A Narrative View on Children's Creative and Collaborative Activity

The aim of this paper is to examine children’s ideating processes of creating playground of their dreams from the viewpoint of narrativity and narrative thinking. The children aged 6-7 were asked to express their ideal outdoor playing environments and a large number of narratives emerged. This study concerns how these narratives were constructed through creative processes and what affect narrative thinking has on the process. The research process consists of 15 playful ideating sessions, during which the children (N = 49), through play, expressed their thoughts by drawing and telling stories. Our starting point is the pivotal nature of narrative thinking in creative and collaborative activities, we also aim at a closer theoretical examination of this phenomenon. Through narratives the children structured their experiences and the products of their imagination into larger entities. The children were enchanted by exceptional ideas and their imagination was stimulated by integrating fact and fiction. We realized that in situations where the children were emotionally committed to building a story and functioned in a reciprocal manner, refining and elaborating ideas together, there was collective thinking, which in this context can be regarded equal to shared narrative thinking. Based on the interaction between data and theories we present our theoretical model of narrativity and consider possible applications of this model into the context of school. The results will be utilized in the design of learning environments consisting of playgrounds with information and communication technologies, as well as based on play and games.