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This paper highlights a methodological vagueness within the existing qualitative research interview literature related to reflecting where interviews takes place. The aim is to interrogate how the use of the concept of emplaced participation can account for the multisensory constitution of place within interviews as well as how the place can provide an opportunity to generate knowledge about participants’ everyday practices. Casey’s understanding of place as a gathering and Pink’s perspectives on emplaced participation provide a sensitive epistemological approach that can be applied by researchers outside the field of ethnography. Based on empirical ethnographic material from fieldwork in Denmark, this paper makes a novel contribution to how researchers can use sensory and emplaced experience before and during an interview. We argue that, if we cease taking emplaced dimensions for granted, new methodological techniques can be developed, which, in turn, can lead to new types of knowledge of practice.

Education plays a vital role in making children feel they are part of life in their society and culture. However, what is the supposed role of education in creating this sense of agency and what kinds of implications might this have for multicultural education? This paper shows how a sense of agency and social responsibility are central aspects of creativity. The paper draws on a distinction between functional and value-based education for creativity and, on this basis, it is suggested that a new, updated paradigm of creativity and innovation will teach students to think in terms of ‘we’ and togetherness as the central axis around which the novel idea are generated. It will teach students that creativity is often dependent on the support from others and it therefore strives for a broad and inclusive idea of education in line with recent attempts to see multicultural education as a vehicle for cultivating humanity in a global age.

This article develops the contours of a new Five A-model for assessment practices in vocational education. The model develops a combination of the Five A-model taken from creativity research with empirical studies of vocational education. The rationale is to create a basis for description, analysis and development of assessment in vocational education. The Five A-model presents a heuristic method used to describe and reflect on basic assessment practices in vocational education studying the simultaneously related and dynamically interacting role of respectively actors, action, audiences, artefacts and affordances for assessment. On this basis, the article asks not only how research on assessment developed vital distinctions between summative and formative assessment, but also how the idea of formative assessment can be a vehicle to further development of artefacts supporting boundary crossing between schools and learning in the workplace, and furthermore, how apprentices can take responsibility for their own assessment actions. Assessment practices are never neutral, but they contribute in themselves to the valorisation of particular practices, which is why researchers and practitioners in the field must continuously ask critical questions related to the consequences of assessment.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the further advancement of a theoretical understanding of how emergence theory informs the study of creativity as a socio-material practice. Initially, the socio-material standpoint is presented, followed by an introduction to our theorizing on emergence in creative processes. We exemplify and discuss how various creative subject–object relations at Roskilde Festival, a Danish music and arts event, become meaningful in a process of emergence involving various levels of creative contribution, ranging from paying and volunteering participants, through the professional organization, to the headlining artists. We thereby illustrate how ‘Roskilde Festival’ is ritually re-created and saturated with cultural, symbolic meaning – how Roskilde Festival serves as a ‘macro-structure’ motivating and justifying creative behaviour at the lower levels of the emergent phenomenon. The article ends with a general appraisal of the theoretical perspectives presented, discussing the value of increased analytical attention to emergent phenomena in addition to their individual contributions.

The passion for learning and teaching, the pleasure of being lost in a compelling story, the awe and excitement of participating in great drama or producing original art, the engrossing study of pond life and engaging with the wonders of nature, the time to be consoled over a lost friendship– all these things that make classrooms wondrous and stay with children for the rest of their lives have been superseded in many places by the push for higher test scores, the obsession with numerical achievement data, and the narrow concentration on bulldozing through the basics at the price of everything else. (Hargreaves and Fullan, Professional kapital – en forandring af undervisningen pa alle skoler [Professional capital – a change of teaching in all schools]. Frederikshavn: Dafolo Forlag, 2016, p. 35).

The purpose of the present article is to contribute to the development of a socio-material, situated conceptualization of creativity, in exploring music making as it becomes meaningful in performative emergence processes of the digital age. It uses the creative practices of musicians to analyse and discuss the qualities of ‘digital materials’ in a creative setting, today very often playing a critical role in the production and performance of music. Methodologically, the analysis is based on interviews with professional musicians performing at Roskilde Festival and observations inspired by the autoethnographic approach. The study concludes that creative musical emergence in performance situations of the digital age depends on an openness towards a fragility, imperilling the situation and ‘cracking’ the digital materiality.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about the complexity and heterogeneity of entrepreneurship education. In order to achieve this objective, this paper combines educational psychology with perspectives from entrepreneurship education research to make explicit educators tacit assumptions in order to understand how these assumptions guide teaching. Design/methodology/approach – Using ethnographic analysis, the paper reports data from the continuous development and implementation of a single course over a period of ten years bringing in the educator’s and the students perspectives on their achievements and course content. Findings – The authors find that it is sometimes advantageous to invoke and combine different learning theories and approaches in order to promote entrepreneurial awareness and mindset. It is also necessary to move away from entrepreneurship education as being teacher led to being more student-centred and focused on experiential and existential lifelong learning practices. Practical implications – Practically, the authors make suggestions for the design and delivery of a course that demonstrates how four diverse learning theories can be combined to consolidate entrepreneurial learning in students invoking experiential and curiosity-based learning strategies. Originality/value – There are very few examples of concrete course designs that have been researched longitudinally in-depth using ethnographic methods. Moreover, most courses focus on the post-foundation period, whereas this paper presents a course that is a primer to the entrepreneurial process and exclusively centred on the pre-foundation phase. Rather than building on a single perspective, it combines a range of theories and approaches to create interplay and progression.

Humans have awkward ways of relating with the world in comparison to other species. Instead of just representing the objects we encounter, while looking for the satisfaction of our needs, and responding to their entreaties accordingly, we anticipate, invent, and pre-adapt to these encounters, through culturally suggested imaginative, narrative, and creative processes that lead to the production of meaningful actions and artifacts. Far from being merely intra-psychological, these processes are socioculturally embedded in everyday contexts of activity, following dialogical imaginative, narrative, and creative logics that are not antithetical to rationality. In this contribution, the authors will try to develop a theoretically integrated view of future-goal-oriented higher mental functions, claiming for the primacy of production and anticipation over reproduction and representation as distinctive features of the human mind. This view also sets crucial methodological challenges that will be discussed, providing suggestions to study the processes through complex products of human activity.

The chapter addresses basic issues of creativity in higher education: How can creativity be taught as part of higher education when the push to perform on certain standards increases? Can students develop their creative capacity as part of their university education under the current conditions? Does the development of creative capacities among students require new kinds of technologically mediated learning per se, or does the “traditional” lecture still have a legitimate place in a university striving to support the development of critical, creative thinking and action among its employees and students? It is claimed that genuine productivity and learning can go hand in hand, challenging the paradox stated in the beginning of the chapter that creativity and productivity or performance work counter to each other. However, to work with both requires that teaching models are challenged with apprenticeship models and teachers and students are set free to find and organize productive communities of practice in the university context.

The article presents a notion of “analyzing in the present” as a source of inspiration in analyzing qualitative research materials. The term emerged from extensive listening to interview recordings during everyday commuting to university campus. Paying attention to the way different parts of various interviews conveyed diverse significance to the listening researcher at different times became a method of continuously opening up the empirical material in a reflexive, breakdown-oriented process of analysis. We argue that situating analysis in the present of analyzing emphasizes and acknowledges the interdependency between researcher and researched. On this basis, we advocate an explicit “open-state-of mind” listening as a key aspect of analyzing qualitative material, often described only as a matter of reading transcribed empirical materials, reading theory, and writing. The article contributes to an ongoing methodological conversation problematizing the notion of “data” and the use of “data-reliant” methods of analysis.

In this chapter, the authors focus on the methodological implications of imagination in scientific practice and move in two directions at the same time: they outline the methodological implications of using imagination as a research tool, and they address ways in which imagination can be studied in the human and social sciences. These are not unrelated because it might demand particular kinds of imagination to study imagination. The authors underline the importance of “stumbling data” as a kind of “food for thought” for the researcher. To stumble (metaphorically) is a condition for finding out new things about the social world. In the final part of the chapter, the authors suggest that researchers interested in using their own imagination as a research tool should, first, see themselves as farmers, metaphorically speaking, utilizing breaks and instances of stumbling, and, second, decide on heuristics and see mess as a gift.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to ask: what effect does moving from individual to collective understandings of the entrepreneur in enterprising education have on the student’s learning? And given this shift in understanding, is there a need for a new paradigm in entrepreneurship learning? Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on ethnographic data from entrepreneurship education (EEd) at a summer school in Denmark. The purpose of the summer school was to bring the students from an awareness of their own competences to a shared understanding of resources, relationships and opportunities for becoming enterprising. Findings Drawing on the recent developments in understanding creativity, the authors’ explore the potential for similarities between becoming an entrepreneur in collaboration with others and being creative in collaboration with others. The authors’ found that a focus on the collaborative and distributed character of entrepreneurship, as within the We-paradigm from creativity, does not exclude the importance of perceptions of individuals’ self-images as part of a course in entrepreneurship. Yet, a reformulation of these could be an entry point for richer group work and articulation of diverse group potential. Research limitations/implications This study suggests that it is possible to take at least one step further in what can be achieved during an EEd course. Rather than remain a focus on individual learning and treating group work a didactics instrument, team formation processes can be used as a pedagogy/andragogy experiential tool in the classroom with its own learning outcomes, as presented and discussed above. For educators, this means that they have an additional tool to aid the complicated task of bringing EEd to students across campus. For students, this new approach means that the often dreaded and frustrating process of classroom team formation can become a positive experience of purposeful team assembly and collaboration. Two possible limitations regarding the findings of this paper can be identified: for students with extensive experience in forming teams and working in groups, taking them through this process may not have the desired effect as they may rely on habits and known mechanism without much reflection; it may be difficult to achieve the desired effect with students that know each other well before the course starts, as they may have too strong hidden agendas about who they want to work with and who they do not want to work with that this will over-power the idea/opportunity/subject-matter driven approach (Aldrich and Kim, 2007). Educators should consider if they may be subject to these limitations as this may have an effect on the use of active, opportunity-driven team formation in practise. To counter the second limitation, educators may want to consider how far into a course they want to facilitate the team formation; especially for courses running over significantly longer periods than two weeks. Future research may be able to assess the significance of these limitations. Practical implications This paper explores how students experience and handle a shift from an individual to a collaborative understanding of entrepreneurship imposed on them by the novel and unique design of a course that explicitly incorporates the team formation process into the curriculum. This is undertaken to gauge the extent to which students experience this shift as fitting the actual and perceived need for shared practices in developing enterprising behaviour, and to shed light on what action/process-based EEd courses may benefit from actively including a team formation process in the course design. Social implications EEd may be offered for a number of reasons. New enterprises are seen as a potential source of economic wealth and for the student, this type of education offers the possibility of using their knowledge in new ways, becoming entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. Also, from the perspective of both the higher education institution and the student, in the fast changing world in which we live, the digital mobility and multiplicity of work environments requires a workforce that possesses a range of individual competences. Such as being persistent, engaged and having good ideas, competences that are difficult to teach and hard to learn. Adding to our knowledge of how to handle these concerns, the paper points at a number of social implications of EEd. Originality/value The research conducted in this research paper contributes to the field of EEd by exemplifying how conceptual understandings of entrepreneurship as a collective enterprise, rather than an individual one, impact students’ understanding and experience of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, it provides a foundation for expanding research aimed at providing students with a learning experience more in line with the everyday life of an entrepreneur.

We have repeatedly underlined the fact that the field of educational psychology and its practice are undergoing a transformation. Changes have in part been brought about by the need to accommodate new types of task; but they are also the result of the dialogue between educational psychology practice and its users. What does it mean to be in transition and at the same time to incorporate innovation and creation into one’s work and organisation of tasks? How does one manage creative change processes and what should one pay attention to, both as an employee and a manager? This chapter will pinpoint some reasons why creativity and innovation are important in educational psychology practice and explain why psychology work is in itself a creative practice, irrespective of the changing influences and trends in the field.

This present paper troubles and literally ‘shakes’ the idea of methods as the founding ground of qualitative inquiry. It does so by addressing the real-time messiness of research and the retrospective character of research reports. While the paper is not as such opposed to methods, it does suggest that many actual research practices do not follow defined and regular plans as the terminology of methods inclines. However, rather than seeing the messiness as a bias to be eliminated, a more constructive approach is suggested. With the intention of inviting more creative and thought-provoking research within qualitative inquiry, three specific ‘messy’ research strategies are suggested in the paper.These are: 1) Searching for associations between actors, of both human and non-human kinds, 2) following the traces of many kinds of actors and 3) doing a theoretical re-working of materials. The overall suggestion is that these open-ended and flexible strategies allow for an innovative approach to the development of a qualitative psychology while also serving to trouble (at least for a moment) the current popularity of methodsin research.

This chapter presents the case of Denmark, and how creativity is represented in Denmark, both historically, by public media, and by creative actors themselves situated in a Danish context. The chapter draws largely on the theory of social representations and articulates a socio-cultural model of creativity. The chapter explores and describes a possible Danish model for creativity and it is argued that such models can teach us more about the social and cultural dimensions of creativity. This implies that social structures are themselves creative or generative, and their very construction is seen as a creative process.

In this article, it will be argued that in a postmodern society, there is a growing interest in apprenticeship. In a postmodern society, one of the issues dominating work life today is the need to learn local and pragmatic kinds of knowledge due to specialized, rapidly changing, and flexible forms of production. The resurrected interest in apprenticeships that we are witnessing is not due to mere chance or personal contributions to the field; additionally, they are not only a reflection of educational fads. Rather, apprenticeship learning is in line with current postmodern conceptions of knowledge. The change in production involves a relocation of knowledge, the importance and recognition of exemplary forms of acquiring knowledge, the primacy of pragmatic knowledge, knowledge as socially distributed, and knowledge as flexible, changing.

This article argues in favour of a situated approach to understanding learning in practice at trade vocational school and at trade in vocational education. Boundary crossing is regarded as contributing to expansive situated learning by apprentices across trade vocational school and the trade. The purpose of the article is to show that the relationship between strangeness and legitimacy is central to situated learning across different contexts such as at trade and at trade vocational schools. The article draws on examples from a recent qualitative field study of learning among apprentices in the Danish vocational education sector.

The present article offers a reflection on creativity and creative pedagogy emerging out of an ongoing dialogue between three authors placed in two very different sociocultural contexts – Denmark and Colombia. Despite obvious geographical, economic, and cultural differences, similar concerns animate our practice when it comes to the question of creativity and creative pedagogy. The article opens with a brief presentation of the two cultural settings considered here and, based on it, continues with a discussion of paradigmatic foundations of creativity within education in general and within school in particular. These reflections inform our approach to creative pedagogy and suggest a reformulation of this concept in the light of sociocultural and decolonial theoretical perspectives. In the end, we question today's global ethos in formal educational environments of striving towards accountability and standardisation in ways that minimise, if not outright exclude, difference, diversity, and, consequently, creativity itself.

The present article argues for the need to incorporate a theory of identity in the study of creativity and develops a socio-cultural framework of creative identity drawing inspiration from work on social representations. Creative identities are considered representational projects emerging in the interaction between self (the creator), multiple others (different audiences), and notions of creativity informed by societal discourses. An important temporal dimension is added to this model making the self–other–object triad expand into time and highlighting the changing nature of our representations of creativity and creative people. A basic typology of creative identities is proposed and illustrated with examples ranging from the work of artists and TV show hosts to everyday contexts such as the school and ordinary practices like craft activities. Promoted, denied and problematic identities are defined and contrasted in order to gain a better understanding of how identity – a simultaneously individual and collective project – fosters or, on the contrary, can impede creative work. In the end, a more comprehensive vision of creative identities as social, dynamic, contextual, multiple and mediated is formulated and arguments offered for why this perspective is important for both theory and practice.

Over the last few decades, qualitative research has been acknowledged as a peopled practice in which subjectivities come into play. The main argument presented in this article is that qualitative research involves “muddy,” troublesome, interactional passages, because of a complex interplay between subjectivities, situated identities, emotions, and conversational genres. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish Vocational Educational Training College, we introduce the concept of “leaning in” to provide an analytical grasp of the “muddy” interactional tension field in an interview situation, in which situated identities among the participants cross each other. We emphasize the value of daring to lean in to the muddiness of peopled research, use it as an analytical tool and present it in its imperfect form. This approach contributes to transparency in qualitative research, opens up the data in a new way and generates insights and results that would not otherwise emerge.

The aim of this paper was to investigate the economic contours of present day educational psychology in the light of movements towards consultative and inclusive practices. At a time of economic crisis, public budget cuts and changing educational policies are creating new conditions for educational psychology practice. This paper deals with the extent to which economic considerations implicitly and explicitly regulate the practice of educational psychologists. Within the work of educational psychologists, school-based consultation has become increasingly popular and widespread. Over the past 10–15 years, consultation has been put forward as an alternative approach to traditional work based on IQ assessments and special educational evaluations. Concurrent with the implementation of the consultative approach in educational psychology practice, inclusion of children with special needs has become a predominant feature in educational policy and practice. Based on a small-scale empirical project in a Danish edu...

This article puts forward a situated model of creative learning. Most educational studies on creativity tend to concentrate on explaining the relation between teaching and creativity while keeping learning as a secondary concept. However, it has been stated that it is likely that teaching creatively leads to creative learning, suggesting that there is a need to describe the concept of creative learning and to analyse its possible constituents. Accordingly, this presentation introduces an empirically based and theoretically informed model of a creative learning community. The model is based on three key concepts or learning principles which can take different forms in particular settings and social practices. These are respectively: (1) Immersion in the topic of interest, in traditions and in the subject matter, (2) Experimentation and inquiry learning and (3) Resistance from the material of interest. As a theoretical point of departure, this presentation will outline a situated model of creativity and learning, and following this, will introduce a model of creative learning. This presentation will include several empirical examples. In the final part, the model will be discussed in relation to the concept of creative teaching.

This paper reports the results of an interview study of 18 current and former pupils in the Danish ‘Folkeskole’ (primary and secondary public school) from 1930 up to the present. The aim of the study is to provide a forum for usually unheard voices on the subject of everyday life in school. The study pays special attention to relational and everyday aspects of schooling. Against the background of the interviews, narratives of the historically, socially, and culturally changing conditions of learning and school life of the interview participants are presented. In this light, the paper paves the way for a participant-oriented and historical thinking about the social practice of schooling.

This article investigates the innovation concept in two key welfare areas where the demands for innovation are substantial, namely vocational education and elder care. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews on the collaboration between an educational institution and elder care services, the article develops a tripartite empirical model of innovation. The model suggests that innovation requires levers (understood as methods and management contexts) as well as craft (understood as professional skills and rootedness), if it is to be integrated into the core services of a specific context. The article also discusses how innovation’s value-creating aspects should be understood in a public sector context. The proposed innovation model yields recommendations on issues that should be considered in establishing successful innovation in a public, cross-organizational context. This article investigates the innovation concept in two key welfare areas where the demands for innovation are substantial, namely vocational education and elder care. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews on the collaboration between an educational institution and elder care services, the article develops a tripartite empirical model of innovation. The model suggests that innovation requires levers (understood as methods and management contexts) as well as craft (understood as professional skills and rootedness), if it is to be integrated into the core services of a specific context. The article also discusses how innovation's value-creating aspects should be understood in a public sector context. The proposed innovation model yields recommendations on issues that should be considered in establishing successful innovation in a public, cross-organizational context.

The aim of the present article is to consider the research interview as a dialogical context for the production of social life and personal narratives. It is emphasized that interviews are inevitable, dialogical social events based on repertoires of socially and culturally embedded and constantly changing words and discourses. Rather than viewing the interview as a setting for unfolding an inner and subjective lifestory uninfluenced by the interview setting, it is suggested that the interview is better described as a setting in which dissenting opinion, diverse discourses, and personal narratives are produced through the social, dialogical context of the interview. In this sense, one major objective of qualitative research interviewing is to identify general discursive repertoires in speaking within particular social settings and to fuel public dialogue about research themes beyond the specific interview setting.

The purpose of the present paper is to investigate and explore why education organised around production may seem meaningful to youngsters who are at risk with leaving the traditional school and educational system. Education organised around production is here defined as educational activities organised by the state authorities or other educational providers which take outset in producing goods to be sold to real customers outside the school. It is becoming increasingly important to consider learning arrangements for youth “at risk” because access to training and education is acknowledged as a key to ensuring social inclusion and increased labour market participation. This is particularly relevant for groups that have traditionally been excluded from, or marginalised in the labour market (Piercy, Murray & Abernethy, 2006). Based on a broader project conducted in Northern Jutland, Denmark, for “Youth at Risk”, the case-stories of three young people (Ivan, Daniella and Lisa) are presented, evaluated and dis...