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.(1) 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 is free to download from our magazine page. 
​https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

​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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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

Lifewide Education and Creative Academic are exploring the idea of learning ecologies and we have shared initial ideas in a book 'Exploring Learning Ecologies'. In the book I touch on the idea that ecologies for learning development and achievement are also the vehicles for our creativity. Creativity is not separate from the things we want to achieve and from the ongoing development of ourselves as the person we want to become. Chrissi Nerantzi and I had the idea of forming a conversation around the idea of creative ecologies on the #creativeHE platform so for 7 days in early July about 20 people came together in the #creativeHE space to share their thoughts. https://plus.google.com/communities/110898703741307769041

​It was an interesting thought provoking conversation. Much of it was about exploring perceptions of creativity rather than the idea of creative ecologies. This was necessary in order to try to create a foundation of shared perceptions on which to base discussion. We all take away different things from a conversation - which is another way of saying that our unique complexity sees different value in the meanings that are shared. I will just pull out a few perspectives that caused me to progress my own understanding.

The struggles to comprehend and create meaning was one of the most creative aspects of the conversation  and there were many illustrations of what a creative ecology might mean.  They are all valid if the person who invented them feels that it embodies and represents their creative experiences and self-expression.  This open sharing of personally constructed meanings is a sign of a healthy conversation. But it takes confidence and courage to publicly share ideas, thoughts and feelings, and the meanings you have created in the #creativeHE space and I suspect that many participants monitor the conversation but do not post because of this. I hope through our consistent behaviour in the #creativeHE conversational space we are creating a culture of encouragement, trust and respect whereby most people feel empowered to contribute. At the end of the day each individual must make their own meanings and assimilate them into their own framework of knowledge and understanding. Here are a few new perspectives I gained from the conversation

​Interstitial spaces - are not always inconsequential spaces for learning

Jonathan Purdy talked about how Different spaces afford me different things. They alter my mind set. In my garage I'm looking to use something old, often something with its own history that will live on in whatever I create with it and that I will get satisfaction from using up. In the store I'm being afforded the solutions to problems that others have designed, and I sometimes have to re-cast my problem to fit their solution. And in the drawing space - well, anything goes! Similarly Andrew Middleton also talked about spaces particularly informal and non-formal spaces and the creation of a map showing the diversity of spaces/places that a group of people attending his workshop believed they learnt.

In my representations of learning ecologies I pay attention to the big obvious spaces but not so much the little ones. The reality is our life is full of little spaces often transitional between bigger seemingly more important spaces Andrew Middleton's idea of interstitial spaces struck me as being important to an ecological perspective of learning.

Jonathan and Andrew's posts made me think of all the incidental and interstitial spaces and moments that flow through our ecologies for learning which help us connect up the dots of our imagination, critical thinking, reflective, associative  and integrative (synthetic) thinking to make the whole of what it is we are trying to do and achieve. All these seemingly insignificant spaces offer us affordance to think. In particular they offer affordances for creativity because  we may not be thinking in a conscious deliberative way about a problem or situation they provide us with affordance for the associative and synthetic types of thinking when ideas come into our head seemingly from nowhere.

So in future  I will view the interstitial spaces in my learning ecologies with more respect and ask how did these spaces contribute to my learning. In this ecology my interstitial spaces were restricted as I'm mainly around the house recovering from a knee operation, so they are mainly in my garden eg chatting to my son Navid as we cut the hedge and chatting in the kitchen over lunch. Both of these homely interstitial spaces were important in this ecology.

​Creativity and synthesis

Navid Tomlinson made an interesting point that in his view people are 'human synthesizers, we are all continuously taking little bits of information and combining them in different ways to create different outputs, outputs which can be anything from the way we conduct ourselves in conversation to books we may write or even the way we play games. Under this definition we are all being continuously creative but to differing levels of complexity.'  

Figure Humorous depiction of the way we integrate and synthesize lots of observations and information to create new understandings.

This suggests that at the heart of our learning ecology is a synthesizing process through which we create new meaning. I like the idea that our creativity reflects the fact that we all have the innate capacity to be inspired and take information in through all our senses, across all the different parts of our life, and throughout our whole life span. We are able to filter and make use of this information at particular times, either by accident or design, by connecting and combining it with other thoughts to create new thoughts and feelings that mean something to us.

I realise that I try to do this all the time and perhaps it is the main creative process for most academics. When I am interested in something I put lots of time and energy into thinking about it. I take lots of information and ideas and try to connect them to ideas and beliefs I already hold in ways that make sense to me to make a more complex understanding that I try to apply and justify. It happened with the ideas of lifewide learning and learning ecologies and my attempt to embed the idea of creativity within the affordance provided by a learning ecology is another example that we have been grappling with. Going back to my days as a geologist I engaged in synthesis all the time in my research and practice as a field geologist - making a map is a way of synthesising and presenting geological information and creating a mediating artefact. I suspect that the tendency to synthesise is programmed into us so that we can transfer the tendency from one domain or context to another.

​I think this perspective freshens and reinforces a belief I already hold about my learning ecology. At the heart of my learning ecology is the seek (information) sense (filter, process, create meaning from information), share (synthesised meanings)  model that has been developed by Harold Jarche.
(Jarch 2014). 

Irene Stella Vassilakopouou made the important point that although we may create and share the meanings we create through synthesis, 'the way we understand things doesn't [necessarily] make sense to others, so sometimes  [the results of] our creativity may frustrate the other people.' Simply sharing the meanings we have created and share does not mean that someone else will accept these meaning in the same way. I read somewhere that once you have shared a meaning with an audience you no longer control it. It becomes whatever each person in the audience feels it means and this is the likely process within our conversation and the likely outcome of the conversation. Perhaps our creativity only becomes recognised when enough people in the field accept the meanings we have created