A draft of Hakkarainen, K, Hytönen, K., Makkonen, J., Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P., & White, H. (submitted b) Interagency, collective creativity, and academic knowledge practices. In A. Sannino & V. Ellis (Eds.), Learning and collective creativity: Activity theoretical and sociocultural studies. Routledge. Interagency, Collective Creativity, and Academic Knowledge Practices Kai Hakkarainen 1 , Kaisa Hytönen 1 , Juho Makkonen 2 , Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen 3 , & Hal White 4 1 Department of Education, University of Turku 2 Institute of Behavioral Sciences, University of Helsinki (www.helsinki.fi/CRADLE) 3 Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki (www.helsinki.fi/CRADLE) 4 Toronto, Canada Introduction Pursuit of doctoral dissertation may be regarded as an academic achievement that necessarily involves a great deal of creativity; that being, however, attainable by committed and hardworking university students. Knowledge creation may be seen to involve creating a novel trail for exploring a previously unknown mountainous territory during which “one proceeds step by step, each step guided by those taken previously and by uncertain intimations about what lies ahead” (Holmes, 2004, xvi). An inexperienced doctoral student is, so to speak, thrown into the wilderness and asked to seek his or her way to a mountaintop across difficult and unfamiliar terrain in fog and rain in spite of limited visibility and slippery and partially nonexistent trail, with numerous unforeseen obstacles. The supervisors determine whether the student is able to advance; if the agent survives, he or she is assumed to be capable of academic work. Such an intellectually as well as socio- emotionally demanding pursuit creates an extremely challenging double-bind situation (Engeström, 1987) in which the doctoral student has to jump into the unknown to create new knowledge and competence required for the doctorate, but exercising competencies that have not yet been developed. The process is so deeply laden with emotional tensions that most doctoral students consider interrupting their program; their attrition is, indeed, a major problem across the world with many psychological, socio-emotional, and societal costs (Delamont, Atkinson, & Odette, 2000; Golde, 2005; Pyhältö, Stubb, & Lonka, 2009; Stubb, Pyhältö, & Lonka, 2011). Investigators have identified two basic, one may say prototypical, approaches to undertaking the doctoral transformation, i.e., the individual and the collective model (Becher & Trowler, 2001; Delamont et al., 2000). One acknowledges, of course, hybrid cases, and fuzzy boundaries of these models. The traditional individual model of doctoral education typical of many social sciences is this: The process of constructing an extensive and well-argued monograph is considered a formative experience that facilitates the growth of scientific mind. Supervision takes place through personal meetings and research seminars that typically allow doctoral students to meet their supervisors two or three times a year. To pursue the analogy, doctoral students engage in a risky effort of trying personally to climb the mountain without too much guidance or supporting harness and ropes. Individual doctoral students pursue, accordingly, monographs based on personal study projects that are usually not related to their supervisors’ research objects. Many supervisors, of course, provide sophisticated academic direction and personal support, but some have difficulty providing proficient supervision for diverse personal dissertation projects that go to territories unknown to the supervisor and follow pathways that do not intersect with those of the senior researcher. Consequently, students often have to reconstruct productive academic practices on the basis of weak networking