Fostering Creative Agency through Screenwriting: An Intervention

ABSTRACT

One of the main drivers of acting creatively is people’s belief that they can do so. Yet, most of the previous work on creative self-concept takes a domain-general perspective, telling us little about whether domain-specific interventions or activities can build people’s creative self-perception. This paper specifically considers the domain of screenwriting to investigate and enlighten the debate in the area. We analyze the impact of an intervention focused on the development of creative self-efficacy and creative personal identity in an undergraduate screenwriting course at the Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Australia. The intervention, scaffolded by a creative metacognitive framework was an integral part of the course and was delivered by a Creativity Coach. Our results suggest that enrolling in an intensive and elective screenwriting course which included targeted teaching and self-reflection about creativity and the creative process, significantly improved participants’ creative personal identity (valuing creativity) and creative performance, with no effect on their creative self-efficacy. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future research.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Joanne Tindale for her invaluable assistance in the insertion of the data collected in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this manuscript will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Ethics approval statement

Ethical implications were considered before collecting data. In harmony with the principles of The Declaration of Helsinki, we gathered, a priori, protocols of informed consent. Furthermore, the research presented herein forms part of the ongoing research project: “Screenwriting: Creativity, Creative Practice and Neuroscience,” with Griffith University Ethics approval: GU Ref no: 2019/327.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that a more comprehensive test of SSCS psychometric quality in this sample should also include measurement invariance analysis – both between groups (control and intervention) and longitudinally (pretest vs. posttest). However, due to the small sample of this study, more complex latent variables models could not be properly estimated.

2. Red lines are individual participants’ results, and blue dots are means. The dotted blue line denotes a value of 3 – middle-point of the scale. Note that only complete cases are presented, while multilevel models estimated the effects using FIML estimation.

Additional information

Funding

The authors did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.