Blog Posts

New Conversation - creative pedagogies & learning ecologies

10/7/2016

We believe in 'emergence': if you create the right conditions through which people, who care about and are interested in something, can come together - stuff will happen - ideas will emerge as people share their understandings, experiences and practices and in the process co-create new meanings. This is the belief that underpins our Creativity in Higher Education project which we have just launched.

As an independent agent in the higher education ecosystem Creative Academic argues that higher education needs to pay more attention to students' creative development as an integral component of their academic development - creative and critical thinking are complementary elements of integrative thinking and they should be treated as such in our educational designs and teaching and learning practices. Through our Creative Pedagogies & Learning Ecologies project we are trying to foster and facilitate new conversations about the importance of creativity in higher education teaching, learning and students' development and achievements. In the coming year we are trying to bring together and connect educational practitioners and researchers, educational development teams, networks, communities, universities and colleges who share this interest and concern for students' and teachers' creative development, through a partly planned / partly emergent programme of activities relating to creative pedagogies and creative learning ecologies.

In 2016 we began to develop the idea of creative ecologies and our intention is to explore and develop the idea further by linking it to creative pedagogies - the imaginative ecologies that teachers create within which students learn and are able to use and develop their creativities. In this issue of the magazine we aim to publish at least one article each month that describes an approach to teaching and learning in which the objective was to enable learners to use and develop their creativity. We also try to bring together research and surveys that cast light on the idea of creativity and what it means to the people involved in facilitating creativity or who are trying to be creative. By considering lots of different perspectives and approaches, in different disciplinary, pedagogic and institutional contexts we hope to develop our understanding of what being creative means and what sorts of practices and behaviours encourage and enable stude nts to be creative and to understand their creativity.

An important element of our programme is to create an 'emergent magazine'. By this I mean we are not finding, editing and organising all the content before the magazine is published, rather we will launch the magazine in the hope and belief that over the course of the coming year we will be able to fill it with content that is relevant and useful to the topic we are addressing MagazineCreative Pedagogies & Learning Ecologies

We believe in collaboration and cooperation and we welcome your involvement and participation in developing and creating this magazine. We believe in collegiality, openness and sharing and the knowledge we develop will be treated as open learning/ open educational resources. The ecology we are creating to explore these ideas is open to new ideas and to people and institutions who want to contribute. We are particularly keen to connect researchers to practitioners so that educational practice can be informed by evidence from research in this area. We are also keen to engage with the enormous range of learning contexts within higher education institutions in which students' are encouraged to use their creativity. If you would like to share your own thinking and practices by writing an article for the magazine please do contact me.

Norman Jackson Commissioning Editor
normanjjackson@btinternet.com
Creativity in Higher Education - Creative Pedagogies & Learning Ecologies
http://www.creativeacademic.uk/2016-17-programme.html

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Exploring the Idea of Creative Ecologies Creative Academic Magazine #5

9/18/2016

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It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention and therefore the fundamental driver of our creativity but this is not the case when we play with and pursue ideas for the sheer joy of using our imagination and intellect. In such circumstances being creative is both personal - it gives us pleasure and a sense of fulfilment as we learn and create new meaning, and social - it gives us the sense that we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves that might be useful to others and outlive us when we are no more.

My involvement in trying to understand creativity preceded and influenced the way I engaged with and developed the idea of lifewide learning out of which grew the idea of learning ecologies (Jackson 2016). As the idea of a learning ecology grew (Figure) I began to see how our creativity must be involved in the process of learning, developing and achieving. So it is not surprising that as I have journeyed with the idea of creativity over the last fifteen years, I have come increasingly to appreciate and respect the way Carl Rogers framed the idea of personal creativity (Rogers 1961).

His view of personal creativity and how it emerges from the circumstances of our life, is an ecological concept. I like it as a way of framing our creativity because it affords us the most freedom and flexibility to explore and appreciate the ways in which we and our purposes are connected to our experiences and the physical, social and psychological worlds we inhabit.

But the idea that creativity and the experience of being creative involves people acting and interacting with their world can, like so many ideas in learning and education, be seen in the ideas and writings of John Dewey (Dewey 1934). Glavenau et al (2013) provide a description of Dewey's model of human experience. 'Action starts... with an impulsion and is directed toward fulﬁlment. In order for action to constitute experience though, obstacles or constraints are needed. Faced with these challenges, the person experiences emotion and gains awareness (of self, of the aim, and path of action). Most importantly, action is structured as a continuous cycle of “doing” (actions directed at the environment) and undergoing” (taking in the reaction of the environment). Undergoing always precedes doing and, at the same time, is continued by it. It is through these interconnected processes that action can be taken forward and become a “full” experience (Glavenau et al 2013:2).

These ideas were developed by Woodman and Schoenfeldt (1990) who proposed an interactionist model of creative behavior at the individual level. This model was later developed by Woodeman et al (1993) to embrace the organisational social-cultural context. The interactionist model, is an ecological model of creativity. Creativity is viewed as the complex product of a person's or persons' behavior(s) in a given situation. The situation is characterized in terms of the contextual and social influences that either facilitate or inhibit creative accomplishment. The person is influenced by various antecedent conditions ie that immediately precede and influence thinking and action, and each person or persons has the potential to draw on all their qualities, values, dispositions and capabilities (ie everything they are, know and can do and are willing to do) to engage with the situation.

Meusburger (2009a, b) also emphasises the significance of places, environments and spatial contexts in personal creativity and draws attention to the way in which creative individuals seek out environments that enable their creativity to flourish. People who are driven to be creative seek and find favourable environments to be creative in. They also modify existing environments in ways that enable them to realise their creativity and they also create entirely new environments (eg an ecology for learning) in which they and others can be creative. They are able to see the affordance in an environment they inhabit and use it to realise their creative potential.

The interactionsist ways of looking at creativity is consistent with the ideas of 'creativity as action and of creative work as activity' (Glavenau et al 2013:1 & 11). 'In contrast to purely cognitive models, action theories of creativity start from a different epistemological premise, that of interaction and interdependence. Human action comprises and articulates both an “internal” and “external” dynamic and, within its psychological expression, it integrates cognitive, emotional, volitional, and motivational aspects. Creativity, from this stand-point, is in action as part and parcel of every act we perform6. Creativity exists on the other hand also as action whenever the attribute of being creative actually comes to deﬁne the form of expression' (Glavenau et al 2013:2). We might anticipate that there is no clear boundary separating creative work and work that is essentially not conceived, defined or presented as being creative but which results in smaller or larger acts of creativity and leads to the emergence and formation of new ideas or things. In other words there must be a continuum of activity that is essentially creative to activity that is essentially not creative. Probably a lot of the work done by people whose work is not categorized as being creative is of this type. The model of an ecology for learning, development and achievement shown in Figures 1 and 2, is an interactionist model : people interacting with their environment and the people and things in their environment.

From an educational perspective these are exciting and challenging ideas. Necessarily they must involve the teacher and her students interacting with each other, the multiplicity of knowledges they are using and their physical, virtual and psychological environments. It is more than simply pedagogy, although pedagogy is a major contributor to an ecology in which creativity can flourish. It involves the individual and collective imaginations and actions of everyone in the learning ecology.

As a first step in our exploration of these ideas, in July members of the Creative Academic community came together in a conversation on the #creativeHE platform to consider the idea of creative ecologies and co-create new meanings as ideas were combined and new understandings were gained. The September issue of Creative Academic Magazine (CAM5) is inspired by this conversation and draws much of its content from the ideas and perspectives that were shared. The next step will be to build an ecology for collaborative inquiry so that these ideas can be explored further. Further details of this project will be published in October and we welcome your involvement.

Sources
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. NewYork: Penguin.
Glaveanu V., Lubart T, Bonnardel, N., Botella, M., Biaisi, P-M.,  Desainte-Catherine M., Georgsdottir, A.,  Guillou, K.,  Kurtag,G.,  Mouchiroud, C., Storme, M., Wojtczuk, A., and Zenasni , F. (2013) Creativity as action: ﬁndings from ﬁve creative domains Frontiers in Psychology Volume 4 | Article 176 1-14 available at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00176/full
Jackson N J (2016a) Exploring Learning Ecologies http://www.lulu.com/home
Meusburger, P. (2009) Milieus of Creativity: The Role of Places, Environments and Spatial Contexts,
      in Meusburger, P., Funke, J., and Wunder, E. (eds.), Milieus of Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spatiality of Creativity. Knowledge and Space 2. Springer 97-149
Meusburger, P., Funke, J., and Wunder, E. (eds.) (2009) Introduction: The Spatiality of Creativity in Meusburger, P., Funke, J., and Wunder, E. (eds.), Milieus of Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Spatiality of Creativity. Knowledge and Space 2. Springer 1-10 available at:
Rogers, C.R., (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Woodman, R. W. and Schoenfeldt, L. F. (1990) An interactionist model of creative behaviour. J. Creat. Behav, 24, 279-290
Woodman, R.E., Sawyer J. E. and Griffin, R.W. (1993) Toward a Theory of Organizational Creativity The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 18, No. 2. (Apr., 1993), 293-321, available at:
      file:///C:/Users/norman/Documents/AAAAA/Documents%20(4)/CREATIVE%20ECOLOGY/reference%20to%20Woodmans%20interactionist%20model.pdf

Norman Jackson
Commissioning Editor Creative Academic Magazine

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Exploring Learning Ecologies #creativeHE Conversation

7/10/2016

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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

Creativity through synthesis with different levels of complexity

Navid Tomlinson argued that 'If creativity is simply creating something new then it cannot be more or less creative, creativity is an absolute'. In order to distinguish between creative acts he uses the idea of complexity. At the heart of his concept is the idea that creativity can be differentiated by the levels of complexity involved in the synthesis. [If] I have synthesised multiple sources, thought about and grappled with [multiple and]complex ideas, [I have] produced a complex product - my change in understanding. ...................It seems to be there is a direct correlation between the complexity of our ecology and the complexity of our creative products,

I would suggest that we should see complex ecologies as a method to help us produce complex creative outputs. Complexity may be reflected such things as the scale and scope of our learning ecology, the amount and level of knowledge and skill we need to develop the number and quality of relationships we need to form, the number of people who are directly involved who influence and co-create the ecology, the time scale over which the ecology is developed and its connectivity to other learning ecologies, the resources that we need to support it.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v6SpLGknfG0zRJ5KEat7LM3PFXp0FJUhBaN-u2L9Px8/edit

I thought there were a lot of interesting ideas in Navid's article so I sat down and wrote my own thoughts.

Complexity and people
We might begin by recognising that people themselves embody different levels of complexity in their personalities, behaviours, cognitive and imaginary abilities and psychologies. The social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied the lives of 91 eminent creators, what he terms “big C” creatives who changed their domains, in search of what they might have in common. He concluded If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude." (Csikszentmihalyi 1996).

By "complexity" he meant (Rivero 2015) having personalities of “contradictory extremes,” such as being both extremely smart and naïve, or traditional and rebellious, or objective and passionate. There is little middle ground. Creatively complex people are nearly impossible to “peg” as this or that. Their capacity to tap into a fuller range of what life has to offer is what allows them a broader response to life’s problems and questions, whether practical or artistic.

Complexity in situations, problems and opportunities
The human condition is to try to understand situations in order to make good decisions about how to act (or not to act). Some situations are easy to comprehend: they are familiar and we have dealt with them or something like them before and we are confident that we know what to do. Others are more difficult to understand and some are impossible to understand until we have engaged in them. Situations can be categorised according to whether the context is familiar or unfamiliar and whether the problem (challenge or opportunity) is familiar or unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity, is one aspect of complexity.

We might speculate that the increasing complexity of situations will demand increasingly complex learning ecologies to deal with them. We might also anticipate that highly complex situations and problems cannot be resolved by individuals but require teams of people working together over considerable periods of time. We might visualise different levels of complexity in social situations using the Cynefin framework developed by Snowden (Snowden 2000). There are four domains within the framework.

In the simple domain things have a simple cause and effect. Complicated situations are not single events but involve a stream of interconnected situations (many of which may be simple) linked to achieving a goal (like solving a difficult problem or bringing about a significant innovation or corporate performance). They can be difficult to understand: there cause-and-effect relationships might not be obvious but you have to put some effort into working out the relationships by gathering information about the situation and analysing it to see the patterns and look for possible explanations of what is happening. Engaging in these sorts of challenges is the way you become more expert in achieving difficult things and a lot of professional work is like this.

Complex situations are the most difficult to understand. They are not single events but involve multiple streams of variably connected situations linked to achieving a significant change in the pattern of beliefs and behaviours (culture) in a society or organisation. In such situations the cause-and-effect relationships are so intertwined that things only make sense in hindsight and sometimes well after the events have taken place. In the complex space, it’s all about the inter-connectivity of people and their evolving behaviours and patterns of participation that are being encouraged or nurtured through the actions of key agents. The results of action will be unique to the particular situation and cannot be directly repeated. In these situations relationships are not straightforward and things are unpredictable in detail.

Figure My own synthesis combining the 4C model of creativity Kaufman and Beghetto (2000) with the complexity model of Snowden (2000). An adaptive creative product of the conversation.

Levels of complexity in learning ecologies
In developing capability for dealing effectively with situations we are developing the ability to comprehend and appraise situations, and perform appropriately and effectively in situations of different levels of complexity. The idea of learning ecologies has been proposed to help explain the relationships of people to their environment / contexts /resources, their problems and perceived affordances and the pattern of interactions and outcomes, as people pursue learning and achievement goals (Jackson 2016). We might make use of the Cynefin tool to evaluate the situations, problems and opportunities our ecologies for learning and creativity are engaging with. I illustrated the idea with examples of simple, complicated and complex learning ecologies.

Kaufman and Beghetto (2000) suggest that human creativity can be categorised into'Big-C' creativity that brings about significant change in a domain; 'pro-c' creativity associated with the creative acts of experts or people who have mastered a field, including but not only people involved in professional activity; 'little-c' creativity - the everyday creative acts of individuals who are not particularly expert in a situation and 'mini-c' the novel and personally meaningful interpretation of experiences, actions and events made by individuals. I attempted my own synthesis to integrate a complexity perspective into the 4C model of creativity. We might speculate that little-c creativity involves relatively simple and complicated situations and problems pro-c creativity involves complicated and complex situations and Big-C creativity would be mainly concerned with situations and problems that are complex but would also subsume simple and complicated situations within complexity.

My new appreciation of the relationship between creativity, complexity and creative ecologies
Synthesis has been a recurrent theme in the #creativeHE conversation and my new understandings are of this nature. I like the idea that ultimately our motivation to be creative reflects both circumstances and affordances we perceive in our environment, our highly individual qualities and capabilities as a person and our intrinsic need or desire to do things for ourselves that help us become 'a newer [and better] version of oneself' (Paula Nottingham) in the manner Navid Tomlinson describes and Rogers (1961)equates with self-actualisation. I think it's this combination of a person interacting with themselves (their complexity) and their environment (affordance and complexity) that shapes the way a person's creativity emerges. It is not surprising to me that the combination of an individual's unique complexity (personality, orientations, passions and other emotions, capabilities, experiences/past history, values, beliefs and ambitions .....), perceiving an environment in which there are affordances - potential for acting in certain ways to achieve particular things, should choose to act in ways that leads to outcomes that the individual would believe were creative (in an absolute rather than qualitative way), if they held a concept of creativity that accommodated these outcomes. It does not mean that other people will perceive these outcomes as being creative as they may lack the knowledge to make a judgment and/or hold different understandings of what being creative means.

Looking back over the week I can see my own creativity in action in the way I played with and develop ideas that were shared and combined and synthesised them in real time with ideas I already owned. Once again I am reminded of two concepts of creativity that seem to explain what was happening in me as I interacted with my complex world with my unique complexities that make me who I am and who I want to become namely:

Creativity is 'the desire and ability to use imagination, insight, intellect, feeling and emotion to move an idea from one state to an alternative, previously unexplored state' (Dellas and Gaier's 1970)
'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/her life', (Rogers 1961/2004:350).

FOOTNOTE: Creative Academic Magazine #5 to be published in September will draw on the content of the July #creativeHE conversation.

Relevant sources
Csikszentmihalyi M (1996) Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by, published by
Dellas, M., & Gaier, E. L. (1970) Identification of creativity: The individual. Psychol. Bull. 73:55– 73
HarperCollins, 1996. https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality
Jackson, N J (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies Lulu publishing
Jarche, H. (2014) The Seek > Sense > Share Framework Inside Learning Technologies January 2014, Posted Monday, 10 February 22 014 http://jarche.com/2014/02/the-seek-sense-share-framework/
Kaufman, J.C., and Beghetto, R.A. (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology 13, 1, 1-12.
Rivero L (2015) Creativity’s Monsters: Making Friends with Complexity Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creative-synthesis/201502/creativity-s-monsters-making-friends-complexity
Rogers, C.R., (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: An Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities. Conference proceedings of KMAC at the University of Aston, July 2000 and Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin: A Sense of Time and Space, the Social Ecology of Knowledge Management. In C. Despres and D. Chauvel (eds)Knowledge Horizons: The Present and the Promise of Knowledge Management, Bost on: Butterworth Heinemann.
Stephenson, J. (1998) The Concept of Capability and Its Importance in Higher Education. In J. Stephenson and M. Yorke (eds) Capability and Quality in Higher Education, London: Kogan Page.
Tomlinson N (2016) Complex ecologies and creativity
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v6SpLGknfG0zRJ5KEat7LM3PFXp0FJUhBaN-u2L9Px8/edit#

Norman Jackson
Founder Creative Academic

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World Creativity and Innovation Week

4/13/2016

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The fourth issue of our magazine is being published during World Creativity and Innovation Week(1) which sets out to encourage people to use their creativity to make the world a better and more interesting place and to make their own lives better and more interesting. WCIW is providing leadership by drawing attention to society's fundamental need for creativity and our fundamental right as a human being to be creative. By its presence WCIW tries to inspire people and organisations to engage in new actions and activities, create novel ideas, make new decisions. It calls on people and organisations who share its values to educate, engage, celebrate and open doors that help people experience freedom from suffering and open new possibilities for them. These values are also values that underlie the work of Creative Academic so we are delighted to be part of this global initiative.

Our contributions include:
1) Establishing a new Creative Academic Google+ Community to encourage sharing of perspectives on creativity
2) Publishing an issue of Creative Academic Magazine on the theme of Creativity in Development, Achievement and Innovation
3) Hosting and facilitating a week-long social learning event Imagineering in Higher Education on the #creativeHE platform.

We are also delighted to have entered a new partnership with Marci Segal, CEO of WCIW to undertake a research study to gain feedback from participants on their contributions.

Why development is important
While innovation is the buzz word of political and business leaders, development is the unsung hero as it embodies all the effort and ingenuity that connects our ideas with our innovations and achievements - the concrete representations and expressions that give our ideas meaning and practical substance. While Creative Academic might be seen as an organisational innovation it's all the hard work of developing ourselves, our projects and our relationships and resources that sustains our existence and enables us to achieve the things we want to achieve.

Development often gets overlooked as a vehicle for creativity. Our magazine is our vehicle for exploring, developing and sharing ideas and it fits very nicely the developmental concept of creativity proposed by Dellas and Gaier(2) 'creativity is the desire and ability to use imagination, insight, intellect, feeling and emotion to move an idea from one state to an alternative, previously unexplored state'. If we manage to do this successfully then we have achieved something valuable.

But this concept of creativity gives little consideration to the developmental process, activities, interactions, relationships, use of resources and creation of new resources, that enables ideas to be moved from one state to another. Our development process to produce our magazine involves searching for information, finding and developing relationships with people and persuading them to share their ideas, experiences, research and insights and other talents. It's a relational process like for example meeting Simon Rae our illustrator on-line during a twitter conversation and inviting him to create some wonderful cartoons to provide another perspective on the ideas being shared. Gradually through this partly organised but often emergent process we (the editorial team) change our understandings as we develop and personalise the knowledge that is gathered, produced and connected. It's a co-creative process involving all the people who contribute. In this way we make our own distinctive contribution to exploring and developing ideas in our particular context.

Creativity is all about having ideas that are new to us, and sometimes new to others, that interest and excite us to do something. Sometimes these new ideas seem to just come into our awareness but more often they form when we connect and combine ideas that have been around for a while(3). Such hybrid ideas often form when we connect our imaginings to a context, a problem or situation that makes our thoughts useful. The idea Creative Academic is developing, through the slow collision of ideas, is the idea that creativity is integral to our ecology for learning, developing and achieving(4).

A person's creativity only has meaning when it is developed and applied in the context and circumstances of the things they care about in their life (4,5). One of the things we (the editorial team) care about is producing this issue of the magazine so it becomes, for a while, the purpose for our creativity and our enterprise is focused on connecting ideas and finding people who are willing to share their ideas and perspectives.

We hope you enjoy reading our contribution to WCIW

Sources and links
1 World Creativity and Innovation Week http://wciw.org/
2 Dellas, M. and Gaier, E.L. (1970) Identification of Creativity in the Individual Psychological Bulletin 73, 55-73
3 Johnson, S. (2010) Where good ideas come from RSA Animate YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU
4 Jackson N J (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies Chalk Mountain available at: https://www.lulu.com/
5 Rogers, C.R (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin

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Trees and Alphabets of Creativity

3/30/2016

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'Our Creative Life' New Community Space for Facebook Users

In early January I participated in a discussion with other members of the Creative Academic team to identify ways in which we might get involved with World Creativity and Innovation Week (April 15-21)which invites us to try to do something new to encourage people to be creative.

During our discussion we generated lots of ideas and one of them, establishing an on-line community space on facebook, seemed to hold much promise because many people already have an account and spend a lot of time on facebook. Since I suggested the idea we agreed that I should set it up and so a week later 'Our Creative Life facebook group' was born to provide a space for facebook users to share their thoughts and experiences on everyday creativity. 67 seven people were invited and 45 people accepted and now form the community, with 10-15 regular users. Of course we would like more people to join in so consider this an open invitation to join us. This post describes the process we have been through to try to create a sense of community and its based on an article Theodora and I have written for the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine (CAM4).

Making a start

Starting an on-line community is always the hard. You have a group of people coming together who don't know each other and somehow they are expected to reveal their most personal thoughts. We invited members of the group to share some personal stories and experiences in which they felt they had been creative. Paul helped us get started by revealing how he wrote the lyrics of a song, which was co-written with another member of his band. One of the interesting aspects in this story was the fact that Graham came up with an odd line from his personal life, which eventually provoked Paul to write the “Nebulous” song. Of course, there were multiple contributions by and from different members of the band, so the song is a collaborative creative effort. It must also be noted that this song was produced and performed for a charity concert that was organised in order to raise awareness and money for kids with cancer. Consequently, the context itself gave particular and deeper meanings and significance to this song. Although this was a great example of what we were hoping for most participants did not join in so this initial attempt to encourage sharing was limited.

We then posed the question: How would you describe YOUR creativity? And what are the two most important characteristics that you could attribute to YOUR own creativity?

Fortunately, more participants responded to this question through posts and comments. Jenny situated herself in the field of words and learning and stated that creativity is the pleasure she gets by using words and logic to create and express ideas. She even creates most of the learning material she uses for teaching, while the characteristics that she chose to attribute to her creativity are “words/language” and “teaching/learning”, which eventually contribute to her sense of wellbeing.

For Τheozina, creativity is connected with aesthetics and the beauty of the world around us. As she describes, “creativity is an outlet of our brains to feel that we contribute by making something new with the help of our imagination. I think not everybody can be creative, it is a skill...”. This statement produced a fertile dialogue between Τheozina and Nikos about the nature of creativity as well as about Theozina’s belief that “not everybody can be creative”. The main contradictory argument was that even though creativity is related to imagination and all people have imagination, then how is it possible that all people cannot be equally creative?

At the same time, emphasis was laid on the educational systems and the role of parents and teachers in the formation of creative people. Sadly, there was a common agreement that only a few teachers promote and provoke creative thinking and creativity, something which hopefully needs to be multiplied in the future.

Another contribution made by Tziadora refers to symbolism and the multiple levels of meaning as a creative aspect of her everyday life. For example, poetry constitutes the perfect field to do so by using a word with two or more meanings, or building a sentence which may have a double function. Characteristically, Tziadora provided an example which provoked further discussion and eventually led the participants to resurface interesting elements of creativity. Some of them include: “through questioning creativity blasts”, “seeing multiple perspectives and possibilities in things that seem to be already saturated”, “it’s all about playing with combinations, playing with ideas as if they were a lego set or a coloring palette”. Furthermore, a special reference for creative writing was also made by Tziadora, who shared with the rest of the participants three observations that she had made:

Most children who engage in creative writing classes tend to write without fear. They laugh a lot and create alternative worlds. However, there are those, especially at the age of 11-12, who tend to be more skeptical or they do not enjoy storytelling and word experiments
Their texts have a great psychological and social value. These young writers refer to certain aspects of their life, as it has been transformed in recent years. Ideas-patterns which usually surface are: tablets, smartphones, Facebook, star system, video games… In general, aspects of a postmodern lifestyle involving technology
How children react to me as a teacher depends, to a great extent, on my performance, on my ability to encourage them. When I create a friendly atmosphere or say jokes, children write creatively and have fun. On my bad days, when I cannot be passionate and pleasant, students are negatively affected, even if I have designed one of my best activities. Learners and teachers emotionally evolved do it better.

Another participant, Ioanna stated that creativity is the implementation of a thought or an idea that can be expressed in different ways and that it needs to be supported with imagination, design, passion, vision and love. The two most important characteristics that she attributes to creativity are freedom and devotion. As far as the last attribute is concerned, an interesting discussion emerged on the topic of failure and mistakes. The common conclusion of participants was that mistakes do not lead to failure, as mistakes tend to function as motives for future learning, self-improvement and creativity.

Our Creativity Tree

Our creativity tree grew up in the “Our Creative Life” online community by utilizing all the thoughts, opinions, views, perspectives and beliefs that were exchanged on creativity. We came up with the idea of the tree of creativity, as we wanted to highlight not only the multiple resources needed to grow one, but also to lay emphasis on the developmental dimension of creativity. Creativity needs to be cultivated, amplified and eventually expressed. Finally, we wanted to show symbolically that creativity is in our nature and therefore all people are creative in their own unique and special way. By pooling our creativity we can achieve something that is greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Our Alphabet of Creativity

Creative Academic is well aware of the value of games in encouraging people to involve themselves in playful activity. The idea of constructing “the Alphabet of Creativity” emerged as a playful way to engage the members of the group in an activity which is designed to encourage imagination and did not demand a great amount of time. Here is the first post which introduced the game.

Hello everyone, Tziadora had a really interesting and playful idea.
How about constructing the Alphabet of Creativity?

In order to so, each person will write something which is related to creativity starting with a letter of the alphabet.
Example:
All people are creative (Nikos)
Be spontaneous (Tziadora)
C......
D....
E....
etc
P.S. In order not to be confused, add your contribution below as a comment.

After that post, everyone could participate by adding their own comment. The only thing that the participants were expected to do, was to pick up a letter and unfold a sentence revealing a view, a perspective, or a short quote on creativity. The alphabet was constructed over 25 days even though there was not a deadline for the completion of the game.

The idea of organizing the members’ contributions as an alphabet instead of collecting free, random thoughts on creativity was preferred for two main reasons. First, the alphabet resembles an open invitation which encourages people to participate and contribute, while at the same time the creative process shows similarities to playing a game. Secondly, the activity is based on free expression, with the exception of one provided restriction: the first letter of the phrase that will be written should be a letter of the Alphabet. Consequently, the Alphabet is an activity built in terms of developmental creativity. At this point, it must be noted that the nature of this task is typically linked to creative writing and improvisational theatre.

The gradual construction of the alphabet has the additional advantage of participants being provided with immediate feedback of the work that has been done so far making it easier to reduce repetitions. However, as it can be seen, there were alternative contributions in some letters, as some participants tried to shed light on different aspects of the topic. Perhaps this game can be played many times according to a particular thought about creativity. The final form of our first

Reflections

When we start something new we begin with hope that it will be of value to someone. The way people collaborated in the alphabet project was the way that we hoped people would work together when we set up the facebook group. But it has taken a while to achieve this.

The many different contributions and contributors mean that the alphabet gathers grows in an organic way gathering beliefs, views and perspectives of different members. facebook encourages interpersonal interaction and new relationships to form and flourish in response to posts that are made. The frequency of posts and the comments made, together with 'likes' expressed by participants, all created a sense of energy as the game unfolded. The 'likes' and 'positive comments' also demonstrated that contributions were valued by other members of the community. Furthermore, feedback was not only provided by the participants, but also from the administrators, an action that promoted the continuation of the game. Our hope is that in playing this and other games we can begin to build a sense of community identity and that this will lead to our members feeling that they belong with this group of people who share many of their beliefs.

Anyone with imagination can have a nice idea but to turn that idea into something meaningful requires work, effort and plenty of creativity. The idea was born in a discussion that was aimed at generating ideas. It didn't matter who suggested it as we were all working together to add value to what we were already doing by extending our involvement to another platform for social learning. Setting up a Facebook group is not difficult if you are a regular user. What is difficult it to attract a group of people to use it in such way that everyone benefits and sees value in participating i.e. the hard work of creativity is to turn a group into a community and Facebook page into a social learning space. Looking back we can see that the strategies we employed have all been directed to developing the will in our participants to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences. This is the nature of development in this context and without it there would be no achievement and no article. So we are only at the start and we invite you to participate in our ed-venture to share your thoughts on and experiences of creativity.

NB IF YOU ARE A FACEBOOK USER PLEASE JOIN US IN 'OUR CREATIVE LIFE'
Nikolaos Mouratoglou & Theodora Tziampazi

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#LTHEchat 43 Exploring Creativity in [my own] Development

2/9/2016

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The April issue of Creative Academic Magazine will explore the idea of creativity in development and innovation as part of our contribution to World Creativity and Innovation Week (April 15-23). So I was delighted when Chrissi Nerantzi invited me to be the instigator of the 43rd LTHEchat Learning and Teaching in Higher Education ( #LTHEchat http://lthechat.com/) as I could explore the same topic with academics and developers through this conversational forum. This post is my way of reflecting on my experience as a self-development process in order to explore how my creativity featured in it.

I recently came across Tom Senningers simple but useful learning zome model (1) it made a lot of sense to me. It pointed out that in order to develop we need to stretch ourselves. Just chugging along doing what we always do will not do it neither will being pushed into a situation where we are at 6's and 7's. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that by agreeing to act as instigator of a Twitter conversation I was putting myself into my stretch zone as I had not done this before. The stretch zone is outside our comfort zone. It involves some risk, for example making a fool of yourself in public. Its unfamiliar and we find it challenging and have to work hard to understand and perform in it. But it's also exciting and rich in affordance for exploring something new and for creative action, and having experienced it we will almost certainly have developed some aspect of ourselves. It's the zone which holds the greatest potential for our personal and professional development so it's worth accepting the risk.

Creativity is seeing affordance and development is
the process that enables affordance to be realised

When Chrissi Nerantzi, one of the organisers of #LTHEchat, invited me to act as an 'instigator' I did my usual trick of trying to imagine what 'it' (the twitter conversation) might look like. I have a habit of trying to connect things, which I suppose is where I think much of my own invention lies, as only I am interested in the things I'm interested in and therefore take the trouble to try to connect them. In this way I can invent stuff that stands a good chance of being original, because I'm the only one trying to do it!

One of the ways I have come to understand personal creativity is the ability to see the affordance(s) in something and development then being the means to enable you to access and make the most of the affordance. I could see the affordance in connecting the #lthechat with my interests in creativity and my current projects - producing the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine and contributing to World Creativity and Innovation Week. I reasoned that if we stuck to the same general theme 'exploring creativity in development and innovation' then they would inevitably be connected in a synergistic way. So I sat down and thought about some questions which provided the framework for the #LTHEchat. I also designed a simple on-line questionnaire to gather more systematically information on the creative beliefs of participants.

#LTHEchat
The chat has been storified by Chris Jobling. Two hours before we started the conversation I posted this image and invited people to share their perspectives on the sorts of journeys that development took them on: because development always involves a journey. I didn't get many responses but I like to think that it prepared the ground for conversation and hopefully planted the idea that there is no single right answer where developmental journeys are concerned - only lots of possibility. One good answer to this question is development takes you where you need to go - you may not know exactly where you want to go when you start, but generally, you end up at, or near, the right destination. And if you don't, you probably know where to go next.

#LTHEchat is an interesting phenomenon because it is a process that produces a tangible product - the ideas, perspectives, experiences, insights, visualisations that are shared on twitter and intangible outcomes - the learning and development of participants.

The conversational part of this journey is co-created by participants within which many ideas, perspectives and resources are shared. These things emerge in response to the questions and to what other participants post including their visualisations. It is an energetic and highly emergent process. Neither the instigator or the participants know in advance what will come out of the process so the idea of exploration is very relevant to this type of developmental process.

an explorer can never know what he is
exploring until it has been explored' (2)

However, with over 500 posts in 60mins the information flow is quite overwhelming. I was definitely in my stretch zone. It felt exciting and there was a sense of anticipation that something new would emerge every second of the process. But at times I felt I was in my panic zone wondering how to respond and not surprisingly I felt distinctly uncreative in responding to the odd post and making my pre-prepared contributions aimed at promoting further conversation. But I was able to enjoy the chaotic way in which ideas collided and emerged through the process.

The final product of this fairly chaotic conversational process is preserved in the #LTHEchat page and storified. It's also synthesised by individuals who share their reflections on what came out of the process for them. But the effects of the process are much more than what is preserved in the web space. The effects reside in the way that individuals now think about the things that were discussed, in the new tools/mediating artefacts they acquired and will use again to think about these things and in new relationships that were formed. Thanks to the event I have 18 new connections on twitter. I also have a new collaborative relationship and access to a lot of new resources and to an experience on which I can reflect and develop further my understanding of the relationship between my creativity and my development. Its often the intangibles, like new relationships, that hold most potential for future learning, achievement and creativity. In this way development for the present is also developing new potential for the future.

Development is fundamentally a search for new meaning aided by our creativity

But the developmental journey relating to the chat is longer than the twitter conversation. For me it included the preparation and design, participation and the enjoyable experience of reading posts the day after the event and responding to those posts I found particularly interesting. It also involved this reflective process through which I looked back on the whole experience to make more sense of it.

One of the thoughts I had during the #LTHEchat conversation was that development was a process through which we searched for, discovered and attributed new meaning to what we are doing or what we have done. Whether we invent new process, perform something or make/produce something we are investing meaning in what we are doing and what we achieve. In this case I am interested in how my own creativity featured in my development process and this was my focus for reflection. In my synthesis of my own developmental process formed around the #LTHEchat I can recognise a number of steps within which I can appreciate how my creativity was involved in my development.

In my synthesis picture of my own developmental process I recognise a number of steps within which I can appreciate my own creativity.

Step 1 involved me using my imagination to see the affordance in my life: affordance that enabled me to connect my involvement in the #LTHEchat with two other projects - production of the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine and the other work I'm doing for World Creativity and Innovation Week. My creativity was used to visualise a future and connect up things that I wanted to be related.

In Step 2 I explored ideas and made a design for the conversation based on 6 questions (and some supplementary questions / statement) and some visual aids I wanted to share. Creativity again involved imagination but this was also combined with reasoning in order to create a design that I hoped would work. I also prepared some visual aids drawing on and adapting materials I had used before and creating some new material.

Step 3 was to actively engage in the conversational process and try to respond to the wealth of ideas that populated the #LTHEchat space. This was the hardest part for me - responding in real time is challenging when you are trying to read the material that is being posted, respond to posts that grab your attention and add the contributions you want to make. I did not feel creative at all in this part of the process. My one creative moment was when I saw the affordance in the artistic talent of one of the participants and invited him to contribute to Creative Academic Magazine.

Step 4 After the event I had time to look at the posts and assimilate some of the ideas. I had the time to compose a response and also to connect to people. I also undertook my own analysis to draw out the key ideas (when completed this will be posted as a pdf attachment) and I wrote this reflective piece and produced my narrative picture to capture the essence of my developmental process. This is my way of learning and creating personal meaning from the experience and it involves thinking in an integrative way combining imagination, analysis, reasoning and feelings and it most definitely feels like I am thinking creatively and producing something new. Its not in any way innovative but I am bringing things into existence that were not there before.

This final step in the development process enables us to see the whole rather than only the parts. It enables us to appreciate how well we have realised the affordance or potential we believed these particular circumstances offered and we can used this knowledge in future. Perhaps this subtle change in our understanding is where much of our creativity lies and yet this often goes unrecognised as a dimension of our creativity. Having reflected on my development process I was struck by how similar the overall pattern was to Zimmerman's (3) model of self-regulation - forethought, action and reflection - which of course is the normal pathway for how we learn in situations that are new to us.

I have always thought that I am creative in finding and persuading people to work with me and on this occasion, I am delighted to say, I found a new collaborator - Simon Rae @simonrae whose creative illustrations (eg above) added humour and insight to the conversational process.

Invitation
If you would like to contribute to the April issue of Creative Academic Magazine on the theme of Creativity in Development please visit http://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

Sources
1 Senninger, T. (2000). Abenteuer leiten – in Abenteuern lernen. Münster/Germany: Ökotopia. Learning Zone Model.http://www.thempra.org.uk/social-pedagogy/key-concepts-in-social-pedagogy/the-learning-zone-model/
2 Bateson, G. (2000 reprint. First published 1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press
3 Zimmerman B J (2000) Self-regulatory cycles of learning. In G A Straka (ed) Conceptions of self-directed learning, theoretical and conceptual considerations. New York, Waxman 221-234

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#creativeHE: A Humanised and Humanising Experience

1/6/2016

33 Comments

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

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

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

Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Creativity on Campus Needs an Urgent Re-Think

8/14/2015

53 Comments

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

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

Consider the lingo

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

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

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

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

The commodification of creativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity – what it is and what it needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Problem with Creativity & Play in Higher Education

7/17/2015

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

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

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

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

Play in Higher Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Play in Higher Education: A Waterfall of Questions

6/29/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References & Notes

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

Chrissi Nerantzi & Alison James

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