creation it all took place at a remote period. Since then the world has only recited lessons.” [21: p23]. Dewey thought that reciting lessons is a way of suppressing the variation that is necessary for creative intelligence to flourish. There was nothing divine about Dewey’s view of creative thought, and he made little use of the popular concept of genius, instead seeing art and creativity as present in the most mundane activities: “The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd; who notes the delight of the housewife in tending her plants, and the intent interest of her goodman in tending the patch of green in front of the house” [18: p3].
In this philosophy, education involves social control, but not via rules dictated by authority. Instead Dewey took as a benign paradigm of social control that of children playing games, in which the control is not from on high, but is naturally social from “a community held together by participation in common activities” [20: p55]. This underlies his practical experiments in education in the experimental schools he set up first in Chicago, later at Columbia University.
Creativity. The modern word “Creativity” came into play a little
later than “creative,” in the mid 1920’s [
colleague the social psychologist G.H. Mead had contributed one of
the chapters in Dewey’s Creative Intelligence of 1917 writing, “The
individual in his experiences is continuously creating a world which
becomes real through his discovery”. [41: p210] After reading
Whitehead, he used the word “creativity” in his lectures during the
1920’s, [41: p325], and it appeared in his best known book “Mind,
Self and Society” [
There Mead described how any individual self is constituted by the
social and physical environment it inhabits, but at the same time
affects the environment in which the it is situated. More generally,
the organism is partly determined by its environment, but also “is
determinative of its environment” a more general version of the
circular process described by Dewey [
By partitioning similar correlations in tables from a large number of
tests, Spearman had shown how to extract distinct factors of the
mind, like intelligence, perseverance, memory and so on, and now
creativity, which can be used to form part of the O in the S-O-R
scheme. By 1950 Factor Analysis had reached a high level of
sophistication, and Guilford had isolated a factor he called
Creativity, based on his test of Convergent and Divergent thinking.
Convergent thinking is conventional problem solving, converging
on the correct solution, divergent is open ended and was thought to
allow the free play of imagination, with questions like “in what
different ways can you make use of a brick?” Later many other tests
of creativity were devised including Torrance’s Incomplete Figure
Test [
A. It is held together by the scientific armour of Factor Analysis, a way of constructing smooth curves from the uncertain data of questionnaires.
B. Protected by this show of rigour, it was able to break away from
the aridities of Behaviourism, which had given Psychology its
needed scientific respectability but had bored students for years.
C. The giants of Humanistic Psychology got on board, each with a
mouth-watering trade mark to draw students to Creativity 101: Carl
Rogers’ self-actualization in 1954 [
E. Last but not least, there has been massive funding from military and industry. As Guilford wrote in 1959, soon after the launch of Sputnik by the USSR “The preservation of our way of life and our future security depend upon our most important national resources: our intellectual abilities and, more particularly, our creative abilities. It is time, then, that we learn all we can about those resources” [27: p469]. The economy and safety of the West is thought to depend on the practical benefits of making things that work, from nuclear weapons to the stylish artefacts of Steve Jobs, and the secret is creativity.
But in the midst of all this razzmatazz, there was a quiet Deweyan
revolution. Some of it took place on the bandwagon itself, where
there are researchers who stress that Creativity is an everyday
matter, and that we all possess it in our capacity for flow and
mindfulness. More recently there are those who have turned away
from creativity with a capital C, and looked at how a more modest
Deweyan creative intelligence can be encouraged throughout
education [
This is the goal of MusicCircle Software project at Goldsmiths; to design an online environment to support communities of creative feedback for learning to play music. It includes the ability to upload performances, share them with others, and then seek and provide creative feedback. It is developed through a process of participatory design, working with students and other users to ensure we build what people want. Through systems such as ours perhaps we can begin to reconcile the conflicting demands of Michael Gove and Ken Robinson through evidencing clearly how learning takes place through creative feedback.
In order to understand how to design learning environments, we now set out to characterise creative feedback in more detail. We do so by describing its qualities along a number of dimensions drawing both upon our historical analysis and our combined backgrounds: teaching, programme development and management in higher education; performance and composition in music; design and implementation in software; and mindfulness and psychotherapy in practice. These qualities of creative feedback are offered in hope of receiving creative feedback to inspire the next steps. 1. CF is social. It comes from one social agent who has perceived the feedback object in some way (whether that is an output or a process of an individual) to another (the originator of the feedback object). Note this definition does not preclude students giving creative feedback to their own work. 2. CF is mindful. This incorporates at least two aspects. a) That the person giving the CF is aware of the cultural and individual context of the receiver (such as an understanding of the individual’s artistic or scientific goals/methods/audiences etc.) and b) That individuals are aware of any personal judgments that are being made and can articulate these if required. 3. CF contains a degree of community awareness. a) That CF embodies an awareness of what creative feedback has occurred previously but also that it features as part of a complex and developing system b) That giving and receiving CF should be embraced equally for the community to sustain itself. It would be difficult for communities to thrive if everyone wanted to give more CF than they wanted to receive of course. CF creates a selfsustaining self-organising system where flexibility and robustness need to be balanced. Whilst each learner may have more or less knowledge about what is required to maintain such a system it is clear that it can only exist if individuals in the learning environment actively encourages engagement in CF. 4. CF is clear, the language used being unambiguous and terms used mutually understood. 5. CF is democratic. Being a tutor or student bestows no special right to giving or receiving CF (though of course one might hope that tutors have more experience and skills in giving it). 6. CF is challenging. Underpinning any creative partnership is the notion of the challenge that the each brings to the other. CF that provides the right level of challenge is arguably the most sought after feedback. To do so involves “skill in means”, a Buddhist concept meaning that feedback is geared to the level and character of the student, and is always open to the student’s needs. 7. CF incorporates generosity of spirit and compassion. It is an act of giving and enabling, itself an essential aspect of skill in means. 8. CF is always open to discussion and further explanation. 9. CF is comparative rather than absolute. No absolute judgment about a feedback object can be made. Comparisons (explicit or implicit) of the feedback object to other existing objects is a mindful tactic in many cases and involves skill in means. (For example, CF to a jazz piano student from a tutor could simply say how close the student’s playing is to another well-known jazz pianist and how they may want to take a listen.) We believe the key to successful education is about providing the right kinds of environments where skills in creative feedback can develop. The role of technology is both to build new kinds of learning environments but critically to start to evidence how the creative feedback ability is correlated with learning and artistic development more generally. This may have ramifications for the way in which we think about structuring learning in schools, universities and any other kind of learning community.
We are designing a new technology at Goldsmiths called Music Circle as part of a European Project (Practice and Performance Analysis Inspiring Social Education) through the technologyenhanced learning Programme. It is designed to allow students to upload and share performances and compositions within learning communities and then by inviting feedback from others. In order to identify the kind of feedback we wish to encourage in our system (which currently operates in a blended learning context at Goldsmiths) we have identified the term “creative feedback” which embodies a range of characteristics including clarity, mindfulness, generosity, challenge and democracy.
At the heart of the motivation for designing this system is the idea that students can learn a huge amount from the creative feedback given by others. Not only that, but that the students can develop their own abilities as musicians through the ability to give creative feedback to others. And there is little doubt that the ability to receive feedback well, to depersonalise it as much as possible and respond to it appropriately, will stand students in good stead for the world of professional musicianship. Moreover, outside the professional music world, employers will be seeking students who have the skills to work in communities that have skills in giving and receiving creative feedback. Indeed one can easily imagine a world where an employer is much more interested in the way in which a student has contributed to and benefitted from being in a community. So our manifesto and agenda for change may result in students leaving universities not with a transcript of module marks but with a detailed account of their sustained engagement with creative feedback in a community of learners.
As part of the design of the system, we are designing “creative feedback agents” that are software systems that can start to provide some aspects of creative feedback on uploaded performances and compositions. With the development of techniques from audio analysis, gesture analysis, and style analysis combined with building models of learners we are looking to build systems that can start to embody some of the CF characteristics we have identified in this paper. What is important to us is that the design of our software is underpinned by a strong educational philosophy that comes from an understanding of the historical precedents and discoveries of many before us. We want to move away from the idea that technologies are designed and built by technologists and we embrace a multi-disciplinary approach where learners, educators, designers, sociologists, philosophers, historians, psychologists and computer scientists come together to build systems but with a clear understanding of the work that has come before. Perhaps more than anything this paper is a call to arms to revive and embed a Deweyian educational philosophy that can now be both supported and evidenced through technology.
Our thanks to Goldsmiths, Harry Brenton, Roger Burrows, Rosie Shepperd, Matthew Yee-King, Francois Pachet, Jon McCormack, Andreu Grimalt-Reynes, Melly, Maisie and Maureen Still, Sarah Khan, Jonathan James, Chris Kiefer, Carles Sierra and Robert Zimmer. This research was supported by the FP7 Technology Enhanced Learning Program Project: Practice and Performance Analysis Inspiring Social Education (PRAISE) which includes Goldsmiths, Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Barcelona and VUB, Brussels.
Whitehead