Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in:Cognition and Instruction 32.3 (2014): 290-312

Master narratives about national history have been recognized as powerful cultural tools, influencing both historical understanding and national identity construction. For example, by the work of James Wertsch and studies on national history representation from a sociocultural point of view. However, the appropriation of these narratives needs to be considered in more detail for a clearer picture of how the nation is imagined and how this representation could change. In this paper a contribution is made by analyzing how the relation between past and present is constructed in master narrative representation, based on interviews with high school students narrating national history and presidential discourse commemorating it. It is proposed that the relation between past and present is constructed in three ways: past and present are identified; the past is idealized and their relation is teleologically constructed. By looking at how past and present are related in representations of the national past, the functioning of national historical myths as cultural tool becomes more clear. This contributes to clarifying how the master narrative constrains historical understanding and how it might enable national identification processes.

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As scholars have recently emphasized, creativity is not restricted to the individual mind; it can happen in and through interaction. To evaluate the legitimacy of claims about “distributed creativity,” we propose a compare-and-contrast approach to Argentine tango. Tango is an improvisational leader–follower dance of a formally constrained kind, yet one that also allows for a range of modes of being creative together in real-time interaction. Six dance couples were filmed while improvising and subsequently interviewed. Based on video vignettes of a few seconds duration, we microgenetically reconstructed the embodied “give-and-take” between partners, from which creative trajectories emerge. The spectrum of cocreative modalities ranges from creativity realized in interaction, but bearing some mark of the individual, to creativity, in which the interaction itself becomes an operative mechanism. Cocreation can happen in forms guided by a single person, yet jointly executed (“leader creativity”), in subordinate spaces that provide for some individual creative autonomy within a collective dynamic, in parallel or additive creative interaction forms, but also in genuinely multiplicative forms in which self-organizing interaction dynamics become a powerful causal factor that leverages creativity. To accommodate these various modalities, we argue for a dynamic-systemic account, which looks at interdependencies between micro- and macrolevels. Our framework recognizes different degrees of creative autonomy within interaction; it hereby avoids a dichotomy between individualistic accounts and interactionism with a purely collective-level focus.