Teaching creative thinking: how design professors externalize their creative thinking in studio classroom talk

This paper reports on a study of professor talk in design studio classrooms. In design education, creative thinking is an important learning outcome, as demonstrated in previous observational studies of studio classrooms and interviews with design professors. I found that professors explicitly describe their concurrent and spontaneous thinking while they are analyzing student work and that this talk represents the features of creative thinking identified in prior research. But more significantly, I also found that professors externalize their creative thinking nondenotationally through interactional mechanisms that implicitly represent many features of creative thinking. I used an interaction analysis methodology—transcribing nondenotational features of talk, such as elongated phonemes, restarts, and repairs—to analyze these implicit ways of speaking. Drawing on previous findings in conversation analysis and in creativity research, I demonstrate that these nondenotational aspects of talk implicitly represent the features of creative thinking documented in prior research. As professors externalize their concurrent creative thinking in speech, both explicitly and implicitly, students are scaffolded in their appropriation of creative thinking.