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Can we understand important social issues by studying individual personalities and decisions? Or are societies somehow more than the people in them? Sociologists have long believed that psychology can't explain what happens when people work together in complex modern societies. In contrast, most psychologists and economists believe that if we have an accurate theory of how individuals make choices and act on them, we can explain pretty much everything about social life. Social Emergence takes a new approach to these longstanding questions. Sawyer argues that societies are complex dynamical systems, and that the best way to resolve these debates is by developing the concept of emergence, focusing on multiple levels of analysis - individuals, interactions, and groups - and with a dynamic focus on how social group phenomena emerge from communication processes among individual members. This book makes a unique contribution not only to complex systems research but also to social theory.

Teaching has often been thought of as a creative performance. Although comparisons with performance were originally intended to emphasize teacher creativity, they have become associated instead with contemporary reform efforts toward scripted instruction that deny the creativity of teachers. Scripted instruction is opposed to constructivist, inquiry-based, and dialogic teaching methods that emphasize classroom collaboration. To provide insight into these methods, the \"teaching as performance\" metaphor must be modified: Teaching is improvisational performance. Conceiving of teaching as improvisation highlights the collaborative and emergent nature of effective classroom practice, helps us to understand how curriculum materials relate to classroom practice, and shows why teaching is a creative art.

In this article, I focus on three defining characteristics of group creativity: improvisation, collaboration and emergence. To demonstrate these three characteristics, I present several examples of group creativity in both music and theater. Then I explore how structure and improvisation are always both present in group creativity. Improvisations contain elements of structure and structured performances contain improvisational elements. I conclude by suggesting some implications for musical education and for education in general.

Many accounts of the micro-macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. Sawyer develops an account of emergence based on contemporary philosophy of mind.

In this article, I study role enactment and status relationships in university design studio classrooms. I analyze conversations that take place during discussions of student creative work, and I interpret them in the context of previous studies of learning, classroom discourse, and creativity. I found that professors and students jointly establish and maintain a complex and hybrid participation structure in which they enact dialogic status: they simultaneously perform both an authority relationship and a peer relationship. I analyzed the interactional mechanisms that dialogically perform these two status relationships, drawing on prior studies of role and status in conversation. I show that the dialogic blend of authority and peer relationships continuously and frequently varies throughout reviews of student work. Drawing on past studies of creativity in education, I argue that the joint enactment of dialogic status is an effective pedagogy for teaching and learning for creativity.

With an increasing emphasis on creativity and innovation in the twenty-first century, teachers need to be creative professionals just as students must learn to be creative. And yet, schools are institutions with many important structures and guidelines that teachers must follow. Effective creative teaching strikes a delicate balance between structure and improvisation. The authors draw on studies of jazz, theater improvisation and dance improvisation to demonstrate that the most creative performers work within similar structures and guidelines. By looking to these creative genres, the book provides practical advice for teachers who wish to become more creative professionals.

There is a lack of research and practice focused on how to foster higher-order processing, such as creative performance, within higher education settings. To address this gap in research, we chose to study pedagogical practices in schools of art and design, where one of the intended learning outcomes is creativity. Based upon data gathered as part of a larger study (Sawyer in Thinking Skills and Creativity, http://doi.org/10.1016/J.TSC.2018.08.002,2018), we found that among a large number of creative performance pedagogical practices we identified, a subset seemed to foster self-regulated learning (SRL). Therefore, the goal of our study was to identify the ways art and design professors enacted practices that foster their students’ self-regulation during learning and performance. We found these professors utilized a number of direct and indirect methods of fostering their students’ SRL, all intended to enhance students’ ability to enact creative performance. In addition to revealing interesting comparisons between SRL in art and design and other more commonly studied contexts such as science or history, our findings suggested numerous directions for expanding SRL models, including a greater focus on process as the outcome of SRL, a need to continue research into SRL during higher-order processing, and gaps regarding the development of SRL.

Group Creativity explores the unique form of creativity that emerges from collaborating groups. Dr. Sawyer draws on his studies of jazz ensembles and improvisational theater groups to develop a model of creative group processes. He applies this model of group creativity to a wide range of collaborating groups, including group learning in classrooms and innovative teams in organizations. In group creativity, a group comes together to collaboratively create in real time. The creative inspiration emerges from the interaction and communication among the members, and makes the result more than the sum of its parts. The dynamic, moment-to-moment communication among jazz musicians and improvising actors is the primary topic of the book. Sawyer explores performers' close listening and sensitivity, the submerging of the ego to the group mind, and the ways that performers work together to create something better than and different from what one solitary individual could create alone. These explorations provide insight into all forms of group creativity and collaboration.

Theories of emergence have had a longstanding influence on psychological thought. Emergentism rejects both reductionism and holism; emergentists are scientific materialists, and yet argue that reductionist explanation may not always be scientifically feasible. I begin by summarizing the history of emergence in psychology and sociology, from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century. I then demonstrate several parallels between this history and contemporary psychology, focusing on two recent psychological movements: socioculturalism and connectionist cognitive science. Placed in historical context, both socioculturalism and connectionism are seen to be revivals of 19th and early 20th century emergentism. I then draw on this history to identify several unresolved issues facing socioculturalists and connectionists, and to suggest several promising paths for future theory.