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Teaching, Creativity and the Pandemic

1/24/2022

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Necessity is often cited as the mother of invention and the pandemic certainly created new necessities, requiring teachers to use their imaginations and creativity to invent new practices to meet the needs of their learners and fulfil their own intrinsic needs to be a creative human being. 

Imagination and creativity are at the heart of the generative capacity of humans and we must be expansive in our vision of what our imagination and creativity are for. We should recognise that what teachers are doing to encourage the creative development of learners, and each other, is also helping to build capacity and potential for a more sustainable regenerative future. After all, it is the current generation of higher education learners that will have to repair the world that previous generations have messed up!

So its great that teachers are willing to share their stories about how they are encouraging creativity in themselves and their students and in the latest issue of Creative Academic Magazine we include ten stories of creative teaching and learning selected from the “Annual #creativeHE Collection” e-book7 edited by Nathalie Tasler, Rachelle O’Brien and Alex Spiers. The editors have done a wonderful job in stimulating interest in the #creativeHE academic community, drawing together 30 diverse contributions from 60 authors, educators and students, from the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Nigeria, Canada, Italy and Germany. Their contributions capture creative and resourceful practices during the pandemic that show the authors’ determination to create stimulating environments for learning in spite of the restrictions brought about by the pandemic.
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The issue also includes an interesting article by Hansika Kapoor and James Kaufman, who explore creativity in the pandemic using the interpretive framework based on the Four C model of creativity8 . This enables us to appreciate the bigger social, environmental and cultural dynamic within which higher education teachers make their own distinctive professional contributions. And not to miss an opportunity, I have once again called for an educational (ed-c) domain within which the important role of education in encouraging and facilitating the creative development of people, can be recognised. 

READ  CAM 20 

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Is ‘Sustainability’ the New High Stakes Context & Challenge for Personal Creativity?

9/15/2021

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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?
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The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

(1) No Poverty, (2) Zero Hunger, (3) Good Health and Well-being, (4) Quality Education, (5) Gender Equality, (6) Clean Water and Sanitation, (7) Affordable and Clean Energy, (8) Decent Work and Economic Growth, (9) Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, (10) Reducing Inequality, (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities, (12) Responsible Consumption and Production, (13) Climate Action, (14) Life Below Water, (15) Life On Land, (16) Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, (17) Partnerships for the [Sustainable Development] Goals.
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. 
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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).
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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.
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 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


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Norman Jackson is the Founder of Creative Academic
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​Making Better Sense of Creativity

11/16/2020

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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).

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​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/

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Exploring and Celebrating Creative Self-Expression

5/27/2020

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This is the time of the Covid 19 pandemic when all the world is turned upside down. For many people who have endured lock down and been isolated from the everyday world they know, it has felt strange indeed. This was the context for our latest foray into the meanings of creativity – on this occasion into the idea of creative self-expression.(1a & b) As I write these words, which are clearly an expression of me and my thoughts for an audience of unknown readers, it seems obvious as to what it means to express oneself creatively, but dig a little deeper and what emerges is infinitely more interesting.
 
A few months ago just before the pandemic struck, I went on holiday with my wife to NW Scotland. I was bowled over by the landscapes and literally sat down amongst the rocks and made some towers by stacking several stones on top of each other. This spontaneous act of self-expression was driven by an impulse that was motivated by how I was feeling in the beautiful land and seascapes I was experiencing. It led me to understand the idea of creative self-expression as the ways and means by which I with my many selves, thoughts and feelings relate and connect myself to the world that has meaning to me to make something that is both a part of me and a part of my world.(2) It is through this relational, enactive and embodied dynamic that the phenomenon of creativity emerges in the  manner so eloquently described by Carl Rogers “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 of his life on the other."(3)
 
My rock towers were for me a novel relational product growing out of my uniqueness as a person (my history as a geologist being an important element) interacting with the materials that were ready to hand in the circumstances of my life. Echoing the words of another of my heroes, John Dewey:

“When we experience something, we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return.” (4 p46). My story shows me that I encountered an environment (the world that had meaning to me) and it engaged me emotionally and motivated me to do something to it (stack some stones) and the process of doing that something and thinking about what I had done, changed me. These ecological ideas are reflected in my concept of creative self-expression.

During April and May Creative Academic facilitated a conversation on the theme of creative self-expression on the #creativeHE facebook forum. One the contributors Carly Lassig shared her threefold categorisation of creativity in adolescents’ creativity based on her doctoral research(5, 6). This way of viewing creativity triggered new insights for me into the way we might view creativity not just in schools but in other domains of life.

Carly’s threefold categorisation of creativity offers a crude first order mapping of learner practices and responses within our education system Figure 1. If it was be possible to map particular contexts, practices and outcomes accurately we might anticipate that most situations in education where creativity is manifest, would plot within the conceptual space near the base of the triangle with creative self-expression tending to characterise early years and primary level of the education      system and the arts and perhaps humanities disciplines at secondary and tertiary level.

At secondary and tertiary levels of our education systems creative effort is more likely to be focused on problem solving in disciplinary contexts or interdisciplinary themes perhaps with some opportunity for creative self-expression. Creative effort in research-based post-graduate education and perhaps research-based project work at undergraduate level is directed towards task accomplishment and extending the boundaries of knowledge fields. Again, both of these contexts may well be accompanied by some opportunities for creative self-expression.
 
So is Ken Robinson in his much watched TED Talk (7) ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ wrong in the assertions he makes? Is it not the case that taking our education systems as a whole, they are encouraging creativity and the application of creative effort in different ways?
 
In doing some background research for this post I discovered an interesting TEDx talk by Tim Leunig “Why real creativity is based on knowledge” (8). It offers a different and I believe a more considered and accurate representation of creativity in schools to that offered by Ken Robinson. This passage in an RSA blog post about the two talks captures this more accurate proposition.
 
“What is striking about the two talks is how different are the definitions of creativity on which they are based. To Robinson, creativity is about imagination, self-expression and divergent thinking. In contrast, Leunig’s examples of creativity show how, through the use of logic and the application of scientific principles, existing knowledge can be marshalled to create innovative new solutions to longstanding problems. To Robinson, creativity is natural – something you’re born with. Whereas for Leunig, it is highly dependent on the prior acquisition of biologically secondary knowledge – something you need to be taught. For Robinson, creativity is an alternative to literacy, and is often displayed by those who struggle academically; people who display what Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner would describes as an alternative or non-cognitive form of intelligence. For Leunig, creativity is a cognitive competence that gains form and substance within particular knowledge domains – domains to which the illiterate cannot gain access.”(9)
 
Looking at the systems level of education (not the experiences of individual learners), it is my belief that, although we might criticise our systems of education for placing too much emphasis on focusing creative effort on externally motivated tasks and assessment exercises at the expense of creative self-expression, this is not surprising given that this type of creativity serves the knowledge economy rather than health and wellbeing of individuals. I now see more clearly that the creative effort within our educational systems is biased towards preparing people for disciplined ways of working in the Pro-c (10) domain of creativity. This is why, I argued with Carly Lassig in a recent Creative Academic Magazine article (11), that we need to recognise an ed-c domain for creativity.

Creative Academic Magazine #16
Exploring and Celebrating Creative Self-Expression

Creative Academic Magazine #17
Exploring and Celebrating Creative Self-Expression #creativeHE Discussion


Are free to download from our magazine page. 
​https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html


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Sources
1 Exploring and Celebrating Creative Self-Expression Creative Academic Magazine #16 Available at: https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
2 Evolving Opportunities For Creative Self-Expression: New Tools For Evaluating Acts of Creativity Creative Academic Magazine #16 p 46-54  Available at: https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
3 Rogers, C. (1960) On Becoming a Person. London: Constable
4 Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin.
5 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/
6 Lassig, C. (2020) A typology of student creativity: creative personal expression, boundary pushing and task achievement Thinking Skills and Creativity 36, 1-13
7 Ken Robinson Do Schools Kill Creativity TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&t=28s
8 Tim Leunig “Why real creativity is based on knowledge https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=93&v=vajIsWwHEMc&feature=emb_logo
9 Julian Astle Do Skills Really “Kill Creativity”? RSA Blog Post 25th April 2018
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/04/do-schools-kill-creativity
10 Kaufman, J and Beghetto R (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity Review of General Psychology Vol. 13, No. 1, 1–12 1
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228345133_Beyond_Big_and_Little_The_Four_C_Model_of_Creativity
11 Jackson N.J. & Lassig, C. (2020) Exploring and Extending the 4C Model of Creativity: Recognising the value of an ed-c contextual- cultural domain Creative Academic Magazine #15 Available at:
     https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
12 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/
 

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Steps to a manifesto for creativity in higher education

4/17/2019

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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.

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In choosing an image for the cover of this issue I remembered a cartoon that the illustrator Patrick Sanders had drawn for me over a decade ago. Sadly, Patrick died in 2017 at the very early age of 41. But his spirit lives on in the memories we have of being with him and in his body of work. So a decade after he used his imagination and creativity to create this cartoon it seems entirely appropriate to place it alongside our collection of personal manifestos. I’m sure he would say that this would be his own manifesto for encouraging higher education to do more to encourage and enable students to use their imagination and creativity.

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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
 
Creative Academic Magazine #13 A & B contains the dscussion papers, summaries of discussions. personal manifestos and the overarching manifesto
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​You can download it here
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Imagine education that cultivates imagination

5/15/2018

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​‘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.

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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. 

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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.

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​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.
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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/

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Our imaginative conversation

5/15/2018

75 Comments

 
Moderating the #CreativeHE conversation on 'Using and Cultivating Imagination' (May 2018) was a great experience. I feel such respect and admiration for the incredible professionalism, pedagogy, and scholarship of the people in the Creative Academic network who participated. You know you have found “your people”—a professional learning network in which you feel you fit best—when the “crazy” ideas you propose and enact in your practice seem not only acceptable but valuable to these people! This was the kind of week I had—learning that leaves me with new directions in which to expand my imaginative practice, and a confirmation that my imaginative pedagogy is valuable to others as well as myself.
 
Interdisciplinary conversations are a joy to be a part of. The varied role of the imagination in human life and the intentional way it is used by professionals were connective threads in the conversation. Whether a Linguist, Geologist, Scientist, Theatre /Performance/ Visual Art professor, or parent or grandparent, imaginative engagement offers a space for growth, satisfaction, freedom and joy. Thanks to the generosity of participants I now possess a (digital) file stuffed with enticing articles, videos and projects to explore. (Nice image isn’t it? For those of us who lived in the days of real filing cabinets and cardboard files, that metaphor of a bulging file, papers sticking out here and there, totally unruly, will create a powerful image in your mind. Whether intriguing or overwhelming—that stuffed folder is full of possibility.)

Our conversation coincided with World Creativity and Innovation Week and this was one of our contributions to this annual global event. 
The first question we asked in our conversation was about what imagination means to each of us. I wasn’t the only one who found this a novel question—despite devoting most of my professional hours to teaching about the role of imagination, its pedagogical importance, and how to engage it in learning, I hadn’t recently reflected on (and definitely not shared) what it means in my life day to day. I appreciated hearing about the highly practical ways in which imagination contributes to everyone’s lives. I was introduced to the term “pragmatic imagination”—thanks Norman. From DIY projects to care-giving (parents listen up!), the great gift that is the capacity to imagine enables us. I appreciated hearing from participants that they need to feed or fuel or ignite or exercise (choose your metaphor!) their imaginations. The imagination emerged as an active part of life for all people—not just the artists of the world. At the same time, you can read that by feeding the imagination, we come to acknowledge its role more fully. The people we talk to, the movies we watch, podcasts we listen to, the books we read, and the places we experience with “affective alertness”, can feed the imagination. (Lunchtime here in Canada’s Surrey, Guildford!) 
 
The Imagination Challenge we posed was particularly interesting to me. The idea of “getting outside” conventions of schooling is a central part of Imaginative Education—as you will read in this volume. But more than metaphorically, I am interested and currently researching how physically getting outside with imagination-focused practices can support learning of the curriculum for all ages. The Walking Curriculum I recently published focuses on the PreK through Grade 12 level. (Note: Physical movement is not essential to the Walking Curriculum—despite the name. The key dimension is the way we are encouraged to learn from the Places we live/learn in ways that support our understanding of curriculum content. Key, too, is getting outside. People of all levels/kinds of mobility can participate.) So, the responses shared for this challenge allowed me to extend my learning into the context of Higher Education.
 
I think one of the reasons that a Walking Curriculum is being received so well by educators, is that metaphorically, it allows and enables us to do what many of us want to do. And that is “get outside” the norms and routines of school. Another layer: the outdoors—even in urban areas—does inspire. My own work on the Imagination Challenge came from a place of no real idea how to teach a concept outside (the story vs story-form) to feeling like I had come up with something pedagogically valuable. (I have shared the idea with some ex-students—the consensus is overwhelmingly positive that this experiential imaginative task would help teach that concept.) So, there is an appreciation among most educators for the “change of venue” getting outside allows. For that reason alone it is an enjoyable activity!
 
Ideally, though, there are particular learning outcomes in our Higher Education courses that can be learned more powerfully and evocatively through experience, through participation in the world. This is what I am most interested in and, to understand this better, I hope to continue the conversation around outdoor, Place-based practices in Higher Education. I realize that what participants chose to share this week was likely selected because it was not so subject-specific that readers couldn’t follow. So, examples may have been more “general” than, say, what could have been shared in a conversation uniquely among Physicists or Architects.
 
Five take-away’s: First, the imagination contributes to all aspects of life—professional (interdisciplinary!), personal, social. In the realm of education I always return to Vygotsky’s quote (below) because in my work I feel at times like I’m swimming upstream—working to convince fellow educators that the imagination is important for learning in all subject areas and grade levels, not just the arts. Imagination isn’t “just for kids”. Imagination matters. Second, imagination is a capacity we all have and the more we work to develop and engage it, the more it can impact us. Third, taking the time to intentionally engage and develop imagination—this week was a week of much what iff’ing for me—pays off not only for ourselves and what we can do with our imagination, but by contributing to a (social/professional) culture in which imagination is given the credit it is due. Four, we can show those around us that we value imagination by giving our colleagues/students actual and ideational space and time to practice using their imaginations, too. And five, imagination is a source of personal and intellectual freedom that makes this wonder-filled world we live in richer and fuller. There’s a joy in it. Especially when you can learn and grow with “your people”- people who care about and appreciate the things that you care about.
 
Citation
Egan, K. (1992). Imagination In Teaching And Learning: The Middle School Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
75 Comments

Creativity in the Making

3/25/2018

66 Comments

 
One of the great things about semi-structured online discussions is that they encourage you to engage in a fairly systematic way with an idea or phenomenon. In the March 2018 #creativeveHE conversation we focused on the concept and phenomenon of making artefacts.

While I have thought a lot about creativity, I had never really sat down and systematically thought about making before so it felt like new territory to explore. Over the first week we engaged with ideas like making is connecting things, that it can be viewed as a project and/or as growth in which we change and ‘undergo’ as we make, that we can view it as a process through which new forms are created in materials and that the materials themselves shape the way we think, that making involves us in a type of knowing that can only come through making, that making is an ecological phenomenon involving relationships and interactions not just with the materials we are working with, but with ourselves, our past and our environment, that imagination plays a role in both a reproductive and a generative sense. We are now at the end of this conversation and I feel I have learnt much through the different perspectives that have been shared by over 20 participants.
​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.
Early in the conversation I posted a story about my brother in law who makes and decorates with a design or symbolic picture, a bowl of porridge everyday and posts a photo of it on Instagram and facebook, giving pleasure to many people in the process. This prompted one of the participants to draw attention to the idea that we use our everyday creativity to make gifts that we give willingly to others.
The gifts we give through our open, on-line conversations, are the type of gifts that don’t leave us with less of what we had before we gave the gift, rather they give us pleasure as others appreciate and comment on what we have shared. Furthermore, what we make and share may inspire further acts of creativity and making. In giving we form a bridge between our own mind and world to the minds and world of others. In this way a gift can have a cascading effect and unknown consequences as its effects ripple through the world.
​

This is what underlies the spirit and culture of open learning and open education to which this conversation is dedicated. The conversation and the images and stories of the things we made and shared is a gift to anyone who takes the trouble to view our Google+ forum or the YouTube movie below, or in good time – the issue of Creative Academic Magazine we will make.

​Norman Jackson


YOUTUBE VIDEO OF OUR CREATIONS
66 Comments

Creativity in Practice

11/20/2017

42 Comments

 
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​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.

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​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
42 Comments

Ecology of embodiment

5/6/2017

68 Comments

 
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Over the last few years I have come to realise that personal creativity is a matter of connection and integration: of connecting and integrating perception, imagination and reasoning to connect and integrate existing ideas to produce new thoughts, and of connecting and integrating thinking and action, mind and body.
 
The questions posed in the #creativeHE on-line discussion on the role of the body in creative processes and practices, encouraged me to consider something that I had previously often taken for granted - the role of my own body in my own processes for learning that also enable me to use my creativity to create new 'things'.

As the conversation unfolded I surprised myself by focusing on the early part of my career when I trained and then practised as a geologist. Being a field geologist involves quite a lot of physical effort and labour as the body is used to physically interact with the landscape and the rocks in it, or in the case of a mining geologist, interacting with the rocks and structures deep underground so perhaps this made it easier for me to visualise how a body might be involved in a creative process in a disciplinary context. In the attached article I examine the role of the body in a creative learning process using the example of a field geologist.

The next issue of Creative Academic Magazine (early June) will explore the role of the body in creative processes and practices. We welcome further contributions to the issue particularly if they show how someone in a particular disciplinary field uses their body. If you would like to write an article please get in touch.  
​
Norman Jackson Commissioning Editor
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