Sawyer, Keith 1960- (R. Keith Sawyer, Robert Keith Sawyer)

views updated

Sawyer, Keith 1960- (R. Keith Sawyer, Robert Keith Sawyer)

PERSONAL:

Born in 1960. Education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, S.B., 1982; University of Chicago, M.A., 1992, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Education, Washington University at St. Louis, 1 Brookings Dr., Campus Box 1183, St. Louis, MO 63130. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, lecturer, consultant, public speaker, researcher, musician, psychologist, video game designer, and educator. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, lecturer, 1993-95; University of California, Santa Cruz, lecturer, 1996; Washington University at St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, assistant professor, 1996-2003, associate professor of education, business, and psychology, 2003—. Washington University, adjunct associate professor, department of psychology, 1997—, Olin School of Business, 2007—. General Computer Corporation, project manager and video game designer, 1982-84; Kenan Systems Corporation (information technology management company), Cambridge, MA, principal manager, 1984-90, consultant, 1991-93; Culpeper Consulting Group, senior consultant, 1994-95. Presenter and speaker at symposia, meetings, and conferences. Guest on television and radio programs.

MEMBER:

American Educational Research Association, Academy of Management, American Sociological Association, International Society of the Learning Sciences.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship, 1996; AERA Division E Outstanding Dissertation Award, 1996; Mouton d'Or Award for best article in Semiotica, 1996; Lilly Fellowship, 1998; National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2000; Washington University Faculty Research Grant, 2001; National Science Foundation grant, 2003-06, 2007; Skandalaris Center, grant, Washington University, 2005; Washington University Center for Inquiry in Science Teaching and Learning grant, 2005; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant, 2007.

WRITINGS:

Pretend Play as Improvisation: Conversation in the Preschool Classroom, L. Erlbaum Associates (Mahwah, NJ), 1997.

(Editor) Creativity in Performance, Ablex (Greenwich, CT), 1997.

Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse, Hampton Press (Cresskill, NJ), 2001.

Creativity and Development, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration, L. Erlbaum Associates (Mahwah, NJ), 2003.

Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation, foreword by Michael Silverstein, Ablex (Westport, CT), 2003.

Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

(Editor) The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, edited by H. Schorr and A. Rappaport, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989; Sociological Studies of Children, Volume 7, edited by A. Ambert, JAI Press (Greenwich, CT), 1995; Encyclopedia of Creativity, Academic Press (San Diego, CA), 1999; Critical Creative Processes, edited by M.A. Runco, Hampton Press (Cresskill, JN), 2003; Creativity across Domains; Faces of the Muse, edited by J.C. Kaufman and J. Baer, Erlbaum (Mahwah, NJ), 2005; Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by G. Ritzer, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 2006; Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, edited by R.K. Sawyer, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006; Play and Literacy in Early Childhood: Research from Multiple Perspectives, edited by K. Roskos and J. Christie, Erlbaum (Mahwah, NJ), 2007; and The Sage Handbook of Social Science Methodology, edited by W. Outhwaite and S.P. Turner, Sage (Thousand Oaks, CA), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals and journals, including International Journal of Educational Research, Educational Administration Quarterly, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Psychology of Music, Educational Researcher, Teaching Education, Philosophical Explorations, Linguistics and Education, Social Methods and Research, Human Development, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Sociological Theory, Reviews in Anthropology, Culture & Psychology, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Mundane Behavior, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Philosophical Psychology, Psychology of Music, Creativity Research Journal, American Journal of Psychology, Language in Society, PsycCRITIQUES, Contemporary Psychology, and Semiotica.

Journal for Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory, member of editorial board, 2003—; American Journal of Sociology, consulting editor, 2004-06; Psychology of Music, member of editorial board, 2007—; and Korean Journal of Thinking & Problem Solving, member of editorial board, 2007—.

SIDELIGHTS:

Keith Sawyer is a writer, educator, and psychologist based at Washington University at St. Louis. He is a leading expert on the subject of creativity and the science behind creative thinking. Among his topics of study, according to a biographer on the Washington University at St. Louis Web site, are topics such as common conversation, everyday social life, and the play patterns of children. Other topics of Sawyer's research include innovation in business, organizational dynamics and creativity in work teams, artistic and scientific innovation and creativity, and the structure of conversation. He is a prolific author of scientific papers, a frequent lecturer and presenter at seminars and other events, a consistent contributor to books, and a reviewer for more than two dozen scientific journals and publications. In the past, he has been a video game designer for game pioneer Atari. Sawyer is also a jazz pianist and has a background playing with improvisational groups in the Chicago area.

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration is Sawyer's exploration of the significant power of creativity and innovation that can be found in cooperation and collaboration. For Sawyer, there is no such thing as those individual, isolated geniuses who spend their time producing new and valuable creative works on their own, independent of the input or influence of others. Instead, Sawyer asserts that "all creative processes are ultimately the product of collaboration," remarked a reviewer in Science News. All creative work involves a level of input and influence by others, even such work that is done alone, according to Sawyer. Further, successful creative collaboration displays an improvisational nature, similar to the type of unstructured but cohesive performances turned in by improvisational musical, theater, and performance groups. The flash of insight or "Eureka!" moment is rare or nonexistent, Sawyer claims. Instead, innovation results from a series of sparks and events, both from individuals and groups, that finally culminate in a new idea.

In addressing what he sees as the myth of the solitary genius, Sawyer states that the mind of an individual possesses a sort of internal collaboration that assembles, evaluates, and discards fragments of information from diverse sources. He explains that commonly believed instances of profound innovation arising out of a single individual, such as Edison's invention of the light bulb, Darwin's elucidation of the theory of evolution, or Morse's invention of the telegraph, are actually the result of collaboration on several levels, building upon the thought and work of many others who had gone before. He describes how famed writers J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, authors of the "Lord of the Rings" and the "Chronicles of Narnia" series, respectively, "composed their epic novels in concert," stated a Publishers Weekly critic. In Sawyer's view, "group interaction forces reinterpretation of previous ideas and challenges us to take them further than we might ever have if only talking to ourselves," observed Karen Malody in a review for Foodservice Equipment & Supplies.

Throughout, Sawyer provides examples of innovation from prominent companies and businesses, including Apple, eBay, Google, and Toyota. He includes a number of creativity games designed to help sharpen individual skills and creative processes. He explains the concept of group flow, a condition in which collaborative groups operate at peak levels of efficiency and creativity through planned and guided improvisation. He stresses that real creativity and innovation emerges from the interaction of many ideas over time; the majority of those ideas will be failures, but it is through considering, testing, and then discarding unworkable notions that breakthrough ideas come into existence.

Reviewer Jeffrey Marshall, writing in the Financial Executive, commented that in Group Genius, "there is plenty of good thinking about the creative process" and the ways that process has been "applied to products that are central to our daily lives." A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a "solid recipe for ‘unexpected innovation.’"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Financial Executive, September, 2007, Jeffrey Marshall, review of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, p. 17.

Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, September 1, 2007, Karen Malody, "Foodservice Collaboration and Collective Intelligence," review of Group Genius, p. 37.

New Zealand Management, November, 2007, Reg Birchfield, review of Group Genius, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, April 23, 2007, review of Group Genius, p. 42.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2007, review of Group Genius.

Science News, June 30, 2007, review of Group Genius, p. 415.