This week has been another busy week.. immediately following our conference I discovered that a possible invitation to teach a module in the professional development programme at the University of Limerick had become a concrete possibility with an email from the programme director..

I am following up on an email my colleague sent you regarding your willingness to teach a module on our Specialist Diploma in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship.  The course is a level 9 course consisting of ten modules each with three credits and it is designed to equip  participants with high level competence in Teaching , Learning, Scholarship and Innovation in Higher Education settings (I have attached a copy of the Diploma handbook for your information). The module we would like you to teach covers Scholarly innovation and creativity. I have attached the module outline used previously and the type of assessment students have been given in the past, to give you an idea of what is involved. Of course given the module is about innovation and creativity in scholarship, you have freedom to teach this module in the manner you feel is better for you
 
The email went on to inform me that the module was to be run in six days seven April 3/4 if I was willing to do it so I had to decide on whether I could take it on. Effectively I had 6 days to prepare but I also had a lot of other commitments in that time. Two things grabbed my attention - the fact that I could teach it how I wanted to and the focus on personal everyday creativity.. So I said yes and spent every spare hour I could over the next six days 'preparing'.

The experience was a good one  in all sorts of ways and I am writing a reflective essay to consolidate my thoughts and feelings. Here I focus on its value to me as a reminder of what it is like to teach. I had a group of 18 professional learners ranging in age from early 20's to 50 at various stages of their careers. All were leading busy lives and had to fit in the 10hours over two days during which the course ran. As a teacher I designed a process which included content - mainly my writings on the topics we covered, activities - the tasks I designed before, during and after the event and a few more spontaneous situations. But you cannot predict how learners will respond. It was my good fortune that they engaged in the way I had hoped and the whole experience for me became reaffirming. It made me feel like I used to feel as a teacher when the situations I had crafted produced the desired results in terms of learner interest, engagement, discussion and the application of the learning. I still have to mark the two assignments I set which will give me more feedback on whether the ideas and knowledge I worked with has been assimilated and applied and I want to gather the learners' feedback on the course - but the experience has shown me something that I miss so I am going to try to market the short course to other  institutions.

Thank you Limerick Creatives!

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.

I introduced my talk with a slide that portrayed my own ecological process for making my contribution to the event. I had concluded that my learning process had been purposeful and directional - towards creating the resources and personal knowledge to be able to contribute to the seminar and workshop and that it had also involved lots of other people - the people who had codified their understandings in the articles I had read and whose ideas I had assimilated and reused, the people I had talked to especially members of my family, the people who had written blogs which I had drawn on, accounts of learning written by past students at Surrey and my daughter's evolving account of learning as she helps us pilot the lifewide development award. My learning had been both a  constructive process and an organic social process. 

The workshop involved inviting participants to think of a learning project they had been involved in and to try in about fifteen minutes to record the key elements of their learning process. Each then told their story of learning and as a group we tried to think about the ecological aspects of the story. The process was quite revealing and on the train journey home (in true ecological spirit) I decided to email the people who had participated to invite them to continue working on the ideas that had emerged and to write them up as a co-authored paper to illustrate how such a workshop methodology can work in revealing the ecological process involved in lifewide learning. So far only two people have responded so I'm uncertain as to what will emerge from the process. But I feel sure that something useful will come from it. 

On Thursday I was thinking ahead to the next issue of Lifewide Magazine and thinking of potential contributors when I googled Jay Lemke - who has written extensively on ecosocial theory and  who I had really enjoyed reading. I came across a beautifully written and inspiring chapter he wrote in 2002.. on becoming a village.. I cite a passage below to illustrate..

An old saying has it that it takes a village to raise a child. As children, we know how much we need to learn about everything and everyone in our communities to live there successfully. As we learn, we gradually become our villages: we internalize the diversity of viewpoints that collectively make sense of all that goes on in the community. At the same time, we develop values and identities: in small tasks and large projects, we discover the ways we like to work, the people we want to be, the accomplishments that make us proud. In all these activities we constantly need to make sense of the ideas and values of others, to integrate differing viewpoints and desires, different ways of talking and doing. As we participate in community life, we inevitably become in part the people that others need us to be, and many of us also find at least some of our efforts unsupported or even strenuously opposed by others... The challenges of living in a village define fundamental issues for both education and development.1

His website had a contact email address and in the spirit of nothing ventured nothing gained  I decided to invite him to write a feature article for the next issue of the Magazine.. Within a few hours I had a very encouraging response which indicated that although in the midst of travelling from Europe to San Diego he had taken the trouble to follow the link I had given him to my website and had made a relational connection.. What a wonderful illustration of our ecologies in action.

Fortified by insights gained at the CRA workshop, the other important decision I made this week was to reframe the conference we are planning for next year to focus attention on the way that universities are supporting lifewidelearning ie I turned it from a criticism of inaction to the opportunity to celebrate achievement and progress. In spite of uncertainties I went ahead and booked the venue thus committing Lifewide Education to the conference in March next year. Making these decisions brought a sense of relief, as so often decision making does, and I was much happier at the end of the week than I had been at the start.

1 Lemke J L (2002) Becoming the Village: Education across lives, in G. Wells and G. Claxton (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK available on-line at http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/becoming-the-village.pdf

I remember completing a diary once as part of a work evaluation exercise where over a two week period every hour I had to record everything I had done. One of the headings was 'planning' and at the end of the week I was surprised to discover just how much time I spent doing it. That changed my view about the importance of planning in my work but its also true of every day life.

A busy organised world requires us to spend a lot of time planning. If you want to undertake anything out of the ordinary that also requires planning.
My reflections on planning were triggered by a deadline I had to meet to provide an abstract for an event at which I was to be a keynote speaker in Macau in November. It forced me to think about what I was going to speak about and how I was going to structure my talk. This then led me to think about logistics of how I was going to get there. For the first time I searched to find out where exactly I was going and was pleasantly surprised to find it adjacent to Hong Kong. I discovered that there was a ferry service from the airport. I also checked out the visa situation with the conference organisers. I decided I would try and combine it with a flying visit to see my parents in Australia. So I spent a couple of hours searching for flights and comparing routes and costs and then drilling down how I would get to the airport early in the morning in Sydney. I found myself thinking about all sorts of things all of which were about imagining the future and what I needed to do inhabit that future.

This was not the only thing I planned this week I designed a workshop for an event at Southampton Solent University and interacting with co-presenters at the university. Thinking ahead to how we might better optimise our websites I also downloaded a booklet for future reading. I had a conversation with my daughter about how she might conclude the piloting of the Lifewide Development Award pilot. I also spent time thinking about our Lifewide Education conference next March and contacted two potential speakers and someone who could record the event. With my wife I discussed what we would eat at a dinner party planned for the weekend, and with my daughter we thought a few weeks ahead to her twins birthday party which she wanted to hold at our house. With my band I discussed the idea of a doing a concert in our garden in late August.. weather permitting!! Planning and thinking about the future in imaginative and analytical ways pervades all aspects of our life and without it I don't suppose as many things would happen.. or if they happened they would happen in a disorganised way without the results you want to achieve. Planning can simply be thinking generally about something in the future or it can be about deciding exactly what to do. And plans - the results of planning can be explicit and somewhat rigid or vague and fluid. And personal plans evolve over time with different levels of detail being added at different stages in a perpetually evolving process. And plans can be changed as new circumstances emerge. That's the beauty of planning... nothing is fixed until it has actually happened.

In my google searches this week (actually searching around what is learning?) I came across a nice short paper explaining why, in the corporate environment, planning is learning. Its trying to understand the future and all the complexities associated with it and trying to imagine how you get there. In doing so it is taking the fundamental step towards learning to find a way into the future. I think the same holds true when we plan our own future. In our imaginings we are trying to understand what we have to do in order to secure a future of a certain type... and from that point of imagining (our rough plans) we continually refine our thinking until we get there.

PLANNING AS LEARNING
http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/subjects/ims5042/stuff/readings/de%20geus.pd