I remember reading the work of Maurice Boisot many years ago  and for the first time appreciating that telling stories was an important way in which we made sense of complex situations and communicated our sense making to others. Narrative is rich in personal doings, and contextual and situated understandings, but the actual doings and other people's responses to those doings have been reflected upon and pieced together and related in a way that I know see as 'ecological thinking'. When we tell stories about our work as teachers we are creating a bridge between our hidden, tacit embodied knowledge and beliefs, and knowledge that we might find in a book describing principles and theories of the 'how and why' of teaching. Narratives reveal a lot about who we are and who we want to become. Personal narratives are the means we make greater sense of our lives - how the moments add up to something bigger and more significant than just a string of moments.

We can tell a story in a picture like the one I've created to animate this story. I use these sort of narrative pictures a lot in my 'teaching' as they turn words only into actions and doings that people can more readily relate to. They are an important feature of my teaching and a medium for my creativity. Over the years I have collaborated with illustrators and graphic facilitators to turn concepts and theories into visual stories. The drawings in this picture were made by Andres Ayerbe - who was at that time a talented graphic design student. I honour his talent by remixing his sketches and reusing them over and over again in different contexts and stories.​(see my previous post) 

​In my educational work with higher education faculty or students I try to involve people in telling their stories. I see my facilitation role as one of trying to make the invisible visible as this is the starting point for deeper and more meaningful conversations about learning that has personal significance. The work we did to develop the idea of lifewide learning in the SCEPTrE Centre at the University of Surrey, was all about encouraging and helping students tell their stories of what they had done and what they had learnt and achieved in all aspects of their life. By narrating their stories and reflecting on their experiences and what they had learnt they were able to draw out extraordinary insights into their development as a person. Through this process we were able to recognise their development and show them that the university cared about their learning and achievements beyond the academic curriculum. Students developed scrapbooks to document  the artefacts of their informal experiences of learning and then told their stories - their storytelling was a powerful and effective way for them to reveal the meanings in their experiences. In some cases they made a short film to explain the meaning of their experiences.

I am currently exploring the idea of personal pedagogies with HE teachers. I tell my story of how I have come to be the teacher I am - it's a story of my life as this is our input to who we are. I then invite them to create a timeline and on it to reveal the situations and incidents in their life that have significantly influenced their beliefs, values and knowledge that underpins their pedagogical thinking. In this way I encourage them to tell their stories about how they have come to hold the views they have that influences their pedagogical practices. From this process we can appreciate better how we have come to be the person we are.  Here are some examples from a recent staff development event I facilitated.

​Two related themes that have emerged for me this week are caring and honouring. In telling a story about ourselves we are caring and honouring our own life experience. By providing a framework - like a timeline and a prompt like 'what has influenced your beliefs?' a person has enough of a scaffold to use their imagination and memories to make sense of their life and their beliefs and their practices as a teacher. In revealing these stories to each other we create the opportunity to appreciate, respect and care about colleagues in ways that we did not know before.

This is social learning at its best. This is 'teaching' through the sharing of stories that have powerful personal and collective meaning. They move us from the theory of how something might be accomplished, towards how practice is acually achieved in a particular context and more importantly 'WHY?' it is achieved by a particular person in a particular way in a particular context. Personal stories and how they shape our perceptions are at the heart of our ecologies for learning, creating and achieving. They are also the way we recognise and share our personal ecologies retrospectively.

A RECENT STORY
Periodically, someone new comes into your life, and they start sharing their stories and suddenly new affordances open up. One such person is Gillian Judson who has been an active contributor during this weeks #creativeHE conversation. I invited Gillian to write an article for Creative Academic Magazine which she kindly did and in the article she drew my attention to
 'Dance Your PhD'. I clicked the link and spent a whole evening watching many video clips on YouTube. Here is a playful idea for creating new meanings about quite abstract often scientific ideas using a medium for creative expression that involves story telling, dance, music and visual performance. They are also social creative artefacts in that the owners of the PhD involve others in their dance intepretations.  I can't think of a better way of demonstrating the power of story telling in higher education learning. Here are a couple of examples.

Today is a sad day. I woke up to hear the news of the Manchester bombings last night... I felt flat from the moment I heard the news. I was born and grew up in Manchester so it's not surprising I felt the way I did as the full horror of the game that terrorists play unfolded and I listened to the tearful mums and dads appealing for news of their children who were caught up in the event. But Mancunians are resilient and they have been to a place like this before and for once the words of Teresa May captured well that we had witnessed in the bombing and the response of people afterwards, 'the worst and best that mankind had to offer'.

Throughout the day it felt wrong to be even thinking about the idea of playing games so I spent quite a lot of time in my garden (which ironically is a sort of game for me) doing physical things that made me feel better. I made a sort of crude memorial by placing some granite boulders I had around some posts with sweet peas growing on them. They are not out yet but they will be soon, and when they are out in all their glory they will be brilliant reminder to remember the people who have died. 

​​Things that go on in our lives do interfere with and affect one another. I did manage to read and comment on most of the posts that were made today. In my readings (perhaps I was looking for it) I sensed there was a tension between those who are really enthusiastic about play and games in education, who have clearly experimented and proved to themselves there worth and others that were more reticent in their acceptance. I think I fall into the latter camp. Simon Rea articulated something of what I felt in his post

'I guess this is where I have issues with Play and Games in teaching ... it's the process of transferring from one domain (play/fun/game) to another (learning/assessment/work). I think people, students included, see the two domains as different which should be kept different, and see it as a sort of dumbing down activity. And anyway, people don't play games when they finish HE and get a job do they … my parents don't play games …'

But I also agreed with Gillian Judson that play is a matter of perception and how we see affordance in a particular context or situation for playing - and that really only has meaning to the individual. There is no doubt that WORK has different levels of affordance for play but teaching in particular and knowledge work in general has much affordance if you have the interest, desire and imagination. The many great examples of practice shared in the #creativeHE conversation revealed the truth in this.
 
Sarah Honeychurch made an interesting point:  I've never really liked games, but I do love playing with new tools. Here's today's diversion from work http://www.nomadwarmachine.co.uk/2017/05/23/cogdogvidblog/ She shared her use of Lumin5 tool which can be used to turn a blog post into a video with music. It was the first time I and others had come across this tool and it inspired several people to try it out. I had a go but found myself spending a lot of time editing down my DAy1 blog post to the point where it didn't make sense so I gave up - I think you have to be in the mood and I wasn't really. But I did enjoy the Lumin5 creations of others in particular Gillian Judson's contribution https://lumen5.com/v/1vd/  which I have embedded to show myself how it works.

The idea that grabbed me, perhaps I was looking for it, was embedded in Wendy Taleo's post 'A game of honouring' http://wentalearn.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/a-game-of-honouring.html

​A game that I enjoy is about honouring those in my Professional Learning Network (PLN). It involves these things: close/slow reading, using new digital tools, curating, remix, sharing, fun.
 
How to play this game: Choose a blog post of someone in your PLN or curate information from open sources. Complete a slow read of the material. Pick a digital tool that can help you remix the blog post while keeping the original intention. Share it out and acknowledge the author. Here are two examples that I created today. In this remix, I look at Sundi's blog post on Intentional Practices. Taproot Blues has been created from a set of tweets. I've put them together, nearly a poem! These were created with Lumen5 desktop application. It uses images from unsplash.com and you can choose music to go with the work. 
Posted by Wendy Taleo 
 
I loved the idea of 'honouring' as a 'game' involving respectful remixing' and showing the creator that he or she had inspired you to add your ideas to their creation to make something different. This process of adding and combining lies at the heart of much of our creativity. The idea resonates with my day 1 post on 'caring'. Honouring is a way of demonstrating you care. Wendy's post contained an answer to Simon's post.. if we see honouring as a form of play then a lot of what we do as academic's when we write a paper is about remixing and recontexualising the thoughts and ideas of others. Similarly, when we take a idea for educational practice that someone has shared and rework it within our own pedagogical thinking and then use it in our own practice - we are honouring the originator and inspirer of that idea (but how often do we say this publicaly). This was my most important insight today and I am left thinking about how I honour the ideas that are gifted to me. I guess sharing them in my blog is a form of honouring. So thank you Wendy.
 
The thought I am left with is that this notion of honouring in the digital world of artefacts should be something we are teaching in higher education. We clearly teach the rules of plagiarism which is the dominant form of honouring in the academic world, but as Wendy points out the digital open world of learning offers so much more opportunity for playing this game.

POSTSCRIPT  26/05/17
I think Wendy must have taken pity on my inadequacies because by Friday she had generously used her time and creativity to show me how to use the LUMIN5 tool to create a new artefact from my blog. It felt quite humbling to have someone caring enough to show me what I could do if I set my mind to it. I felt as if my words had been honoured. So here it is - thanks to Wendy Talaeo

DAY 1
Such a lot of ideas and artefacts generated on the first day in response to Chrissi's invitation and challenge to watch and reflect on the following short clip https://vimeo.com/194276412 Have you experienced something similar? Share your experience and/or re-action to this clip using art - make a collage, produce a drawing, construct an ‘installation’.

 When I watch a beautifully crafted animation with a story that engages me intellectually and emotionally my first thought is I'd love to be able to make one like this myself. But then I know my own limitations. It's not that I don't think I could make one if I spent a huge amount of time and effort: its more that I don't want to spend the time learning how to do it. In other words I don't care enough about the idea of making such an animation to do it and stop doing all the other things I could be doing in this time.

'Caring about something' seemed to be one of the themes to emerge from the conversations today. It seems to be a prerequisite of creativity and significant achievement. We can only care about so many things at once and the things we care about jostle and compete for the time and spaces we have - so only a few things get the chance to come fruition. I care enough about #creativeHE, exploring creativity and Chrissi to want to use some of my time to contribute and so some of the other things I care about will have to take a back seat for a while.

I tried to connect today's challenge to my current  garden project. It's not very exciting and really not very creative but it will bring about change and transform the look of a small part of my garden. We are blessed with a big garden. I care about it a lot and it gives me much joy but at times I am overwhelmed by the scale of what I have to do just to keep up with it and so become paralysed.

​A few weeks ago my wife announced she was going to get dig up all the tangled vegetation under our bedroom windows and lay stones. Of course I was goaded into helping and slowly got sucked into the task toiling for a few hours most days, and then starting my own 'transformation' project at the side of the house. Just getting involved, and making a start and then making and seeing progress all contributed to caring about what I was doing and to devoting more time, energy and effort to making it happen. You need to care if you want to sustain something. So caring is an important element of an ecology for achieving something. Without caring the will to pursue a goal of vision will diminish and other things that we care about more will take over.

Through my actions and using the tools and materials I have I am creating a new sense of order in the medium that is my garden. Slowly but surely the after is replacing the before and it's tidier, easier to maintain and when complete it will be more aesthetically pleasing than it was before. In itself, what I am doing its not creative, but all the little bits I do contribute to the whole over time, and the whole is, I think, a creative project to which I contribute.  

By a strange coincidence I was listening to 'Womans Hour' on radio 4 this morning while driving and one of the Chelsea Flower Show garden designers (Charlotte Harris) was being interviewed. She talked with great passion about her design (inspired by the Canadian wilderness) but what came across was the care she gave to her creation and her insistence that while perfection was a goal it could never be achieved and the only way you could get anywhere near it was to pay attention to detail. You have to care enough to pay attention to detail. Needless to say she won a gold award.

​Back to my real world - here is the bit of detail I did today. 

                              BEFORE                                                         AFTER

I inherited my garden from the two previous owners of my house. The first owner and builder of my house, was a man called Ernest Wright. He created the garden nearly 50 years ago out of farmland and orchard. It's his legacy I am enjoying but struggling to maintain. We often think of creativity as production and we often forget that there may be maintenance to sustain a creation. But he would not have seen or experienced what I see now - only in his imagination could he see and experience what might be. I feel I am the custodian of his creativity a mix of his designs and planting and the natural tendency of nature to do it in its own way. I have learnt to live with this struggle - even allowing the many rabbits that share this space to dig a multitude of holes - what else can I do. From time to time I tweak his canvas. Its an interesting concept of collaborative creativity.. my creative living artefact - my garden, is a never ending work in progress and in time it will pass to someone else who will also have the chance to love, cherish and add to what already exists. So my collage for Day 1 honours Ernest Wright the original designer and architect of this wonderful landscape.

​​Some teachers have the ability to encourage and enable learners to care deeply about what, how and why they are learning. They can change our whole attitude to learning and cause an epiphany. And like caring for a garden they might only influence us for a short time but the contribution they make can last a lifetime. One teacher certainly had that effect on me.