India 1. The Discourse Of Collaborative Learning

I’m one of those writers that hide their work. I hold it so incredibly close to me that I feel guilty when telling friends “I’ll email you my piece tonight” when I’m secretly plotting how I’ll never show them a thing. The concept of writing without a plan for 24 hours straight, surrounded by eight talented authors makes my inner thighs sweat. Needless to say, as I read the project description for Willow Patterns, my right arm shot straight towards the ceiling, beaming “pick me!”.

Initially the intrigue was towards the nine authors of Willow Patterns and their creative process. I was fascinated by the brain of Simon Groth and wanted to know every thought process each writer had at every minute. The idea that creative collaboration invariably leads to productive work is one that has been challenged by current research (e.g. Vass, 2003), indicating that the benefits of paired creative writing are inextricably linked to the quality of collaboration as well as other contextual factors.

I wanted to explore these contextual factors and what exactly the researchers meant when describing “quality of collaboration”. Do you have to like the people you are collaborating with? Does your work need to be fundamentally coherent with theirs? What if you are opposites? How will it work? Well, it did! Nine writers. 24 hours. One book. In that time they managed to interweave stories, keep their own unique voice and make it all sound fantastic. They each displayed an impossible amount of critical thinking while remaining subjective and improvisational.

Now, we are a group of 8 students remixing the leftovers of a successful collaborative project. One usually cringes when hearing about a group assessment or collaborative project, mainly because of the large melting pot of ideas each student brings that never quite add up to anything intellectual. This project is teaching each of us how to collaborate creatively and consists mainly of three major processes: planning, translation (of data), and reviewing. It contains equal amounts of fusion between the productive and analytic phases. It incorporates two interlinking and interdependent processes, engagement – the generation of creative ideas; the emotional engagement with the material – and reflection – the conscious break of the chain of association; reviewing, contemplation and planning.

What we will walk away with and leave you to mull over is an idea of how the writing process is activated. Some attribute creativity to deliberate explorations and transformations in the mind. In contrast, others argue that low focus thinking – is the foundation of creativity, by which unique analogies are formulated as emotion surfaces and binds thoughts in the dream-like associative process. We could join these two arguments, and posits that the two types of thinking are both crucial to the writing process. They are combined by the mind's conscious effort to recreate an emotional experience, which prompts the composition of the written text. Perhaps I will learn to reveal some stories to you after all.