Blog Posts

#creativeHE: A Humanised and Humanising Experience

1/6/2016

This week we published the third issue of Creative Academic Magazine which explores the idea of creativity through an online course that was designed and facilitated by Chrissi Nerantzi - one of Creative Academic's Founders.

The idea of how we might teach people to be creative is an idea that has bothered me throughout my career. I should come clean and say that while I believe teachers can, through their practices, inhibit their students' creativity, but students will always find ways of using their creativity even if it means seeking opportunities outside their academic programmes. But my over-riding belief is that many teachers believe that it's important to encourage their students' creativity and use their own creativity to find ways of doing this. The more I have thought about this the more I see the teaching project as one of creating affordance that students recognise and utilise for their own learning projects that demand their creativity and Issue 2 of the magazine provided some glorious examples of teachers creating affordances for experimenting and play in higher education. When it comes to mature learners with significant experiences of the world, education is much more about sharing these experiences and the insights that have been gained Campbell Gardener captures this well when he talks about sharing wisdom (Wisdom as a Learning Outcome TED talk). If a teacher can encourage a group of students to share their experiences and wisdom then they are likely to facilitate a great environment for learning and the development of new insights.

Over the last 12 months Chrissi Nerantzi, a champion of open learning and education through the use of social media, has been developing an on-line course 'Creativity for Learning in Higher Education' or #creativeHE (1), which creates the affordance for people to explore the idea of creativity. It has been one of Creative Academic's goals to facilitate professional development relating to creativity in higher education so I was delighted when Chrissi invited me to be involved as one of the facilitators in the second iteration of the course. This was my first complete experience of participating in an online course. I had joined a couple of moocs before but quickly became disillusioned and dropped out. This was not the case with #creativeHE and I'm very glad I stayed with it as the experience revealed to me the fantastic affordance for learning that a well structured and facilitated online course and a well connected community with a culture of sharing, can create. Over the eight weeks that the course was run I engaged in many productive conversations, met and formed good relationships with many people, learnt about and used new technological tools and generally enhanced my understandings of many things. Looking back I can see and appreciate this as a rich learning and relationship building experience. As the course came to an end in late November I had the idea that we might use the affordance of Creative Academic Magazine to consolidate and share some of the learning gained through #creativeHE and I'm delighted that Chrissi and Jenny thought it was a good idea. Furthermore, two of the most enthusiastic student participants, Nikos and Rafaela also wanted to help produce the magazine so they joined our small editorial group, along with Roger Greenhalgh, another equally enthusiastic participant in the course. So this issue of the magazine is very much the result of a co-creative effort involving the editorial team and all the participants who shared their perspectives through the #creativeHE process.

Insights

The Danish philosopher Soren Kiekegaard once said, 'Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards'. I think the same is true of participating in an on-line course. When we view the curriculum laid out before us we can see the structure and a timeline for activity that was imagined by the designer, but the curriculum is a lived experienced, those who participate by sharing their thoughts and feelings, are the source of the curriculum. Of course we are aware of what emerges as it emerges but its only when it's all over, if we have the time and inclination, we can look back and make more sense of it and create deeper meaning of the experience.

If being creative is connecting ideas with other ideas, needs or experiences in ways that had not previously been connected then I have done this on several occasions as I reflected on my experience.

The first insight was the value of approaching and facilitating learning through the sort of approach used by #creativeHE using a similar range of web tools. This opens up the possibility for Creative Academic to offer similar open courses or discursive processes. Indeed I was so taken by the google+ community tool that I set up a community space called 'Our Creative Life ', for the production of the December issue of Lifewide Magazine to enable people to share their stories of personal creativity

As we were finalising the magazine I came across #humanmooc (2) in my Twitter feed and followed the link to discover the Human MOOC website - an instructor-led course that sets out to humanise on-line instruction. I was too late to join the course but felt that the idea of humanized instruction and community interaction in on-line environment established for the purpose of learning, resonated with my experience of #creativeHE (my second insight). I loved the underlying wisdom in the principle of seeking to develop an environment within which our humanity can flourish. Social learning, as embodied in #creativeHE, enables people to share their experiences and the insights that have been gained. Campbell Gardener captures this well when he talks about sharing wisdom (Wisdom as Learning Outcome TED talk). If a teacher can create a culture within which people feel safe and can trust each other and be sufficiently confident to share their personal experiences and wisdom, they are likely to facilitate a great environment for social learning.

My experience of #creativeHE was that it indeed felt like a very human experience replete with deep and meaningful conversations based on shared experiences, care, compassion, empathy experiences and reveal how they feel as well as what they know., humour, insights and inspirations, creativity, commitment and new relationships and friendships. I hope that this magazine manages to communicate this, indeed I hope that this magazine is itself an extension of the humanised and humanising process that was #creativeHE.

The third insight to emerge from this post-experience reflection relates to a new purpose for our magazine. A social learning space without people is a dead space and if it is not accessible or searchable to the wider universe of learners via the internet it has little value as a resource for future learning.

The absence of curatorial tools in Google+, the main platform for community discussion, makes it extremely difficult to curate the content of #creativeHE. By creating a magazine that draws on the content and attempts to add value through analysis, synthesis, conceptualisation and other sense making processes the magazine is serving as a curatorial tool.

Perhaps we might extend the idea of a magazine based on the products of social learning as a curatorial tool, by suggesting that the production of an end of course magazine might be incorporated into a pedagogic strategy providing a useful collaborative activity for social learning and for celebrating the humanising dimensions of the experience. The challenge for facilitators is then one of building a collective with the enthusiasm and commitment to engage with this task on behalf of the whole community.

Finally, on the day the magazine is published I will be participating in a workshop organised by MELSIG on the theme of digital narratives. As I was writing this post it struck me that #creativeHE was a collection of digital narratives as participants worked through the learning activities or exchanged stories about themselves and their experiences. Furthermore, this issue of the magazine is clearly a type of meta-narrative or big-picture story that attempts to illustrate and illuminate something of the experience and the wisdom that emerged and communicate this to an interested audience.

The magazine is free to download at: http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

Sources
(1) https://courses.p2pu.org/en/courses/2615/creativity-for-learning-in-higher-education/
(2) http://humanmooc.com/syllabus/overview/
(3) Exploring Creativity through #creativeHE Creative Academic Magazine January 2016 http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

Norman Jackson is Founder of Creative Academic a not for profit social enterprise that promotes and supports creativity in higher education

6 Comments

Creativity on Campus Needs an Urgent Re-Think

8/14/2015

4 Comments

Many universities see themselves as profit-motivated enterprises, but there are still a fair few people working in them who think teaching and learning ought to have different aims from those of business.

Where does creativity fit into this schema? What is it – and what is it not?

Consider the lingo

Today, metrics, expedience, and control mechanisms are used within higher education to harness creativity for market interests. This is aided by a particular language in current use.

I have dubbed it Zombilingo, because it’s a lingo that eats meaning in the way zombies eat brains. Unlike a related patois – let’s call it “Corpspeak” – which imports the language and concepts of business into higher education (and in fact all other spheres), Zombilingo first exports the vocabulary of creative thinkers into the business realm. There, it undergoes a sort of psychic surgery. It is then sold back to the academy, hollow as an empty brain-pan.

I’m currently compiling a ZED (Zombilingo/English Dictionary) which includes many terms in their before-and-after-surgery forms.

For instance, “dream” (before: irrational, demanding, allowing utopian reach; after: visions of material success). “Passion” is in the ZED listing too, along with “imagination” and “excellence” – and “creativity”, which is now a cant word in universities.

The commodification of creativity

Following government directives, universities are enjoined to develop “creativity” among students, to prepare them to compete in the global “marketplace”. This, the government hopes, will lead to “increased productivity and efficiency across the economy”.

In the US, Obama described “creativity” as America’s “single greatest asset”, and promised to “aggressively protect” the nation’s intellectual property.

Australia’s national cultural policy, Creative Australia, also proclaims that “a creative nation is a productive nation”, echoing American urban studies theorist Richard Florida’s declaration that not only is “creativity … now the driving force of economic progress and decisive source of competitive advantage”, but that “creativity is the new economy”. In the same article, Florida defines the creator as “one who rebels against nature’s dictates”. Thus we have the “creative” Hollywood-style cowboy whipping the steers of industry across the dusty plain (now cleared of natives and bison). His wilful individualist’s determination will never say die, though “nature” might protest and environmentalists point out that untrammelled exploitation of the earth’s resources may spell disaster for the planet.

In Florida’s narrative, notions of “economic progress” and “competitive advantage” are the rewards bestowed by “creativity”. These are simplistically represented as the virtues of a hero whose aggressive performativity will enable greater success in a narrowly Darwinian sense. That is, the ability to continue to produce and consume product at an ever-increasing rate in the competitive global market.

The word “creativity” and what it represents desperately needs a re-think.

And really, universities ought to be the sites to do that thinking in. They’re full of thinkers, aren’t they? Maybe, but it’s harder to be creative when you’re working with a dead script employing such usages as “client”, “productivity unit” and “multi-output organisation” for “student”, “academic”, and “university” – or when your work is subjected to value judgements by growth indicators, such as those outlined in Creative Australia’s tracking and targeting policy. All of these begin with the word “growth” – of participation, of economic impact, and of value of the cultural sector as measured by a statistics working groups.

Creativity – what it is and what it needs

Creativity is a liminal activity. It happens in an ambivalent space between certainties. You have to find a balance between intellect and imagination. You need to be able to speculate, muse, play around with thoughts. The right words are needed for this, and also time. As in the slogan of the Slow Science Manifesto: “bear with us while we think”.

Uncertainty itself is part of creative process, “a source of possibility and potential action”, to borrow a phrase from the Slow Science Manifesto. Favouring accident, chance, and unsystematic stimulation supports creativity too. Divergent thinking, and therefore creativity, is stimulated by engaging with imperfect or ambiguous information – which takes time to explore.

Or, in Italian writer Carlo Petrini’s words, the tempo giusto: the right speed for the task. In order to produce something fresh, a new insight or original analysis, time cannot be suborned to the acquisition of immediate, quantifiable objectives.

The results of creativity are unpredictable: it’s a risky business, and it needs to be so.

Attempts to control it through instrumental proceduralism, managerial scrutiny, and the imposition of unreasonable time-constraints is antithetic to creative practice. Where you might have had imaginative dynamism, instead you get an anodyne performance. It’s quite hard to be creative when being supervised and measured.

Control also produces fear of the consequences of failure to comply. This undermines scholarship, inhibiting possibilities for unconventional analyses, for strangeness or beauty, for the possibility of change or seeing broader vistas than those allowed by the current economic monocultural view.

The opposite of creative vision is totalitarian narrowness: streamlined, directed, quantified and ultimately dead-ended.

Once upon a time, universities were in the thrall of medieval scholasticism. Today the over-privileged controllers are corporate rather than clerical. But ideally, universities could be superlative sites for what cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams described as “the articulation and formation of latent, momentary, and newly possible consciousness”.

This means demanding time and space for the creative process to flourish.

Please share your perspectives on concepts of creativity that higher education might find useful to develop particularly in the context of enabling students' creativity to flourish

Image credits
Measuring Crearivity http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/4917/is-unoptimized-the-new-optimized-for-seo/
Innovation Growth Curve http://christopherhildreth.com/
Thriving in Uncertainty http://vivmcwaters.com.au/2012/07/

Dr Louise Katz is a lecturer in academic communication at the University of Sydney and a successful novelist http://louisekatz.com/ Her article 'Square pegs: Creativity on campus needs an urgent re-think' was originally published on January 20, 2015 on The Conversation website http://theconversation.com/square-pegs-creativity-on-campus-needs-an-urgent-re-think-36125

4 Comments

The Problem with Creativity & Play in Higher Education

7/17/2015

11 Comments

There are good educational, cultural, social and economic reasons for why higher education should be interested in students' creative development. From an educational viewpoint, the reason goes to the heart of the educational mission and values of a university, namely to enable students to develop and achieve more of their potential and through this make a positive difference to their future lives. Education is fundamentally an act of personal development and that includes students' creative development.

From a social and economic perspective, students' creative development is nested within the much larger problem of how universities help students prepare for a lifetime of learning and challenge in the work and other social environments they will inhabit, in a world that is growing ever more complex, disruptive and uncertain. This developmental problem unites all universities and all the people who work and learn in a university.

The problem of creativity in higher education is not that it is absent but that it is omnipresent and deeply buried within the ways of imagining and solving the problems, perplexities and challenges in each disciplinary domain. The problem is not chronic, in the sense that most teachers, educational developers and institutional managers believe that there is an urgent issue to be resolved. Rather, it is a developmental problem that is most usefully imagined as an opportunity to do more to support students' creative development than we currently do. The most important argument for higher education to take creativity in students’ learning more seriously is that creativity lies at the heart of performing, learning, developing and achieving in any context, and the highest levels of performance and achievement that enable us to make the imaginative leaps that change our lives and the world around us, involve the most creative acts of all.

One aspect of the 'problem' of how we encourage students' creativity is that there is so much choice in how it might be achieved. There are so many possible ways of enabling creativity to flourish and each teacher has within them the power to enable or disable their students' creativity. The question of how teachers exercise this awesome power should lie at the core of all educational practice.

Play in Higher Education

One approach to encouraging creativity to flourish is for teachers to explore the possibilities of play within their teaching and learning contexts. Play has been shown through numerous studies to provide an environment that can be favourable to the emergence of personal creativity. Both creativity and play require imagination, insight, problem solving, divergent thinking, the ability to experience emotion and to make choices (1).

According to Peter Gray (2) any activity can be described as play or playful if it contains the following characteristics: it is (a) self-chosen and self-directed; (b) intrinsically motivated; (c) guided by mental rules; (d) imaginative; and (e) conducted in an active, alert, but relatively non-stressed frame of mind. Most (all) of these characteristics are also associated with creativity emerging from - self-chosen/self-directed, self-motivated and imaginative acts often where people feel relaxed because they are 'in their element' (3) And creativity often emerges within the rule bound environments of organisations and societies.

Higher Education should be concerned with providing opportunities that encourage people to develop and flourish, including the possibilities that play, appropriately situated in a learner’s experience, provides. In fact, there are few professional contexts like that of a higher education teacher where individuals have such autonomy and freedom to choose how they practice. Of course there are rules and norms but generally they do not dictate a teacher’s action and they leave plenty of scope for personal creativity. The challenge for play in higher education (as in other phases of formal education other than early years!) is mainly semantic, stemming from conceptions of play as being something that should be kept outside the serious business of learning and education. The way to work with this challenge is through professional education and development that enhances understanding, pedagogic research that demonstrates value, and leadership that seeks to connect people who are interested and willing to collaborate to create movements that bring about changes in practice.

Chrissi Nerantzi (Manchester Metropolitan University), shows how professional developers can create opportunities for higher education teachers to come together to share and develop their ideas and practices in a playful and supportive professional learning environment (4) which she likens to a playground. Such environments are designed and facilitated to provide five types of space within which participants can make new connections.

Community Spaces - Connecting people
Open Spaces - Expanding minds
Story Spaces - Connecting hearts
Making Spaces -Connecting hands
Thinking Spaces - Connecting minds

Higher education teachers, like any other professionals, need to be inspired through stories that show them both the possibilities and potential of practices that are different to what they normally use (Chrissie Nerantzi’s story space above).

The latest issue of Creative Academic Magazine (5) has created a ‘story space’ by commissioning and curating over 30 narratives which explore the idea and practice of play in higher education with the intention of encouraging, informing and inspiring academics to include play within their repertoire of techniques for engaging and enthusing students in learning about their subject.

When I look back over my career, I’ve been fortunate as both a geologist and an educator to find subjects and professional roles I loved, that I could turn into hobbies as well as work. When your work becomes a hobby the possibilities for play are infinite. I have been fortunate to have the autonomy and freedom to 'play' and to involve other people - both students and peers - in my playful activities. I have had the freedom and opportunity to invent and adapt within the rules and affordances of the contexts that I have inhabited and the freedom and support to explore their potential. Ten years ago I invited the eminent psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's to write a Foreword to my book, 'Developing Creativity in Higher Education’. His words of wisdom chime well with these thoughts on helping creativity to flourish in higher education.

“If one wishes to inject creativity into the [higher] education system, the first step might be to help students find out what they truly love, and help them to immerse themselves in the domain – be it poetry or physics, engineering or dance. If young people become involved with what they enjoy, the foundations for creativity will be in place.”(6)

If we enable students and teachers to do what they truly love - they will find ways to play.

We welcome further thoughts on the role of play in promoting creativity in higher education and examples of how you have used play in your teaching and learning contexts.

Image credit
Playful professional development
http://www.materialsforthearts.org/author/mfta-team/page/4/

Additional reading
1) Russ, S.W. (2003) ‘Play and creativity: developmental issues’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 47, 3, 291–303.
2) http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Definitions_of_Play
3) ‘Finding Our Element’ Creative Academic Magazine 1
http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
4) Nerantzi, C. (2015) ‘A Playground Model for Creative Professional Development’ Creative Academic Magazine 1 http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
5) ‘Exploring Play in Higher Education’ Creative Academic Magazine 2
http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
6) Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2006) Developing Creativity in N.J.Jackson et al (eds) Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An imaginative curriculum Routledge

11 Comments

Play in Higher Education: A Waterfall of Questions

6/29/2015

6 Comments

The June issue of Creative Academic Magazine, which we edited, provides a wonderful collection of stories of the use of play in higher education. The magazine explores the idea, concept, practices and applications of play in a variety of higher education settings through the voices, stories and artwork of practitioners and students. As we have sifted through contributions and mulled over our own experiences of play a waterfall of questions has poured over and through us…some of which our contributors address, some of which remain unanswered, and more still which have yet to be asked.

When we first started playing to learn ourselves we realized how ambivalent or polarised responses can be when playful methods are mooted for teaching and research. Some people embrace them wholeheartedly, while others, often in high level roles, or who feel they have a certain kind of accountability, are nervous about the implications and resistant to participating. It is clear from the sheer weight of ideas contained here that many colleagues fall into the first group: however for those outside this ‘magic circle of play’, (as one of our writers describes it) we need to ask the question “Can we afford not to play?”

Einstein said that "play is the highest form of research"(1) and Brown (2) considered that "play is the fertiliser of the brain"; Plato – much cited - argued that you can learn more in an hour of play with someone than in a year of conversation; the political philosopher and professor of law Martha Nussbaum, in setting out her 10 central human capabilities including at no.9

“Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.”(3,4)

So why then do some of our colleagues feel uncomfortable about play in higher education? Why do they roll their eyes, find numerous excuses not to play dressed up in serious reason and beat a firm and speedy retreat? What are they retreating from? What causes their discomfort? Is part of it about loss of control, or feeling coerced into engagement and out of the tired-sounding-but-true comfort zone? How much of this is within them (and us?) or caused by conventions, traditions, expectations of appropriacy, value, level, context and so on ad infinitum? What is it about our professional roles that constrains us against playing? What is the impact of the clash in beliefs and behaviours between those who are pro-play and those who are against on our learning cultures and environments?

Is part of the problem that we deem play to be trivial or childish? Is it? And if this is the case, why do we think that way? Is play always childish for children? And what does childish actually mean, beyond the dictionary definition? If play is central to our development as human beings why do we draw a line after a certain age? Who dictates when we should cease to play? - and most importantly why? We like the word “childlike”, as denoting the openness to discovery and absence of prejudice and preconceptions: also it has an innocence that the unfortunate conjunction of ‘adult’ and ‘play’ has completely lost.

And what about higher education? Does it exclusively prepare graduates for the world of work? Or does it, and should it do much more than that, as Barnett (5) explores in Imagining the University? We think higher education provides an open and dynamic greenhouse for ideas to grow, develop and evolve for the public good. For us play is a very sophisticated way humans of all ages learn, develop and grow using appropriate play. Why should play suddenly stop when we enter adulthood? Do we stop riding a bike? Do we stop playing goofball/football? Do we stop dancing?

With Stephen Brookfield, Alison has written about the importance of play for learning and creativity (6). How can we nurture the new, the novel, the weird and find exciting ways to combine the uncombinable? The examples we have brought together here show that this is happening already – and outside the pages of CAM too – only think of the work by Sara Ramshaw and Paul Stapleton combining musical improvisation and the study of law. Isn't this what universities should be all about? Isn’t this what research is? What else is happening in the labs that we don’t know about?

And what are the consequences of not playing in any form whatsoever? Colourless, tasteless, emotionless learning? Flat learning, serious learning in every sense of both those adjectives? Not talking, not moving, not feeling? Are we creating silent or silenced sheep in our educators and our learners if we try to constrain play? Silence, of course, has its place – and yet play can be silent and solitary too. However, if we really want autonomous creative and critical thinkers and doers, is silence enough? What else should happen in higher education? Is there a need for more madness, messiness and playfulness – at least among those who thrive on it? How can we challenge misconceptions about play? We think the answer lies in the ideas presented here. We also suggest some of our own ideas in the Reservoir of Possibilities which accompanies the readings, viewing and visuals you will find here.

Explore, enjoy and ride into the chaotic waterfall of play.

References & Notes

1 Einstein play quote. In 1962 the journal “Childhood Education” published an article titled “Play is Education” by N. V. Scarfe that contained the following passage: 2 All play is associated with intense thought activity and rapid intellectual growth. The highest form of research is essentially play. Einstein is quoted as saying, “The desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of a vague play with basic ideas. This combinatory or associative play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought” quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/21/play-research/
2 Brown, S. (2010) Play. How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul, London: Penguin.
3 Nussbaum, M (online) Women’s Capabilities and Social Justice
http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/nussbaum/Women's%20Capabilities%20and%20Social%20Justice.pdf p232 [accessed 12 May 2015]
4 Kleist, Chad (online) Global ethics: Capabilities Approach, available at http://www.iep.utm.edu/ge-capab/#H3 [accessed 18 April 2015]
5 Barnett, R Imagining the University. Routledge
6 James, A. and Brookfield, S. D. (2014) Engaging Imagination. Helping students become creative and reflective thinkers, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Chrissi Nerantzi & Alison James

6 Comments

Towards Transformation: Conceptions of Creativity in Higher Education

4/22/2015

5 Comments

It had been a long day. I had spent it interviewing several academics – from new lecturers to emeritus professors, across a range of disciplines – about their conceptions and experiences of creativity in relation to learning and teaching. Even though I was recording it all, it was still hard work maintaining focus and enthusiasm for each of the 45 minute sessions, and ensuring – as one is obliged to do in phenomenographic research – that I had obtained deep and rich responses to my questions.

I always started with the same question: Could you tell me about an occasion that was a creative experience for you in terms of learning and teaching higher education?

All too often that question would be greeted by silence, and what I came to call called the ‘rabbit in the head- light’ look: as if why on earth would I think that there might be a connection between creativity and teaching? But I’d learned, from my training and work in drama, not to be afraid of silence and to avoid the temptation to ‘jump in’ in order to avoid embarrassment. As a drama therapist once told me: “silence IS golden: it usually means they’re thinking”; and sure enough, after a short while, a story would emerge, and I would gently probe the whats, hows and whys of that particular experience.

The last interview of the day was with a vastly experienced educational developer, with a PhD in linguistics, who had taught in China. After the usual hesitant start, he began to tell me how he had developed a successful student-centred, experiential and problem-based learning experience which was the antithesis of the teacher- centred, conformist, ‘micro-teaching’ that was the normal and expected practice. It was he who described the experience with the Paul Klee ‘taking a line for a walk’ quote above.

Thinking back to those interviews, a number of ‘moments’ stand out:

The eminent, soon-to-retire historian bemoaning the conformity and lack of risk-taking in his younger colleagues, and finally – as his last ‘hurrah’ – running a ‘visual history’ course on 18th century England as seen through a number of key objects that he had always wanted to run but never had the nerve… until now when he was leaving. (This was way before Neil McGregor’s renowned BBC series on the objects of the British Museum).

There was the young, early career lecturer, genuinely committed to teaching, tears rolling down her face as she recounted the frustrations of having her creative ideas about teaching rudely quashed by her senior male colleagues: “I feel restricted, I feel frightened….the constant ‘don’t bother about the teaching, just focus on your research’….it makes me so angry, but I don’t dare say anything”.

And there was the language lecturer whose creative ‘Damascene’ moment occurred serendipitously as a result of being very late for a class she was meant to be teaching in parallel with other identical classes. When she finally turned up at the end of the session she found that the group, who normally “sat like puddings” while she presented the set material in the set textbooks, were still there and that “the atmosphere in the room was buzzing…they were talking to each other, they had a problem to solve. So we spent the last couple of minutes talking about how we were going to keep that going now”.

There were many such moments in all the interviews, and after personally transcribing all the interviews (extraordinarily tiring, but so valuable in being able to get ‘inside the source material’), I began to search for patterns of thoughts and behaviour. Slowly but surely, after a long and rigorous iterative process, the many and varied experiences of creativity in higher education began to coalesce around five main conceptual categories. I attempted to capture them in the following map:

1.Creativity can be a CONSTRAINT-focused experience, where the constraints and specific limitations tend to encourage rather than discourage it. Creativity occurs despite and/or because of the constraints;

2.Creativity can be a PROCESS-focused experience; that may lead to an explicit or tangible outcome…or may not;

3. Creativity can be a PRODUCT-focused experience where the whole point is to produce something;

4. Creativity can be a TRANSFORMATION-focused experience where the experience frequently transforms those involved in it;

5. Creativity can be a FUFILMENT-focused experience where there is a strong element of personal fulfilment derived from the process/production of a creative work.

As well as the development and identification of these five categories (later to be reduced to three – but that’s another story), a number of significant outcomes and observations sprang from the research.

It was clear that university teachers experienced creativity in learning and teaching in complex and rich ways, and certainly the ones I interviewed – once they got going - exhibited great enthusiasm for, and an interest in, creativity.

I was struck, particularly, in response to my exploring the reasons why an individual pursued a particular creative course, by the number of times someone said ‘I stumbled across something’ or something similar. The example of the very late lecturer (above) is a typical example. The frequency and consistency with which the opportunity to exploit the consequences of

‘stumbling upon something’ played a critical part in the various self-narratives of creativity in learning and teaching is clearly important, and it has obvious significance for those interested and engaged in learning and teaching. Firstly it is important to realise that there are several distinct but linked elements in this. One is the ‘stumbling’, and another is the ability or opportunity to exploit it. How- ever, as one of the university teachers interviewed said, people stumble across things all the time but rarely act: “So it's not just stumbling upon it, it's finding that the thing has a use”.

Then, beyond finding that whatever it is might have some use, one needs the confidence to be able to engage in an action that exploits – in the best sense of the word – that situation. The notion of confidence constitutes a significant and expanding thematic element through all the five categories. In many of the interviews - and it is one reason why actual face-to-face interviews are so important – as the individual began to explain and explore their own creativity (some said it was really the first time they’d ever really thought about it) - I both heard and observed the growing sense of confidence both vocally and physically: they became animated, they smiled and they laughed.

Confidence clearly plays a critical role in enabling university teaches to engage creatively in their pedagogic practice. However, in the research into conceptions of learning and teaching, little attention seems to be paid to the subject of confidence and other affective aspects of the teacher’s role and identity. A number of researchers comment on this apparent gap in the research literature, and explain it by saying that dealing with the emotional and attitudinal aspects of learning and teaching is rather antithetical to the prevailing analytic/ critical academic discourse.

During the course of those interviews there was a strong sense of people transformed. It is also clear that the centrality of creativity-as-transformation in relation to learning and teaching, and the importance of creativity in relation to personal and/or professional fulfilment, poses a series of challenges. The outcomes of the research suggest that there is much more to the experience of creativity in learning and teaching than simply ‘being creative’. Furthermore, the outcomes indicate that a focus on academics’ experience of creativity separated from their larger experience of being a teacher may encourage over simplification of the phenomenon of creativity, particularly in relation to their underlying intentions when engaged in creative activity.

The significance in these research outcomes is that academics need to be perceived and involved as agents in their own and their students’ creativity, rather than as objects of or, more pertinently, deliverers of a particular ‘creativity agenda’. The transformational power of creativity poses a clear challenge to organisational systems and institutional frameworks that rely, often necessarily, on compliance and constraint, and it also poses a challenge to approaches to learning, teaching and assessment that promote or pander to strategic or surface approaches to learning. For higher education institutions (and the government) creativity is seen as the means to an essentially more productive and profitable future. But for university teachers, creativity is essentially about the transformation of their students…and themselves.

Reference Kleiman, P. (2008) Towards transformation: conceptions of creativity in higher education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 45 (3), 209-217 Also available at: http://www.creativeacademic.uk/resources.html

Paul Kleiman is a member of the Creative Academic Team, a Senior Consultant (Higher Education) at Ciel Associates and a Visiting Professor at Middlesex University @DrPaulKleiman

5 Comments

Finding Your Element Survey

2/22/2015

0 Comments

One of Creative Academic’s aims is to explore new ideas and contribute to a formal body of research on aspects of creativity. So, to complement the launch of the Academic Creative project and as a feature for the first issue of Creative Academic Magazine, the team designed an open, on-line survey entitled In Your Element. The survey is still open, and anyone can complete it – just go to https:// www.surveymonkey.com/r/VWD5K36. To date, we have had 14 responses; this article gives a taster of the trends already emerging.

The survey asks 12 questions, 5 of which elicit quantitative responses, the remainder are open-ended, qualitative questions. We therefore have a very rich data resource, which we hope further respondents will either confirm or expand. Quotations in this article are verbatim, but have been anonymised.

1. When someone says, 'they are in their element', what does this mean and how might this relate to their creativity?

Four themes emerge from the responses to this question. Firstly, respondents believe the meaning will differ for each individual, as described in this response: The mechanism does not matter rather it is the "fit" to the person. The next themes are closely related and are mutually influential, as noted by one respondent: They are engaged in something they really enjoy. Enjoyment may be an important motivation for creativity as well as an outcome of creativity

The second theme is enjoyment and interest in the activity. Words such as pleasurable, happy, interested reflect this feeling.

It is difficult to separate interest from motivation, our third theme. Typical of this, comments include: A realisation that what they are doing is inspiring themselves.

They are creating something which is aligned with their values and which brings pleasurable rewards,

The sense of motivation is closely linked to being in control, having confidence, and hence taking risks to go further, in a spiral of creativity. Some examples illustrate the point:

People probably feel in control of the tools and ideas they need to express themselves

It means displaying the full potential of your ability in that context e.g. sport, leisure, teaching.

If they are knowledgeable and confident about their participation, they may be more likely to try new things or deviate from the norm.

2. Have you had any experiences in your life which you would describe as 'being in your element'? What were the circumstances and why did you feel this way?

Responses to this question relate to both personal factors and more altruistic ones, hence interaction with others is intrinsic to some experiences. The following respondents both acknowledge the sense of achievement they derive from teaching, whilst also enjoying the impact (albeit intuited) they have had on their students:

Giving what I know to be a good lecture or presentation, one that evokes a response

When drawing on skills, knowledge, competences I have e.g. teaching and getting positive (implicit) feed back; creating something of which I can be proud

Teaching and get positive feedback, seeing ideas being taken forward

For some, there is an explicit aim of bring about the development or change in others: Having dialogue in an open forum breaks down concrete/narrow views, whilst others are content with sharing a common interest: I felt excited about learning new things or sharing my ideas and experiences with others.

Once again, the notion of confidence, mastery of something and the impact of this on personal motivation and experimentation is mentioned:

I felt confident in expressing myself, excited and surrounded by those who shared the same interests

I associate a sense of mastery with "being in your element".

You find you can realise something that has perhaps been fuzzy and forming!

The frequency with which such moments occur varies according to the individual. One person admits

It doesn't happen very often, and actually it usually means a lot of preparatory work has gone into making the moment. It’s like a coming together of otherwise disparate activities.

In contrast, another respondent says this feeling happens ‘frequently!’ A third person recognises the potential of mixing the planned and the unexpected for creativity to have elements of planning yet have the potential to be spontaneous.

3. Did such experiences encourage you to be creative? If they did, in what ways did they encourage you and what sorts of things did you do that you felt were creative?

Some of the previous comments have already provided affirmative answers to this question. We have seen that creativity is a motivator that enhances risk taking and potential creativity. Interaction with, and learning from others is essential to this process: it involves bringing together--the various people involved through the interaction with other creative people.

As a result, personal fulfilment can be derived and again, others may be helped: ?

understand the value in listening to other people's ideas, perceptions and theories.

they motivate me to spend more time planning and producing resources, learning new material to incorporate in teaching.

it encouraged me to further my understanding and appreciation of art by running these groups patients became more empowered

The quality of perceived outcomes can be enhanced:

I felt like I was producing high quality pieces but I was not constrained by technicality

The last comment reminds us of the freedom felt when in this state, and the consequent desire to experiment:

(I feel) safe in the knowledge that I can extemporise and adapt as I progress.

I really enjoy adding this "other" message

The message is repeated: creativity can occur anywhere

there are different levels of creativity even a mundane task can be creative

and it is caught up in a spiral of motivation, interaction, security, and risk-taking.

4. What do you understand by the idea of a 'medium' for creative expression'?

Many respondents associate the medium with a situation or setting, but it is seen as also encompassing an event, a conversation or simply a mental state. It can be the tools, materials, anything:

it is a conduit- the “thing” that you use. As such, it is ‘limitless’,

Anything that allows the brain to feel as if it is opening up to the new possibilities or even seeing familiar things in a different light

Security to take risks is involved, as we need to feel

the freedom to be creative without being judged. In short, says one respondent,

I think we are only limited by our self-imposed limitations.

5. In your current life, what medium or mediums provide you with opportunity for creative self-expression?

As we would expect, the medium for individual creativity is personal to us each. Some of those cited are: drawing, poetry, textiles, teaching, researching, communication, conversation, writing, producing workshops/PowerPoints, decorating the house, yoga, telling jokes, photography, blogging, videos, Wordpress, Flickr, Twitter, cooking, cabinet making, playing an instrument and many more. These media include professional and leisure activities, the intellectual, physical and emotional, but one person explicitly suggests the two may be iterative:

A lot of this seems inwardly-directed, but much feeds (eventually) into my external facing creative activities. Another respondent regrets being no longer able, with age and physical incapacity, to engage in previous forms of

activity, but has found new outlet, raising the question of adaptability and the ability to be creative in our creative media.

Questions 6 – 10 required respondents to rate statements on a 5 point scale from strongly
disagree to strongly agree.

6. Your element could be playing the guitar in a band, or playing football, cooking a meal, or playing with your iPad, or growing flowers in your garden. People in their element
may be teachers, designers, homemakers, entertainers, medics, fire-fighters, artists, social workers, accountants, administrators, librarians or even politicians! In other words, people may
find their element in any type of work, hobby or other activity which they find interesting,
meaningful and fulfilling.

The figure above shows the responses to questions 6 limitless variability in the medium,
to be completely in agreement with the statement, with 93% being in strong agreement.
This would confirm the qualitative answers above, where they indicate that creativity is not limited to an individual, discipline or medium.

7. To be in your element you have to care deeply about what you are doing and love doing it.
You have to have a deep and positive emotional engagement or passion in order to commit the time, energy and attention to do the things you do. That does not mean that you enjoy every moment but, on balance and over time, your enthusiasm and motivation is sustained and you do not get put off by challenges, obstacles and setbacks. In fact these become new sources of motivation and goals.

7% of respondents actually disagreed that positive emotional engagement is essential to creativity, whilst 14% were unable to decide. We should note that, at the moment, these represent small numbers of individuals, and it is important that we encourage more responses in order to test the validity of this apparent trend. Despite these exceptions, the majority of respondents were, again, in agreement with the statement. The comments made in questions 1 3 also indicate an association of creativity
with engagement and motivation.

8. Your element includes the medium through which you are able to express yourself creatively. The medium is an agency or means of doing and accomplishing something you value.

We have already heard respondents’ comments on what the medium for creativity means to them. The figure shows that individual answers spanned the whole range of (dis)agreement. Still, 72%
are in agreement or strong agreement with the statement, but 14% (only 2 individuals
so not necessarily indicative of a general view) disagreed, and a further 14% were neutral.

9. For an artist the medium is his painting, drawing or other form of visual representation. The medium includes the media or tools he uses - his sketchbook, pencils, paintbrushes and paint for sketching and colouring. Or, if he is a digital artist, a computer or digitising pad, scanner, camera or smartphone and software to process and manipulate the images.

Question 9 explore the association between medium and tools, a theme that was considered in
questions 4 and 5, where we saw the variability of media and the extension of meaning to include
contexts and frames of mind. Given this range or meaning, it is perhaps surprising to find such high
levels of agreement with statement 9: only 1 person neither agreed nor disagreed, the
remainder being positive.

10. Personal creativity flourishes when an individual finds their 'element': the particular contexts in which an individual can fully utilise their aptitudes, abilities, talent and enthusiasm for doing something, be- cause they care deeply about what they are doing and are motivated
to perform in an excellent way to achieve things that they value.

Question 10 returns to the themes of self- actualisation, commitment and motivation, but links
this to the need for personally valuing the activity. No-one disagrees with the proposition, but two people are unable to comment and one does not answer the question at all. When we re-examine the qualitative data, it is clear that there is little, if any, explicit reference to the value of
activities, though there is some implicit indication of personal value.

So what picture emerges if we compare respondents’ views on the five statements contained in questions 6-10 The figure below provides an easy overview of these. The colours indicating
agreement are blue and yellow.The statement eliciting greatest approval was 6, the
individuality and variability of one’s creative medium, followed closely by 9, the medium being
one’s tools. The statement with which least agreement and most variability in responses was found was question 8, the need for the activity to be valued.

11. To what extent do you feel higher education is able to help learners find their element and discover their medium(s) for creative self-expression? How does it achieve this?

This and question 12 bring the issues of creativity into the Higher Education sector. We did not seek autobiographical data, so do not know how many of or respondents have experience in the HE sector. Nevertheless, there are some very strong, common themes in their comments.

Sadly, numerous remarks indicate the limits imposed by institutional and/or central constraints, be it in terms of course structure, delivery or resources:

it depends on your colleagues, and also the encouragement of line managers etc. protocols and guidelines

timetabling, pressure on studio and classroom space and exam and assignment deadlines

Increasingly less so because there are so many hoops for students to jump through

Expectations, both explicit and implicit, are also affecting creativity. High amongst these is the assumption that study will have a vocational outcome:

The possibility of experimentation by students is reduced because of increasingly work-oriented syllabuses being fixated on industry and getting a job higher education context tends to stifle any creative self-expression because most students are here "to get a 2:1" "to please my Mum" or "to get a good job".

Even those who reveal some sympathy to the structural constraints show little optimism for change:

I think that HE aim is do that but resources and guidance can be limited sometimes, HE don’t like to be messy and is sometimes scared of being colourful or daring,

I think higher education struggles with this, by its nature and by society, education is formed to put value on what people do and potentially earn. This conflicts with the goals of the creative life, in which earning a max amount is often not the first thing on the list, not the most important thing.

A number of respondents cite interdisciplinary approaches as a means to creativity, though they are again some- what cynical of the degree to which they are implemented:

interdisciplinary collaboration is celebrated in theory but rarely offered to students in practice

Courses that encourage inter-disciplinary approaches tend to be more successful in achieving this

It (HE) doesn't - it is very subject specific

One person recalls how her PhD supervisor scorned her for daring to step into disciplines other than her own, leading to a sorry conclusion:

I was conscious that I had to learn to jump through the hoops of the doctoral tradition before I would be free to really express my own views/creativity.

One respondent suggested that students are forced to fulfil their creative needs outside the curriculum – if there are such opportunities:

This may mean that some will find creative self-expression via societies or social and hobby-related activities, which may be pursued and developed with others who just happen to be in or around the institution.

But let us remember these words: if HE is preparing students for life as well as a professional role we should be aspiring to helping them find their element.

Question 12 provided a wonderful rich picture of someone in their element. The final question asked
respondents to look at an image of Jeff in his element and to say what it meant to them.

12. What features of this image convey the idea of 'being in your element’?

The first, most obvious theme is the sense of chaos, but this is seen as pleasurable:

a bit chaotic; It is colourful and chaotic, but also vey harmonious

The chaos is a source of excitement and creativity of mind:

the excitement and the flurry of thoughts that flood through your mind; contents of a brain exemplified

As some observe, Jeff does not look troubled by the chaos: they refer to the tranquil face of Jeff; Jeff looks very focused but not overwhelmed

This is attributed to his being in control:

It looks like "Jeff" has built around him all the things he likes and uses. I equate this to his being at the centre or the "control centre".

Finally, one respondent observes that Jeff has managed both to give himself some unique space and remain an individual while still being part of his environment:

doing what you are interested in as opposed to what you are supposed to be doing, Having a barrier between yourself and the 'stuff' - feeling part of a cosy family and expressing a little individuality.

The response to this image therefore recognises many of the themes that have recurred throughout the survey. We have noted that responses are rich but derive so far from a small number of individuals. We welcome further contributions. Please take a few minutes to add your own responses to the survey and give a more reliable understanding of issues. to https:// www.surveymonkey.com/r/VWD5K36

Jenny Willis
Executive Editor Creative Academic Magazine

0 Comments

Assisting the birth of good ideas

2/11/2015

2 Comments

Facilitators are a bit like midwives, our privileged position enables us to witness the birth of new ideas. I couple of weeks ago I facilitated a workshop at Sheffield Hallam University. My role was to encourage a group of staff to re-imagine what an educational process called 'personal and professional development planning' (PPDP) might look like if it were to embrace the ideas of lifewide learning and learning ecologies. I have to declare a vested interest since I had introduced these ideas to the university at their teaching and learning conference last year.

I started my session by referring to Stephen Johnson's excellent RSA Animate talk - 'Where good ideas come from', and suggested that the workshop provided a great space for harnessing the thoughts and ideas of the participants on the matters we were focusing on. We worked through the approach that I had learned from Fred Buining, the great Dutch facilitator, encouraging participants to suspend their disbelief and think imaginatively with purpose to explore the problem statement we had created and then generate many possible solutions. This process prepared them for the main task which was to work in two's or three's to create a poster to describe their solution to the problem. Here the process encouraged both imaginative and critical thinking within a well defined time frame. At the end of it each small group pitched their poster to the others and at the end of the pitch the other participants had to make at least one suggestion to add value to the ideas that had been pitched. What emerged were some 'great ideas' which had huge potential to be shaped into exciting new concepts and social practices. It was a wonderful experience and I caught the sense of excitement as some of the participants realised some of the potential in the ideas. Feedback at the end on my contribution was very generous and I went home a happy man.

On 5 hour journey home I reflected on the experience. Travelling makes you do this doesn't it? I re-read a blog post I had downloaded by Carlo Miceli http://www.carlosmiceli.com/about/ who summarised the key points in Stephen Johnson's book and it seemed to me that the workshop satisfied two of his ten statements about where good ideas come from.

The Adjacent Possible
The first pattern he recognises is that ideas are connected like doors. Open a door and you can see new ideas, but only ideas that are connected can be seen. It’s by learning from other people’s ideas, or previous ideas of our own, that we come up with new ways of seeing the world. It’s a constant connection of innovation. The key is not to isolate your idea. Instead, try to connect it to as many doors -people, places, ideas – as possible.

I think the 'design thinking' workshop provided an excellent space in which individuals could open the doors behind which their ideas sat and expose them to new possibilities.

Liquid Networks
Ideas are not single elements. They are more like networks. They are not sparked by the connections between different elements: they are those connections. For ideas to happen, you have to place the elements at your disposal in environments where more connections can occur in the right way. The best networks have two characteristics: they make it possible for its elements to make as many connections as possible, and they provide a random environment that encourages constant “collisions” between all of its elements. The elements are worthless if they are not properly connected. The magic in the workshop is the way in which people who had participated in and shared a process were then connected in the act of designing their solution to the problem/opportunity and deep collisions of ideas and reasoning occurred to create some 'GOOD IDEAS'.

Johnson says that “if we’re trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces” that foster real collaboration. The process I facilitated just required a space where we could move from tables to a semicircle of chairs but it did need wall space for the sharing of ideas and posters. And this wall space was particularly useful because of the long whiteboards. It was pretty near perfect for the type of collaborative thinking we were engaged in. But space alone is not enough that space and the people in it have to be helped to think in certain ways - someone needs to lead and facilitate the process with a structure, with some basic rules and an energy that creates momentum in the collaborative process. There also has to be the means to capture ideas as they emerge for they are transient and will not stay in the mind unless they are helped - so there was a lot of catching on post-its, in posters, and on video. The animation of posters - the culmination of the process and the catching of elaborated ideas on video was particularly important. We kept the process going by adding new ideas to the poster after each presentation. Uploaded to dropbox these provide a useful resource for reflection and further development. After the workshop the organiser transcribed all the post-it ideas and circulated them by email as part of an ongoing conversation. The lesson is that GOOD SPACE + GOOD FACILITATION has the potential to produce GOOD IDEAS that must to be CAPTURED in order to be used.

So this is how I witnessed the birth of some great ideas. It was a deeply purposeful, collaborative, energetic and constructive process and I feel privileged to have been a part. But the good ideas are only that. They need to be developed and grown into something that can be brought into existence. The story of where GOOD SOCIAL PRACTICES come from, is an entirely different story.

The following day I sat down and tried to catch some of my learning from the event. I was particularly interested in the high level concepts and how the rationale might be developed to support these. As I wrote I realised that I was embodying the first of Johnson's innovation pattern. During the process I had opened my door to share my ideas and then been provided with the open doors of participants through which they had shared their ideas. My writing process was the way I tried to select and make sense of these exchanges connecting the big ideas to the subsidiary ideas that gave the big idea substance and meaning and which ultimately might enable new social practices to be created. More than that the process itself was uplifting and I could see how, if I was taking them forward, I would be enthused by this process of adding detail and further meaning.

Finally, one other thing I now have which I didn't have before is a personally meaningful story I can use in my work in encouraging creativity to flourish in universities. Such stories are valuable ways of bridging the gap between the abstract ideas of Stephen Johnson to the real world of academics, educational developers and managers.

Louis Pasteur famously said that “chance favours the prepared mind.” Johnson adapts this and says “chance favours the connected mind.” The workshop demonstrated that "chance favours minds that have been connected through a well thought out facilitated process"

Sources of ideas:
Carlos Miceli Review of 'Where Good Ideas Come From'
http://www.carlosmiceli.com/where-good-ideas-come-from/#sthash.Baif9dvQ.dpuf

Stephen Johnson Where Good Ideas Come From
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

2 Comments

Mediums for Creative Self-Expression

1/22/2015

1 Comment

In a design brief for some training and development I'm doing I was asked to address the idea of 'mediums for creative self-expression'. In spite of having invested a lot of time thinking about creativity over the last 15 years I have never really sat down and thought much about the mediums I use. I have taken them for granted.

The context in which people work, study, play and socialise includes the media through which they communicate and are able to express themselves through what they do and how they do it. The medium is an agency or means of doing and accomplishing something. In the context of personal creativity it is the means by which we convert imagination and ideas into something tangible and visible.

According to Ken Robinson the medium rather than the context is the vehicle for creative self-expression. 'If you’re doing something creative, you have to be working in a medium. My experience is that the most creative people love the medium that they work in. Musicians love the sounds they make. Writers love words. Mathematicians love the abstractions that numbers make possible. Engineers and architects love building things' (Robinson 2007).

For an artist the medium is his art - his drawing, painting or other form of expression and it includes the media he uses to create his representations, his sketchbook and tools for sketching and colouring. Or, if he is a digital artist - a computer or digitising pad, scanner and camera or smartphone and software to process and manipulate the images. For a writer his medium for self-expression is the words he writes be they in a notebook or on a word processor. For a performer like a footballer, his medium is the game of football he plays and his tools are the ball and the boots he wares.

Finding the medium and media for creative self-expression is an important and continuous search across and through all the spaces and opportunities in our life if we want to find joy and live a fulfilled and meaningful life. Looking back through my life as a teenager I loved drawing and painting so I was used to the medium of the artist. Later I swapped my sketchpad for a field notebook as I became a geologist. My context became the 'field' and my medium my field sketches and the maps I produced as I observed and interpreted the world around me. Geological mapping is a craft that combines observation and critical thinking with imagination. In the classroom as a teacher, the lecture or practical became my medium and the resources I produced and used were my tools to engage and encourage students to share my love of my subject. These techniques were later adapted for educational professionals as I morphed into a higher education researcher, policy maker and developer. In this way, although the contexts have changed the medium through which I have expressed myself have generally remained constant. Outside my work I have enjoyed expressing myself through my garden and being in a band where I play drums. All these contexts, and more, provided me with challenges and opportunities, in which I could create a sense of purpose. Within them I found a 'medium', the means of doing and accomplishing something that I valued and within which I could create something - mostly by myself, but sometimes with others.

The medium I prefer to express my ideas, imagination, beliefs and values in is writing. This has always been the way since I wrote my dissertation as an undergraduate, through the papers and thesis I wrote as a postgraduate, through the articles and books I have published in my fields of geology and education and now to the articles and blogs I write and most recently a book about my family's history.

In recent years I have come to see myself as first and foremost a writer, then a developer, broker and lots of other things. Some would say I'm sad spending so much time sitting at a computer writing. My wife sees my writing as work, and there is a discipline that makes it work-like, but it often feels more like a hobby because of the pleasure and satisfaction I gain from it. Through writing I explore my ideas and imagination and bring some sort or order and meaning to their randomness as they are connected and contextualised.

There are many definitions of creativity but as a writer I have always had a soft spot for Dellas and Gaier (1970) who suggest that creativity is the desire and ability to use imagination, insight, intellect, feeling and emotion to move an idea from one state to an alternative, previously unexplored state. That sums up very nicely what often happens when I sit down to write about a subject I know little about - like this blog. The process of crystallising thoughts in words is the way I discover and consolidate what I understand and believe. 'How do I know what I know until I say it?' is very real to me. Through writing I appropriate the ideas of others and make them my own connecting them to what I understand and adding to my understanding in the process. It's mostly a solo experience - so in answer to the question do you prefer to be creative on your own or with others, I would have to say that on balance, and in the context of my preferred medium, my preference is to work by myself. Although, there are certainly times when it is a joy to write something collaboratively.

The desire to write is often what gets me up early in the morning (including this blog today). I have a thought in my head and that provides the stimulation and motivation and I get annoyed if something gets in the way. It's the medium that provides me with the means of doing something useful (to me) with the idea. When I sit down to write I usually have a bit of an idea about what I want to write about but not much. The words have to be invented as I write. When I get stuck I might google and do thanks to serendipity I will usually find something that someone has written that triggers new thoughts and ideas. I sometimes also bounce an idea off friends who will offer their perspectives. For example yesterday I wanted to start writing something on the creative affordances of social media but didn't know where to start. So I wrote down some simple propositions and emailed them to a couple of knowledgeable friends and within an hour or so I had their perspectives, as well as confirmation that what I had written was okay. This enabled me to progress my understanding in a way that was useful to me.

The medium enables immersion. By that I mean I can lose myself in the process for hours, sometimes 10 or 12 hours in a day. It's not all fun though and there are often negative emotions and feelings of dissatisfaction as I struggle with something or lose something that wasn't saved, as well as more positive feelings as stuff emerges. Writing is a process that results in a product but the product emerges through the process and that is where the magic lies. So at the end of writing this piece the collection of connected thoughts and feelings that have been crystallised into words did not exist before.

I enjoy writing for different audiences and in different styles - essays, academic articles and books, magazine articles and blogs to name a few. The space I write in is not so important - I can write anywhere and anytime but I prefer writing in my own space,which is my office - a converted garage where I'm surrounded by own things and connected to the world via internet. This perhaps is because leaving the house and walking to the garage is like going to work where I know I am going to be disciplined. My office space is my equivalent to an artist's studio. It's full of stuff that has meaning in my life. Like many an artist's studio my office is quite messy but I can generally find things I need. I remember reading that when they broke into artist Francis Bacon's studio after he died it was knee deep in discarded drawings and paintings. In life he reasoned that in this environment he created order out of chaos and I have used that as an excuse for my messyness ever since.

My preferred writing tool is a laptop/word processor - I use an old version of word. I cannot touch type but I'm quite fast with 2 or 3 fingers and I type as fast as I can think and compose. I sometimes write with pencil and paper but I notice that when I sit down at my laptop I ignore what I have written and just write. But coming to it freshly, after having thought about it, generally makes it easier. Writing is an emotional rather than clinical affair: I often listen to music when I write and I choose music that fits my mood.

The second medium I am at home with is visual representation. I like to turn ideas that are written in words into pictures - illustrations and diagrams, in particular. I enjoy the process of creating a picture in my mind but technically, I am not very good at drawing the pictures so I work with an illustrator (Kiboko our community artist) to help me turn my imagination into reality. Sometimes I just tell him that I want to illustrate an idea and describe it to him in words and then let him interpret but this generally does not work. I have discovered that if I can create a design for him - usually based on cut and paste of figures he has already produced we get a much better result. To achieve this I've got proficient in using paint and photoshop to edit and amend existing illustrations or parts of illustrations. - Here is a recent example formed around the idea of learning and developing in lots of different contexts. On the left is my collage formed from previous drawings that Kiboko has done with my notes to guide him and on the right the new design created by Kiboko. The process is collaborative and we both feel that we have contributed to the process of creation.

Most recently, I have, thanks to Web 2.0 website building tools enjoyed creating websites in order to support my work as a developer and organiser of social networks around the educational ideas I believe in. Weebly, (this website) and other Web 2.0 tools like explee that allows you to animate illustrations, have opened up a whole new medium within which I can think, communicate and create. Thanks to Web 2.0 and social media the world has suddenly become richer for people to express themselves and share their creations.

Please share your perspectives on the medium(s) you use for creative expression?

Sources
Photo is of Julian Stodd a talented graphic facilitator drawing a conversation on the walls of SCEPTrE at the University of Surrey

Dellas, M. and Gaier, E.L. (1970) Identification of creativity in the individual. Psychological Bulletin, 73, 55-73

Robinson, K. (2007) Fresh Perspective: Creativity and Leadership: Sir Ken Robinson in Conversation with Russ Volckmann Available on line: http://integralleadershipreview.com/ 5377-fresh-perspective-creativity-and-leadership-sir-ken-robinson-in-conversation-with-russ-volckmann/

Norman Jackson

1 Comment

10 Ways Social Media Can Enable Creative Self Expression for Digital Scholars

1/16/2015

163 Comments

One of the profound changes that is taking place at the start of the 21st century is the creation of many new affordances for creative self-expression brought about by the technological revolution that is carrying us into a new Social Age of learning and a new culture of participation, creation and co-creation (1). Aided by the internet and its associated technologies we are changing our habits of communicating and interacting through the on-line environments we increasingly inhabit. Fundamentally, as a society we are changing the way we find, share and co-create information to develop new knowledge and meaning. The world is full of content creators and people offering their unique perspectives on anything and everything and full of opportunity to collaborate to co-create new knowledge, objects and relationships. The very act of communicating in the Social Age offers new affordances for creative self expression and examples are given below of some of the ways in which social media can encourage and enable creative self-expression for all digital scholars working in higher education.

Traditional channels to share achievements

The CV or resume has been used for many years as a means of sharing work experience, skills and qualifications. Typically the 2-sides of A4 paper CV is used as a means of selecting applicants for job interviews. In the last two decades we have seen a growth in the Company website which may offer a Who’s Who gallery. The purpose of these is to showcase the skills of those who work for that organisation. The digital CV for many is now having a LinkedIn profile and using the affordances for professional networking and publication that LinkedIn provides. This professional networking site has provided the space to host these since 2003.

Traditional channels to express scholarly activity

In the main these have been peer reviewed journal articles and books. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. Whilst providing valued benchmarking information and reputational yardsticks, for use within the higher education (HE) sector and for public information, we must also consider how to highlight the excellent work that doesn’t make the dizzy heights of the REF. A further consideration is the time it takes for research to actually be published.

Professor Patrick Dunleavy argues that “a new paradigm of research communications has grown up - one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication”. He goes on to introduce the blog as a useful mechanism to share a synopsis of your article, book or chapter. The likes of Wordpress and Blogger offer free blog sites and are supported with excellent online help guides to get you started. Web 2.0 drag and drop technology also enables us to very easily create our own websites to curate the products of our research see for example weebly.

Using social media to become and sustain yourself as a digital scholar

Social media is what it says on the tin. It is digital media that enables you to share information socially. By social this means enabling opportunities for interaction and dialogue. It goes beyond text as multimedia can be shared in the form of images, video and audio.

In a recent open lecture on Social Media and the Digital Scholar I suggested that providing bite sized links to your scholarly work can be helpful to others, highlighting topics of mutual interest. Examples might include:

writing a LinkedIn post and updates which include links to useful content
adding presentations to SlideShare and sharing also on your LinkedIn profile
adding your publications to your LinkedIn profile: articles, press releases, papers, books and chapters
adding projects you are involved in along with the names of those you are collaborating with
writing guest posts for other peoples’ blogs, websites and digital magazines
writing your own blog and sharing a link via Twitter

Taking this a step further and considering the technology so many of us have at our fingertips and contained within the mobile devices we carry with us, there are now so many more opportunities to become more creative in the way we share our scholarly work. Beyond text we can now easily capture images, video and audio using our mobile devices and share these on a variety of social media channels. Thinking about utilising a variety of rich media to express ourselves is the first step and will provide the means of adding your own creative mark to the work you are sharing.

Ten creative ways social media can be used:

1 Twitter

Having only a maximum of 140 characters per message (tweet) brevity is the word!. Adding hyperlinks to websites can provide the reader with more information. These links could also be to videos, audio or images. In addition you can upload an image of your choice and this will appear below the tweet. This is where you can become creative as you can design your own images. There is now an option to pin a tweet to the top of your profile page. Selecting one you wish to promote along with an image can be very useful. Opportunities for creativity abound in the messages and images you create, and the way you engage with others using this medium.

2 Slideshare

You can upload PowerPoint presentations, documents and infographics to Slideshare. If you are on LinkedIn you can choose to auto-add these to your profile. This adds a visual aspect that stands out amongst the text. You can also capture the embed code and display your slideshares in your blog or website.

3 Screencast-o-matic

Create guides in the form of a screencast video. This captures anything on your screen from a PowerPoint set of slides, a word doc, a photo, diagram or drawing along with a recording of your voice over. The recording can be uploaded to YouTube or saved as a file. It can then be shared via your chosen social networks.

4. Pinterest

Pin your visual assets - photos, drawings, sketches, diagrams of your work, book covers, presentations - on to a virtual pinboard. The image maintains the link to the site it was pinned from. You can create as many boards as you wish on Pinterest.

5 QR Code

Add a QR code to your business card that links to your blog, website or LinkedIn profile. These can be made easily by using the https://goo.gl/ URL shortener. Paste the URL you want to link to - click shorten and the click on details to reveal your QR code. Save this as an image. There are a number of free QR code reader apps that can be downloaded on to your smartphone.

6 Video

Capture short video clips about your work. These could be demonstrations of practical activities, talking head interviews or exemplars of student work. You could create a video biography or CV and then share on your blog, website or LinkedIn profile. If uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo you can capture the embed code and simply paste this into a blog post or on your website.

You may also want to experiment with Vine to create mini 6 seconds video clip. This is long enough to capture the cover or title of your book or any other artefact you wish to share. Vines can be shared via social media or embedded into a blog or website.

7 Podcasts

Tools like Soundcloud and AudioBoom are easy to use to capture audio narrations. Consider recording a synopsis of something you are working on. Share the recording via Twitter,

LISTEN TO SUGATA MITRA PODCAST

8 Images

An image can add context to an update shared via any social network. This could be a photograph or a digitised drawing, sketchnote, mindmap, diagram, CAD drawing and more.

Curate scholarly related images you create by adding to Flickr or Instagram. Go a step further and use them to create a collage using PicMonkey or an animated slideshow using Animoto or Adobe Voice.

Consider giving your images a Creative Commons licence so that others may use too and make use of the Creative Commons search facility for your own work. Here you can find images and music.

9 Host a Google+ Hangout

A Google Hangout is very similar to Skype enabling you to have a live video conversation with one person or a group of up to ten people. Google Hangouts on Air give you the opportunity to publicly share the hangout conversation that takes place and will auto record and publish this on YouTube.

Sharing a discussion is an excellent way to introduce others to research, teaching innovations, student work or anything else you think would be of interest to others.

10 Infographics

These are a great way to visually portray information including stats and data in the form of a digital poster. You can use PowerPoint or Publisher to create or tools like Piktochart or Infogram which give you a lovely choice of templates. Infographics can also be used for visual CVs using VisualizeMe.

Right is an example of an infographic poster made using Piktochart.

Useful background reading

1) Using Social Media in the Social Age of Learning Lifewide Magazine September 2014 Available on line at: http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/

2) Exploring the Social Age and the New Culture of Learning Lifewide Magazine September 2014 Available on line at: http://www.lifewidemagazine.co.uk/

Sue Beckingham @suebecks is an Educational Developer and Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University with a research interest in social media use within education http://socialmediaforlearning.com/ . She is a founding member of the Creative Academic community.

163 Comments

How purposes drive creative self-expression

1/10/2015

0 Comments

For the past month we have been busy getting ready to formally launch Creative Academic and now seems as good a time as any to do so. Chrissi, Alison and myself will try to energise the idea but ultimately the success of the enterprise will be in attracting people who care about students' creative development, to our community, and harnessing their energy, enthusiasm and expertise to bring about systemic perspective change.

By those wonderful coincidences I came across a lovely post by Shelley Prevost this week who talked about the way she carried her purposes through different jobs and roles to enable her to become the person she wanted to be.

'Your purpose in life has very little to do with your job' In the last four years, I've been a psychotherapist, teacher, mentor, investor, and entrepreneur. It's so tempting to say with certitude that this job or that job is my purpose. That I'm 'called' to be a counsellor, a teacher, or a CEO. But rather than using them as labels to define and decode my purpose, I now think of my roles as reflections of who I am now, in this moment in time, with these people I work and share my life with. And perhaps more importantly, these jobs are helping me become who I am supposed to be. Your purpose is to unlock--and eventually fold in--who you are becoming with who you already are. The activities that force you to grow are your calling. Learning from those activities is your purpose. Your life purpose is way too big to be filled by one role, or even one long career. If you choose wisely, your job can point you toward your purpose. Your personal evolution--becoming wiser, kinder, more curious, more YOU--is the purpose of your human experience. If you're lucky, your job might serve as the flint that sparks your growth or, as some of you know too well, it may take the form of a psychic straight jacket that's inflexible and unaccommodating. Either way, your job is a reflection of your current conditions--not the purpose itself.' Shelley Prevost

How right she is. I've had five different roles / enterprises in the last 15 years and in each I have tried to pursue my purposes even though the roles have been different. In fact making the job or enterprise into something through which I felt able to fulfil my purposes and provide opportunity for creative self-expression, was and remains, a key element of my enjoyment and fulfilment in each role. In the coming week I am going to launch another enterprise - Creative Academic. Its purpose, and mine, is to support students' creative development in higher education. Looking back to 2001 I created a similar community based enterprise called the imaginative curriculum network while working for the Learning and Teaching Support Network . Both of these enterprises are, in Shelley's words, activities that force or enable me to grow and develop and give meaning, substance and purpose to my creativity. These interconnected projects underlie the fact that our purposes are too big to be filled by one role. We carry and enact them by repeatedly bringing new organisations, relationships, performances and products into existence. In this way our purposes become the real driving forces for our creative self expression. While our creativity gives meaning and substance to our purposes, its our purposes that drive our creative spirit that ultimate leads to the creation of the things twe value.

“Whether we’re artists, corporate managers, accountants or whatever, we all want to create; and we want to do it in a purposeful and meaningful way. I learned the hard way that, as agreeable an idea ‘Creativity for its own sake’ is, it’s not particularly sustainable, financially rewarding or emotionally satisfying over the long run.” Hugh MacLeod

One further thought occurs in the light of my recent exploration of the role of disruption and inflection in our lives. It seems to me that our purposes persist through disruptions and they influence our decisions that lead to inflections that take our life in a new direction.

Shelley Prevost Two Unexpected Lessons I've Learned Since Changing Careers
@shelleyprevost
http://www.inc.com/shelley-prevost/two-unexpected-lessons-i-ve-learned-since-changing-careers.htm

image source and quote
https://brucelynnblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/creativity-with-purpose/

Norman Jackson
Leader Creative Academic

0 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

#creativeHE: A Humanised and Humanising Experience

Creativity on Campus Needs an Urgent Re-Think

The Problem with Creativity & Play in Higher Education

Play in Higher Education: A Waterfall of Questions

Towards Transformation: Conceptions of Creativity in Higher Education

Finding Your Element Survey

Assisting the birth of good ideas

Mediums for Creative Self-Expression

10 Ways Social Media Can Enable Creative Self Expression for Digital Scholars

How purposes drive creative self-expression

Authors

Archives

Categories

﻿Authors﻿

Archives

Categories

Authors