I'm writing this blog on my way to Australia. With my head full of the bright sunlight of 35,000 feet. The last week has been a bit frantic as I got ready for my trip but nothing cIompared to the traumas of last week when the twins were quite poorly in hospital. Thankfully they are both well now and I had a lovely day looking after them rejoicing in their 'wellness'. In fact they provide the stimulus for my reflections this week which are focused on learning trajectories - which I touched on in my writing for the Creativity in Development e-book. I have watched them grow and develop from premature babies 16 months ago but they are developing at very different rates because one has global development delay. It brings home quite starkly what happens when the natural process of development is disturbed and I have to ask myself what does lifewide development mean in such circumstances.

All of our thinking and development work to date has focused on fully functioning people, and mainly young people who are already well developed and mature in their developmental outlook. Michael Eraut used the term trajectory to describe the developmental pathways we create for ourselves but others influence as we journey through our lives. He developed the idea in the context of his extended studies of how people learn through their work but they are relevant to any facet of life and therefore are relevant to lifewide learning and development. Michael talks about development being a function of the opportunities we have for experiences that will enable us to fulfil particular roles and tasks and in that process develop ourselves, on the assumption that we have the capability to occupy the role. The absence of opportunity, over a sustained period leads to regression of capability.  Conversely, we need to create particular types of opportunity for ourselves in order to progress along the developmental trajectories we aspire.

As I watch the twins I can see that one is able to create opportunity for himself as he plays and explores his surroundings because he has attained a certain capability, while the other twin, who has no mobility, is much more dependent on those near to him to provide opportunity and to help him lead a good life. And this in turn his making his mum develop herself in order to serve his needs. In this way their developmental trajectories are intertwined.  I am forced to wonder whether our approach to lifewide learning is only relevant to those people who are able to create their own opportunities for development.

In his book CREATIVITY Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention  which greatly influenced my thinking when I was trying to understand what creativity meant in academic disciplines, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Creative ideas need a receptive audience to receive and use them. And without the acceptance and judgements of competent others, we cannot decide whether someone's claims for creativity are valid. 

Csikszentmihalyi developed a 'systems' model for creativity which contains three components. The first of these is the domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures. The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who contribute to the field who act as the gatekeepers to the domain. They decide whether a new idea or product can be accepted. These people decide what new contributions are relevant and what should be recognised, preserved and remembered. The third component is the individual, who using symbols of a given domain, comes up with a new idea or sees a new pattern or contributes a performance that adds value to the field. It is the thoughts and actions of individuals or co-creating groups of people whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain.

My own research into higher education practices aligns with this well established conceptual framework but how does it relate to my own learning ecology. The domain I am contributing my thinking and writing too is the domain of education/higher education and the field I am trying to influence is the field of educational practice - particularly  people who have a developmental role within universities (educational, professional, curriculum, student development and organisational development). Looking back I can see that I have tried to engage with and influence the field of practitioners in four ways.

Firstly, I tried to grow the knowledge from the field itself by involving practitioners in the study. It is their knowledge and perspectives that provide the new and original contribution

in the e-book. The act of feeding back the views of other members of the field and inviting comment was a way of testing whether the products have value to the field and ultimately the domain. I did not receive any negative feedback and the positive feedback gave me confidence that what I had produced was of value.

Secondly, I tried to engage other practitioners through an on-line survey. While very few members of the field accepted the invitation to complete the survey the notice was circulated by email to many hundreds of practitioners on the specialist mail lists or postings in on-line special interest groups. The small numbers of respondents might suggest that what I was doing was of no interest to them or it might indicate that culturally most practitioners do not get involved in on-line surveys.

Thirdly, thanks to two invitations to speak on the subject of creativity in higher education I will be able to present and discuss my ideas at two conferences in November.

Fourthly, my consolidated learning has been made explicit in an e-book which provides me with the vehicle for recording my contribution to the domain and I will publish it on a website under a creative commons license so that practitioners can access it with no financial cost to themselves. This means that the ideas will be publicly accessible in a global sense.

Finally, when the work is complete I will make it freely available and disseminate information about its availability to the field via email networks. In this way I anticipate that those who are interested and willing to spend the time reading, will access my ideas and take from them those aspects that they find useful and meaningful.

Only time will tell whether the ideas contained in my e-book will be seen by the domain as being relevant and significant enough to warrant citation and adoption by practitioners in the field. By putting a stat counter on the web page I can monitor how many people access it so that will give me an indication of the interest in the field. If further invitations to speak arise from this work that will be another indication that the ideas have value to people who are practising in the field.

But there is another very important dimension to the field and that is the way people in the field  contribute to the creative work. In my learning ecology two people stand out in the extent to which they contributed materially to the creative product through the insightful feedback they provided, the way they challenged ideas or perspectives, and the encouragement they gave me to persist. In the world of sharing and shaping academic ideas it is the unseen hand of collegiality that shapes the creative work and makes it more acceptable to the field.

Csikszentmihalyi's cultural domain-field model has much relevance to my learning ecology and the creative work that emerged from the ecological process.

I was greatly moved by this wonderful choral work performed by the Voice conducted by Gareth Malone at the Brit Awards. It got me thinking about the multiplicity of current and historical creative inputs into what for me was an uplifting and emotionally engaging experience. The composer who wrote the song and music. The orchestra and choir who interpreted and performed the work. The staging of the performance. The creation of the choir in the first place bringing together so much talent and the enormous amount of individual preparation and the choir as a whole to master this medium. When we experience a performance like this we only witness the tip of the creative iceberg - one moment in the creative lives of many individuals but it represents the integration of so much creative thought and disciplined action by so many people over a long time in order to invent the experience. Creativity takes time to develop.

Over the last few weeks I have been working on my background paper for the SEDA conference in mid November. Last week I realised (insight) that I had enough material to move from a single paper to a mini-e-book of six or seven chapters. This would allow me to explore the idea of creativity in development so much more than I could through a single article. 

This week I reached 20 respondents to my email survey of creativity in educational development. This was the target I had originally set myself so I was of course delighted. The results will form one of the chapters in the e-book. I felt it was time to try to engage the wider community so with JW's help we put our creativity questionnaire on-line and invited SEDA members to participate in the survey. We needed an image for the survey so I adapted a picture by Julian Burton to suit the purpose (above). I also used this image to encourage Kiboko to develop his version of the narrative that is conveyed in this picture as its an important one.


REFLECTIONS ON MY ECOLOGY FOR CREATIVITY
One of my tactics to grow my own understanding of what creativity means to me is to create a narrative of what I have done to develop the knowledge for the talks I am giving in the next few weeks - what I now see as an ecological process for knowledge development and self-development. I can use this narrative to examine my own creativity. One of the ways I am doing this is to use a number of tools I have found to help me think and reflect on my own developmental narrative. In the next few weeks I will share my reflections through my blog.

In my internet wanderings I came across a blog by Darlene Chrissley on the theme of The Ecology of a Creative Life. In it she says,  'It has taken me fifty years to understand my own personal ecology; the conditions that best support me as a creative being. My ideal ecology balances four distinct quadrants: Introspection, Expedition, Integration and Exhibition. Over time I have adopted a set of creative practices that support me in each quadrant. When I make space for each one and move between them in an easy flow I am happy and productive and my work is original and meaningful.' Darlene Chrissley (2012).

I liked the implication in this ecological view of creativity that the four elements work together rather than sequentially as in so many other models of creative processes. .  I have mapped below her four quadrants and my reflections on my own process in respect of each of these four dimensions of her creative ecology.Broadly speaking the model seems to work for my creative ecology although I do not see exhibition as an entirely final stage process and my introspection is far more contextualised than hers.

 Ariel Diaz talking at TEDxCambridge 2013 tells the story of how, as a 10 year old boy, he became fascinated by Formula One racing cars and it inspired him to study engineering. As an undergraduate studying Engineering at Dartmouth College  he found himself leading a team to build a race car and immersed in equations that enabled him to understand the dynamics of the vehicle. He spent night after night getting deep into these formulas but it was exciting and the purpose of this deep involvement was realised in the making and the creation of the race car. He argues that he would never have wanted to learn and master the equations if he had been made to memorise them without appreciating their purpose and significance and then goes on to draw the analogy with education. 

In his view 'we are forcing students to memorize seemingly irrelevant and mundane and boring details before allowing them to see the beauty and excitement intrinsic in every subject that they're about to study'. He maintains that 'education is created by experts and because they have so much knowledge about their subject they try to teach the detail before they share their understanding of the the beauty of the subject that got them excited in that subject in the first place'. His solution is to invert the curriculum - begin with the big inspiring ideas that give the context and purpose for studying something... then take students along a pathway which allows them to discover things for themselves before immersing them in the detail that reveals the inner workings of the subject. The wisdom in this story is that this is the way we learn in life outside the abstracted world of formal education. We find things we are interested in or need to know about and then work out how to gain a deeper understanding. Our interests, passions and needs provide us with the purpose that makes us want to learn more. We begin with the problem, the opportunity or the vision, we work out some ways of finding out more before we get into the detail of problem working or solution finding.

Diaz's solution to making formal education more relevant, exciting and meaningful is to flip the entire curriculum  'we need to start with the big ideas because when you start with big ideas you give students a great context and relevance for the subject they're about to study and also create inspiration and motivation. Then when you have this context and motivation you're able to create a natural and not forced learning pathway because that excitement that motivation leads to questions - how and why and then by answering those questions you get to organically build a deep [and personally significant] knowledge and a deep expertise.'

I picked this up through a twitter link.