Communities of Interest as a Context for Creativity in the Process of Designing Digital Media for Mathematical Learning

Abstract

Starting from the premise that stimulating mathematical creativity in students requires creativity in the process of designing digital resources, we discuss the outcomes of putting this idea into practice. We broaden this discussion to involve not only individual designers but diverse communities including mathematicians in collective resource designs explicitly aiming at generating creative mathematical thinking (CMT) in their end users. To this purpose, we constituted communities comprising mathematics teachers, teacher educators, researchers, engineers, and technicians, seeing them as communities of interest (CoIs), and adopted a specific technical environment for the resource design and communication among the designers. This original study aims at enlightening the orchestration of collaborative design processes of digital resources embedding the potential to develop CMT in their end users. These processes yielding social creativity are perceived as a complex phenomenon, taking place in a particular context involving three CoIs: Greek, French, and Spanish. To conduct this study, we use a functional network of theories and illustrate the processes through two examples of resource redesign between two pairs of CoIs: Greek-Spanish and Spanish-French. Our analyses show the evolution and the appropriation of the CMT representation of the CoI members and point out factors impacting social creativity during collaborative redesigns of these new kinds of digital resources for teaching and learning mathematics.