With the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) looming, the issue of sustaining our planet and our very existence, has once again been brought to our attention. The wicked problem of humanity’s future survival and prosperity is framed by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which offers 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and next week is the UN’s “Global Goals Week” aimed at encouraging people to think about the contributions they are making to support the SDGs.

The UN is the worlds global strategic planner and clearly the SDGs are designed for Governments, corporations and NGO's but the principles on which they are based must apply and be acted upon by the whole of humanity. Education (which has its own SDG #4) has a crucial role to play and this is where Creative Academic, with its network of educators and people interested in learning can participate.
 
While quite a lot of attention has been given to creative innovation for sustainability, relatively little attention has been paid to the important role of individuals’ imagination and creativity in contributing small-scale personal and community-based solutions to sustainable environments, cultures and futures. With so much at stake we need to ask ourselves, "is sustainability the new high stakes context and challenge for personal creativity?

What do we mean by sustainability and sustainable regenerative, environments, cultures and futures?
 
To ‘sustain’ means to keep something going or provide support to enable something to flourish. Daniel Wahl has done much to explore the idea of sustainability he says that what we are trying to sustain through the SDGs is the underlying pattern of health, resilience and adaptability that maintains our planet in a condition where life as a whole can flourish. He believes that the central concern of sustainability is to nurture and design environments, conditions, cultures and behaviours for regeneration – in which living and non living things can be restored if they are damaged, and grow, develop and flourish(2). 

Human creativity is itself generative – by imagining, combining and integrating ideas, and acting on these ideas we bring new ideas, things and ways of being into existence and create new value and meaning. Human creativity and inventiveness is at the heart of the idea of regenerative environments and cultures which can apply at all scales from what we do as individuals to influence the world around us to the way whole organisations, cities or societies behave. But there is also a downside to human creativity as it may lead to inventions, social behaviours and ways of being that have a detrimental impact on our environment.

​The Ecological Mindset: relatedness, connectivity and interdependence, appreciation of consequences
 
As Tom Chalkley’s brilliant cartoon depicts, humans have always had to deal with sustainability issues in their environment and their existence depended on developing the ecologicl wisdom to survive: wisdom that became cultural knowledge within communities. Through their experience of the world and their experiments with it our hunter gatherer ancestors learned to recognise the relationships, connectivities and interdependencies of the living and non-living things in their environment and the consequences of their interventions on these relationships. 

The ecological mindset is fundamental to living a life that contributes to sustainable futures yet some commentators believe that most people have little awareness of the environmental, social and economic consequences of the decisions they make about such basic things as what they eat, what they wear and how they travel.“The fundamental reason why we’ve managed to construct the most highly unsustainable culture the Earth has ever seen is precisely because we have not been taught to see the connections.”(3) Seeing and understanding the complex webs of relationships and connections requires all of our cognitive capacity. It involves the productive integration of our perception, our reasoning and our imagination.
 
As Hans d’Orville, a sustainability advisor to the UN, explains we cannot hope to solve the multitude of sustainability problems without human imagination, creativity, ingenuity and resourcefulness. “The world must resort to the ultimate renewable resource: human ingenuity and creativity. Creativity is at the heart of sustainability, rooted in sustainable social, economic, environmental and cultural practices. It is a special kind of renewable resource and human talent.” (4)

According to Zammit-Lucia our failure to address environmental issues is not a failure of information but a failure of imagination. But imagination cannot thrive in a culture that privileges the rational and analytical to the exclusion of all else. In sustainability we need to create a capability to allow emotional experiences to unleash the imagination, stimulate creative processes and break us out of incremental extrapolation.”(5).
​
Imagination and commitment are both affective not cognitive processes. They require emotional engagement to work. A culture that encourages regeneration in all its forms must also encourage and value imagination and creativity that are both engaged by emotion and generate emotional responses. Human creativity and ingenuity is the heart of a regenerative culture which can apply at all scales from what we do as individuals to influence the world around us to the way whole organisations, cities or societies behave. In this way imagination and creativity for regenerative futures emerges everyday in individuals’ ‘lifeworlds’.
 
For all these reasons Creative Academic has a responsibility to facilitate conversations and inquiries for anyone who is interested and concerned to contribute to a regenerative future.

 Sources
1 UN General Assembly (2015) Resolution 70/1. Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Available at: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_70_1_E.pdf
2 Wahl, D.C. (2016) Designing Regenerative Cultures. Triarchy Press
3 Mog, J. (2015) The Myth of "Environmental Sustainability" TEDxUofL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqBMg__fRm8
4 d’Orville, H. (2019) The Relationship between Sustainability and Creativity CADMUS Volume 4 - Issue 1, October 2019 p65-73
5 Zammit-Lucia, J. (2013) The art of sustainability: imagination, not spreadsheets will create change. Guardian Fri 24 May 2013 Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/art-sustainability-imagination-create-change


​Norman Jackson is the Founder of Creative Academic

One of the challenges to understanding creativity is to comprehend it as a phenomenon that embraces the acts of individuals that have significance and meaning only to them, and the acts of creative giants who quite literally change the way we see and experience the world at a cultural or cross-cultural level. I believe that we will only progress our understanding if we can develop a perspective on creativity that accommodates and integrates both world views.
 
These different ways of thinking about creativity are captured in the thinking and writings of 1) Carl Rogers who approaches creativity from a humanist, person- and individual- centred therapeutic perspective and 2) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who approaches creativity through the lens of individuals acting in systems and cultures. Kristen Bettencourt (3) neatly captures the philosophies of these thinkers and these notes are taken from her article.
 
Rogers (1) defines the creative process as “the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, people, or circumstances on the other” (p. 251). Rogers points out, “the very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it” (p.252). Rogers leaves room in the definition of creativity for the creator to define whether the expression is indeed novel, going as far to say that anyone other than the creator cannot be a valid or accurate judge. This is in contrast to Csikszentmihalyi’s emphasis on the creative expression serving to transform the culture or the domain.
 
Csikszentmihalyi (2) “creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than individual phenomenon” (2 p.23). Csikszentmihalyi tells us “To be human means to be creative,” he defines creativity as “to bring into existence something genuinely new that is valued enough to be added to the culture” (2 p.25), and “any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one” (2 p.28). The word “creative” is given to expression seen as novel in relation to the surrounding culture, domain, or community, and that is novel enough to create change within that culture, domain, or community.
 
It seems to me that we have to accept both of these ways of thinking about creativity and work with both constructs when trying to make sense of it. In other words we are not dealing with either/or but both of these ways of thinking and we have to be able to accommodate both Rogerian and Csikszentmihalyian philosophies into our sense making in the manner depicted in Figure 1. This figure provides a graphical representation of the 4C model of creativity (4) and then adapts the model to include and educational domain (5).

​Another issue with creativity is the way we define it using terms like novelty and originality. The two are often used interchangeably but again we might use them in a more subtle way to locate creativity within these different ways of thinking about creativity. Using the 5C framework (Figure 2) we can show that in the little-c and ed-c part of the continuum are concerned with novelty and value that are defined and understood by individuals, or individuals and their immediate contacts – like family, friends teachers and peers. The appropriate concept of novelty in this context is the quality of being different, new, and unusual it is not the quality of being unique or original. As Carly Lassig (6) discovered in her grounded theory study of the creativity of adolescents, novelty is about behaving, performing and producing outside what is the accepted norm.
 
As we move along the continuum into the realm of expertise, for example in a work domain, novelty is often seen in the context of product innovation – the production of useful products that are, in some way, different to what existed before. Mostly these are incremental changes to things that already exists but sometimes they are original to a market. But novelty in the domain of expertise is also relevant to the production of new practices, performances, processes – for example bringing about change in an organisation. Novelty in this environment might occasionally be original at not only the level of individuals, but also organisations, markets or domains.
 
The most creative novel acts (Big-c) result in changes that affect one or more cultural domains and they are widely recognised for their originality by people who are highly knowledgeable and expert in their field.
 
Using this sort of reasoning I believe we can make better sense of creativity as a phenomenon by embracing this continuum of possibility.
 
Sources
1) Rogers, C. (1954). Toward a Theory of Creativity. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 11, 249-260.
2) Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins.
3) Bettencourt, K (2014) Rogers and Csikszentmihalyi on Creativity The Person Centered Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1-2, 2014 https://www.adpca.org/.../Bettencourt,%20Kristen%20(2014)%20
4) Kaufman, J and Behgetto R (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity Review of General Psychology Vol. 13, No. 1, 1–12
Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/.../228345133_Beyond_Big_and...
5) Jackson, N.J. and Lassig, C. (2020) Exploring and Extending the 4C Model of Creativity: Recognising the value of an ed-c contextual domain. Creative Academic Magazine CAM15 https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
6) Lassig, C. J. (2012) Perceiving and pursuing novelty : a grounded theory of adolescent creativity. PhD thesis, Queensland University of
Technology. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/50661/

All journeys begin with one step but we began our journey with 7. The first was to commit to an open public discussion aimed at giving meaning and substance to the idea. The second was to gather together a small band of people who cared enough about the idea to try to turn it into a reality. The third was to create some questions and some information resources1 to engage people and encourage discussion. The fourth was to encourage more people to join the discussion and the co-created conversation is preserved on the #creativeHE facebook page2 and curated in CAM#13A.
 
Four weeks into our conversation we reached the fifth step. We invited participants to create their own manifestos to share the values, beliefs, propositions and principles that underlie their own creative practices and ways of seeing creativity in their own lives. Over two weeks we received over 20 personal manifestos, mostly published in the facebook forum but others published in more adventurous ways (e.g. slowly on twitter). We promised to curate these in the magazine and this issue honours that promise.
The sixth and most challenging step was to create and discuss an overarching manifesto. Obviously there are many ways of constructing a manifesto but Paul Kleiman stepped in to provide a solution. His rhapsodic manifesto written in verse and inspired us to invite Paul to be the architect of the overall manifesto and he undertook to draw from the personal manifestos important and meaningful ideas which he crafted into new verses. At the start of World Creativity and Innovation Week we published our draft manifesto in this magazine,( the production of which was our seventh step), recognising that it can only ever be provisional and we continue to discuss the myriad of ideas and meanings it contains.

I took the liberty of tinkering with the illustration to make it even more meaningful for our purpose and I know Patrick would have approved. This cartoon says it all. A manifesto is about having the confidence to stand up for what you believe and using your beliefs to drive forward actions that carry you towards realizing your ideals. In a very real sense those who believe in this manifesto are doing battle with a corporate world that values efficiency and profit over the fundamental purpose of education.
 
Emerging from our conversations was the transformative idea that higher education needs a concept of imagination and creativity that puts it at the very heart of students’ learning experiences and the moral purpose of education. It seemed to many of us involved in the conversation that ‘Transformation’ NOT ‘Originality’ is the core concept for a definition of creativity that education can appropriate for itself. After watching a TEDx talk by Greg Bennick4 I extended the definition he used and offer it as a starting point for discussion.
         
“creativity is the process through which we take elements of [ourselves and] the world around us and transform them into something new that reflects what we want what we need what we can imagine [and in that process we transform ourselves]”
 
Having taken our initial steps, our hope is that many more steps will be taken, not just by those contributing to the discussion, but by everyone who is inspired to do more. Our discursive process remains open as does our invitation to contribute your personal manifesto to our community forums on facebook2 and linked in3.
 
You can download our manifesto at:
http://www.creativeacademic.uk/manifesto.html
 
Norman Jackson
Commissioning Editor & Discussion Leader
 
Links
1 http://www.creativeacademic.uk/manifesto.html
2 https://www.facebook.com/groups/creativeHE/
3 https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8755256/
4 Greg Bennick TEDx talk Creativity and Transformation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnchjo8J8fg
 

​‘What makes the world go around?’  There are many possible answers to this question but one of the most meaningful is ‘imagination’. All the great thinkers understand this. Another possible answer is ‘collaboration’ – when people come together to share imaginations and do something with them there is an energy, a motivational force that connects efforts and contributions so that the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Both these ideas and forces were brought together in the recent edition of Creative Academic Magazine which I had the great privilege of guest editing. Through it I was able to connect in a productive collaboration thinkers and practitioners in the Creative Academic and Imaginative Education communities to produce an inspiring collection of articles which explore imagination in learning, education and practice.

Imaginative Education, or IE, is not just an approach to teaching, it’s also a theory of human understanding through which we can, as educators, reshape and develop our practices. Although you might not be familiar with IE, it certainly isn’t “new”. In fact, it’s been articulated in many books and well over a thousand articles. It’s been studied in universities around the world for over thirty years and it’s been driving the work of scholars in the Imaginative Education Research Group since 2001. 

IE is an educational philosophy and practice that centralises imaginative and emotional engagement in teaching at all levels of education. Imaginative educators think about teaching through different lenses. They are centrally concerned with “cognitive tools” and “kinds of understandings”. Imaginative educators tap into the unique features of their students’ emotional and imaginative lives.
 
Emotion Matters
 
Emotion Imagination Feeling: these words rarely take centre stage in conversations about teaching and learning in higher education.  The odd thing is that I have never met an educator that doesn’t value emotional and imaginative engagement. All educators want students to be engaged. All educators want their students to be imaginative, to experience and demonstrate creative and flexible understanding of knowledge. But we rarely discuss how we achieve it in our practices. It’s a sad fact that there is far more talk of “imagination” in the context of educating our younger learners than in Higher Education. Through this edition of Creative Academic Magazine we want to encourage more discussion about imagination in higher education teaching and learning and share some of the ideas and work we have been doing through IE.
 
Cognitive tools
 
All educators want students to remember what they are learning so that curriculum content has an impact on their lives outside school, college or university. “Cognitive tools” are the means through which we can tie up knowledge with students’ emotions and imaginations and, in this way, make the knowledge memorable1. We all make meaning by employing cognitive tools; when we purposefully use these tools to shape our teaching, imaginative education helps learners to use their knowledge to create meaning that is more memorable.
 
People of all ages frequently and routinely think about the world in ways that evoke their emotions and imaginations. For example, human beings universally enjoy stories or narratives of all kinds. We all enjoy jokes and humor. We all identify and interpret patterns in the world around us and are able to spot new patterns as they emerge in our lives. We can be fascinated by extremes of experience and limits of reality--the stuff in the Guinness Book of World Records or amazing and sometimes dangerous feats recorded on Youtube.

​We may associate with heroes and may (quietly—or not-so-quietly) idolize people, ideas, or institutions. Words cause images to arise in all of our minds. We all enjoy a good mystery and can be left awestruck by unanswered questions or strange events. In the context of Higher Education particularly, we enjoy abstract ideas and theories that represent them. I could go on and on; our emotional and imaginative lives (including learners) manifest themselves in many varied ways. These different forms of engagement are not insignificant; they are actually ways of thinking that help human beings learn. Dr. Kieran Egan calls these features of our imaginative lives "cognitive tools" they are emotional ways human beings make meaning in the world. The crux of the matter is you can nurture the heart of learning—engaging emotion with your curriculum content—if you know what cognitive tools your students employ and if you can use them in your teaching.
​
You can find out more about what these tools are and how they are used by reading Creative Academic Magazine CAM11A which is free to download from the magazine page.

Gillian Judson
http://ierg.ca/gillianjudson/

​One of the great mediators of my thinking about personal creativity (and now making) is Carl Rogers concept of the creative process - ‘the emergence in action of a novel relational product growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, or circumstances of their life’. It captures in a neat and concise way my experiences of making and how creativity features in it. ​In the light of our open conversation I can play with these ideas and relate them to’ making’. For example, making is ‘a process of imagining and connecting and combining particular things to create a relational product grown out of my uniqueness as an individual on the one hand, and the circumstances and materials of their life’.

In reading the narratives of making I am struck by the relationship between the complexity of something that is being made and the complexity of the process through which making occurs. For example, +Simon Rae shared a lovely story of sitting in a church and sketching what he saw and felt. He describes a particular set of circumstances and materials and an act that is contained within a short period of time in an environment that is more or less stable. No one interferes with his sketching and his product emerges quickly.

On the other hand, contrast this situation with +Jennifer Willis' description of trying to work collaboratively with her students to make a promotional leaflet for their school – a narrative that is still unfolding more than three weeks after she started as cirumstances changed to disrupt her plans. Complexity cannot be controlled it must be worked with, responded and adapted to. When more than one person is involved in making we bring into the process multiple uniquenesses, multiple circumstances, materials and events in multiple lives and these become involved and entangled in a merry dance that move backwards and forwards towards a shared goal.

​Higher education students are continually told that employers value creativity yet higher education seems to do little to encourage them to use their creativity. Furthermore, within our culture we are reluctant to talk about our own creativity. This is partly because it is considered inappropriate to publicly broadcast our own achievements and practices, and partly because we don't have the words to describe it in a meaningful way. Which is why people like Steve Jobs have helped by explaining creativity in simple down to earth language. "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."  
 


If we want a more creative world there is a job to be done in encouraging people to share their own stories about being creative and what creativity means to them in their own everyday practices and circumstances.  All too often in education we talk about creativity in a way that is not contextualized or situated in time, or a place, a circumstance, a culture, a problem or an opportunity that someone – a particular person, cares enough about to want to put effort and imagination into doing something that brings something into existence. But for creativity to have value beyond an individual: it must be relevant to others and a particular context or purpose.

​Drawing on Carl Rogers’ ecological concept of creativity namely, ‘the emergence in action of a novel relational product growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, or circumstances of their life(1), we might visualize how creativity emerges from the ecologies of practice people create in environments that are not structured specifically for learning – like work (2,3).
 
By ‘practice’ we mean ‘action rather than thought or ideas’(4), ‘the application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it for example, the practice of teaching’(5). By ecology of practice, we mean the set of relationships and interactions a person creates in their environment and all the people, material and virtual things in their environment, in order to achieve a goal or fulfil a purpose (summarized in Figure 1). Through these personal stories we want to explore how creativity featured, or might feature, in a particular ecology of practice.
 
Figure 1 Learning ecology framework we are developing and evaluating

​To practice as a teacher, or perform any other complex role, involves a commitment to developing the skills, behaviours and ways of thinking that are necessary to fulfil the role in an effective, professional and creative manner. It is necessary to practice these ways of being ‘to perform (an activity) or exercise (a skill) repeatedly or regularly in order to acquire, improve or maintain proficiency in it.’(5) Another aspect of our project is to explore how practitioners develop themselves through practical experience, education and training to be able to practice in effective and creative ways. In this way we might connect the practices of teachers in higher education to the practices of practitioners in the world beyond formal education.

OPEN INVITATION
 
We want to encourage people to share their stories about how they use their creativity in their own work-related practice, or any other contexts where they regularly engage in practice eg pursuing a hobby or interest. Contributions will be shared through Creative Academic Magazine (CAM9) which will be published 4 times while the project runs between December 2017- December 2018
 
If you are interested in creating a similar written narrative or providing an oral narrative which can be transcribed, please contact the project leader Professor Norman Jackson normanjjackson@btinternet.com.
 
To join this open collaborative project please visit
http://www.creativeacademic.uk/creativity-in-practice.html
 
Sources
1  Rogers, C.R., (1960) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 
2 Jackson N J (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies Chalk Mountain / Lulu
3 Jackson, N. J. and Willis, J. (eds) Exploring Creative Ecologies Creative Academic Magazine Issue #5 September 2016 Available at http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
4 Cambridge Dictionary available at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/practice
5 Oxford Dictionary available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/practise