Preamble
These are some of the ideas that I thought about as the #creativeHE conversation unfolded, I will keep adding to them as I reflect. I don’t think it’s easy to talk about our practice in ways that enable other people to get inside it and  it’s even harder to talk about one’s own creativity. Narratives of personal experiences annotated by the individual's own interpretations and reflections seem to provide the most useful way in and we were fortunate in having a number of stories that enabled me to develop my thinking.

Whenever I think about creativity in practice I make the assumption that everyone is unique, shaped by a life that only they have experienced. Therefore the way they involve themselves in a domain or field of practice, including their creative involvement, will also be unique, although their practice will be influenced by what other practitioners do in that field.

I often think its much easier to demonstrate creativity when there is a tangible product arising from practice. Its one of the reasons why we associate creativity with artistic expression. Its far more difficult to demonstrate creativity when, for example, its a course of action and conversation that brings about a change or new practice in an organisation. Conversations about creativity often reflect this bias.

Is creativity transferable? Well our ability to imagine and connect and combine things in novel ways, and to be resourceful can probably be applied in lots of different contexts across our lives, but we cannot suddenly jump into a domain we know nothing about and expect to perform competently and creatively.

Learning to practice in a domain
​During the conversation we tried to explore what happens when a person enters a domain for the first time with no domain specific knowledge or skill – at what point will they be able to draw upon their creativity? By domain, I mean a discrete area of practice replete with its own contexts, situations, cultural expectations, demands, problems and opportunities, knowledge and skill requirements, and experiences. 

We considered the Dreyfus model - the journey from novice to expert as we enter, learn and develop, and eventually gain some expertise in a domain. There was a sense that while this model works in some domains, where there are clearly defined stages in education and training, it was too hierarchical as a general way of explaining the development of a person to perform in a domain.

(see below) ​In thinking about possible alternative explanations for the development of a person to practice in a domain, I remembered the awareness / competency model (right) and thought it had good potential as a heuristic tool for understanding how a person might develop. I was working on the assumption that it is hard to be creative when you know next to nothing about the content and practice in a domain so initially we cannot be creative in a domain specific way, so the question that bothered me, was at what point could we begin to use our creativity in a domain specific way?  Eventually I decided (see below) it was probably at the point we become consciously competent.

Practising to be creative
Much has been written about the relationship between practice and top ‘creative’ performers in fields like music, sport and chess and Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that "ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness."  This idea has been criticized by many researchers in the field of creativity.

The originator of the idea Anders Ericsson argue's the idea is more nuanced. He shows that deliberate practice can indeed help people master complex skills. Deliberate practice involves a series of techniques designed to learn efficiently and purposefully. This involves goal setting, breaking down complex tasks into chunks, developing highly complex and sophisticated representations of possible scenarios, getting out of your comfort zone, and receiving constant feedback. But according to these authors deliberate practice is most applicable to "highly developed fields" such as chess, sports, and musical performance in which the rules of the domain are well established and passed on from generation to generation. The principles of deliberate practice do not work nearly as well for professions in which there is "little or no direct competition, such as gardening and other hobbies", and "many of the jobs in today's workplace-- business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant, and so on."
 
When my two personal tales of creativity (see earlier posts) are viewed from this perspective it is not surprising that I could create a picture that gave me a sense of joy and fulfilment in a medium I had never painted in before without any previous practice in that medium, but I was a million miles away from expressing myself creatively through the production of a mix following the recording of my band because I had not practised enough to understand how to mix a 16 track recording in a domain that requires a lot of technical know how. 

Sensing affordance 
​Being creative is a conscious and deliberate act, in order for a person to be creative in a domain they have to be able to see the affordance in situations to be able to act creatively. Perceiving is a lot more than just seeing. Jenny Willis drew my attention to the idea of ‘seeing with memory’. If we have not developed the memory from experiences in a domain how can we see in that domain?

We can extend this reasoning to the full cognitive spectrum used by an experienced practitioner in any domain. When someone with domain knowledge, skill and experience (memory) tackles a challenging problem they work backwards and forwards along the cognitive spectrum perceiving (observing and comprehending informed by knowledge gained through study and experience), imagining  (conceptualizing what is observed in order to create possible meanings and perhaps extending or modifying those meanings), and reasoning (the critical evaluation of what is perceived or imagined in order to evaluate possible meanings and make judgements) and reflecting on what has been seen and understood to try to develop more meaning from it. All these mental processes are harnessed in a process that involves creativity but to perceive, reason and imagine requires domain-specific knowledge and experience.

I tried to give a practical illustration of this process in my account of a geologist making a geological map. The mental processes of perceiving, imagining and reasoning enable the geologist to develop hypotheses about what is being perceived and these are intermingled with the actions and activities that enable him to test his theories, to find the pieces of the geological puzzle (rock outcrops and structures), sense (observe, feel, hear, test, measure) the materials, and record (often sketching or photographing and making notes) what has been perceived. In this way ideas about the geology are tested, advanced or abandoned.

For these reasons, and with this practical illustration in mind, I concluded that our ability to be creative in a domain specific way, really only begins when we reach the conscious competency level in the awareness / competency model outlined above: when a practitioner has the awareness to not only read a situation but to imagine and play with it. This does not have to apply to the whole of the domain but to areas of practice within the domain where an appropriate level of awareness and competency has been reached.

I have thought for a long time that contexts and challenges that are unknown or familiar provide the best environments for learning and creativity - we are forced to invent new practices for example. John Stephenson's matrix illustrates this. But I can now see that I need to adapt this thinking. It's clear that when a person enters a domain for the first time they are certainly challenged because they don't understand the context or the problems. They also have to learn how to practice but at this stage they do not have the knowledge or skill to be creative. Its only when they reach the conscious competence level that the challenge of new contexts and problems provides the stimulus for domain specific creativity.

Paul Kleiman introduced anther variation on this theme with the idea of 'stumbling' in practices that sometimes led to the discovery of something significant - that we sometimes attribute to being creative. The idea of stumbling towards something that is not very clear and discovering things along the way is probably something we all do from time to time. But I think stumbling with a purpose, no matter how vague, denotes a level of awareness and competency, as does discovering and recognizing something as being significant.  There is a great difference between stumbling with the awareness that comes from a level of knowing and understanding, and the stumbling we do when we don't really know what we are doing, as I am doing in my learning to record and mix story. I think there is something important here to the story of when our creativity becomes significant in our practices and how it emerges as we try things out and stumble across something that we are able to recognise as being meaningful and significant.

​Complexity & ecologies of practice
​My own experiences, and those shared by participants, tell me that we can use our small-c creativity in lots of different practices across our life but we can express ourselves more quickly in some domains than others. My stories of trying to record and mix and trying to create a digital picture on the ipad illustrate this. I need to develop a lot more knowledge, skill and awareness for the former than the latter in order to use my creativity. This simple example tells us that some domains are more complex in terms of their demand for knowledge, skill and the complexity of thinking and action required to perform.

This is particularly the case of professional domains like for example being a teacher or a doctor. Furthermore, admission to a professional domain might be heavily protected with strict requirements to follow a regime of education, training and certification and following entry commitments to CPD. So the journey to levels of awareness and competency where creativity can be used, is much quicker  and less arduous in some domains than others.
​
Creativity in professional practice can be simple small-c expressions but to achieve anything complex, significant and challenging – things that have not been attempted before, require imagination (vision) and a constellation of practices that have to be planned, implemented, connected and effects harnessed. This orchestration of practices over time to achieve a complex goal is best though of as an ecology of practice. John Rea described his ecology of practice beautifully and I illustrated an ecology of practice that a geologist might create to produce a geological map.
​
When we enter a new domain we do not know how to create an ecology of practice. We are not expected to know this. What we are expected to know is how to learn in that domain and if we don’t know we will be shown or we have to find out for ourselves. We begin a process of being a practitioner and becoming a more expert practitioner in that field. Eventually, we take on our own projects and apply what we have learnt as an independent and autonomous practitioner developing our own ecology of practice within which our learning and creativity are embedded.

Concepts and theories for creativity in practice
Glaveneau et al (3) propose an action framework for the analysis of creative acts built on the assumption that creativity is a relational, inter-subjective phenomenon.  Results point to complex models of action and inter-action specific for each domain and also to interesting patterns of similarity and differences between domains. These findings highlight the fact that creative action takes place not “inside” individual creators but “in between” actors and their environment.

Human action is defined by its intentionality and the mediation of various systems of tools, signs, and artifacts that make it comprehensible and symbolic. It takes place in a setting and involves both the  organism, in its unity between body and mind, and a socioculturally constructed environment. Finally, action is often joint action and is both facilitated by and facilitates human social relations (3:2)

I agree with this ecological view of a whole person or persons purposefully interacting with their environment in particular ways that encourages creativity to emerge. Glaveneau et al based their action framework on John Dewey’s model of interaction (4). “Action starts, as depicted, with an impulsion and is directed toward fulfillment. 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 “(2:2-3).

Where do our impulses come from? Well the stories that were shared all give their reasons for why a particular course of action was initiated and sustained and it is very much to do with fulfilling purposes that are often bigger than yourself. You can see the elements of the Dewey model in all the stories of creativity in practice that were shared.

While creative thoughts begin in someone’s mind they are the product of their perception and imagination gained through a lifetime of interacting with the world perhaps stimulated by particular interactions and circumstances in the present. These ideas are reshaped as they are brought into material existence through further interactions with the world.

Considering the narratives of creativity that were volunteered during the discussion the definition of personal creativity proposed by Carl Rogers (5) would fit this action framework and my working concept of ecologies of practice namely, ‘the emergence in action of a novel relational product growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand, and the materials, events, or circumstances of their life’. In my narrative (6) of a field geologist using his practice to create a geological map - a creative artefact in the domain of geology I tried to demonstrate how the production of the artefact emerges through his ecology of practice as he interacts in a purposeful manner with the environment in which he works.

Sources
1 Gladwell M (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success Penguine
2 Ericson A and Pool R  (2016) Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise Hardcover Eamon Dolan/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt​
3 Glaveanu, Todd Lubart, Nathalie Bonnardel, Marion Botella, Pierre-Marc de Biaisi, Myriam Desainte-Catherine, Asta Georgsdottir, Katell Guillou, Gyorgy Kurtag, Christophe Mouchiroud, Martin Storme, Alicja Wojtczuk and Franck Zenasni       (2013)  Creativity as action: findings from five creative domains (2013) Frontiers of Psychology v4 1-14
4 Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin.
5  Rogers, C.R., (1960) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
6 Jackson N J (2017) An Ecology of Practice - Making a Geological Map (copy below)

​VERSION 1 published 09/12/17 revised 10/12/17  

​We can learn a lot about creativity in practice and creativity as practice from people who have developed significant expertise in their field. Having recently watched interviews and storytelling by Dewitt Jones, David Hockney and Hans Zimmer what they all seem to have in common is great skill, modesty, a significant work ethic, enthusiasm for and deep interest in what they do, and critically a wonderful sense of awareness gained from years of tuning in to what matters. Furthermore, they all appreciate the story in what they see and how their work evolves through their interactions with the world. 

What can Dewitt Jones (photographer) teach us about his creativity in practice?
In this video clip professional photographer Dewitt Jones talks about an experience he had taking photographs for an advert he made in Scotland. His narrative reveals what he thought and how he felt as he was faced with the reality of the situation and his explanations of what happened reveal the way he interacted with his environment. Through his story we can appreciate how his thinking, emotions and practice combine in ways to enable him to create new and original artefacts. What can we learn from this story about creativity in/as practice?  Do you have a story that illustrates how your creativity enabled you to gain something valuable from a situation?

​

​Here is a man with great artistic talent, intelligence and a work ethic that few of us can match who never stops thinking about his work, who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary, who is a craftsman who makes poetry with his images. His observations and narrative illuminate his practices. They reveal his journey and how his past experiences and what he values are brought to bear in his present work "The Yorkshire landscape is painted by someone who has lived in LA for 30 years". He reveals how he feeds off the environment in which he places himself ​ "I am affected by the space.. it thrills me".  His mind is shaped by his environment and he in turn represents his environment is ways that have never been seen before.

The Hockney film was not something that was planned or designed into the conversation. It's included here because I found it while the #creativeHE conversation was unfolding and it was relevant to my experience and my practice. During the course of the conversation I discovered that one of our moderators Jenny Willis wasn't well. I encouraged her to watch the DH film and the next day she made a post to share her reactions and experiences.

Jennifer Willis  The art of seeing

Apologies for not joining the conversation sooner – having been coughed over by countless poorly children for the last week or two, I have inevitably succumbed to the same virus. Nevertheless, Norman has coaxed me into action with his suggestion that I view David Hockney’s wonderful video, The art of seeing.

My preferred artistry is through words and thoughts. As I watched the video, I was bombarded with inspirational ideas and memories. Just this weekend, I was driving back to London from my aged father’s home in the Cotswolds. It happened to be one of the nights when the harvest moon dominated a clear sky. Driving directly towards the gigantic orb was mystical: trees were silhouetted as I chased its ascending path. Surely this was an example of my seeing ‘with eye, hand (in my case, mind) and heart’?

Earlier in the day, we had visited an antique shop where we purchased a large glass kilner jar filled with mesmerising shells. My husband wanted the jar, I the contents. Hockney also says ‘We always see with memory’. Was my attraction to the shells a regression to the four year old me who collected shells on the banks of Lake Habbinya, lovingly filled a plimsol bag with them, only to have to leave these treasures behind when we were evacuated back to England at the outbreak of the Suez crisis? Whatever the reason, taking out each shell this week, touching its surface, admiring its natural formation, colour and smell has brought me many hours of pleasure and revitalised my need to create.

The sense of loss and joy was another theme I played with as I watched the video. Throughout, it was clear that Hockney has been strongly influenced by China. There was an unspoken reminder of the Zen paradox: we need, for instance, to have experienced pain to truly appreciate pleasure. And perhaps this brings us back to the stage of learning: with age and practice, we become the skilled expert, but that does not necessarily mean we retain the keen emotional component of art. As Hockney observes, ‘You can teach the craft, it’s the poetry you can’t teach.’ He has succeeded in retaining the poetry, whilst being an expert, yet also having that essential quality of curiosity and adventure. He is not afraid to move into unexplored media and return to being a novice. He does this by knowing how to see. It is this ability to remain young in spirit that keeps him (and the rest of us who defy our chronological age) sensitive to the beauty of nature and immersed in life.

I thought Jenny had  provided a great example of finding meaning in the film that is deeply personal and linked her insights in a memorable and creative way to her own life experiences. I think I will always now remember 'seeing with memory', which I hadn't paid attention to before.. but my goodness how true it is that our perceptions of the world are always constructed through memory.

Inspired to 'paint'
I enjoyed watching Hockney paint in his field environment. It gave me a sense of how he immerses himself in the landscape he is painting and how he sees and feels and then makes his mark using his tools and his medium. I was intrigued and I kept searching YouTube for more clips of him painting. I was infected by his quiet enthusiasm for digital painting on the ipad - he made it look easy, which I guess is the mark of a good teacher - someone who eases the challenge of learning. I thought I'd like to try and paint something and I looked up how he used his ipad to paint. Then I found a lovely clip by Jeannie Mellersh who showed me that one of the ways we can understand someone's practice is to try and emulate their practice. In the video clip she explains and demonstrates how she used her ipad to paint his April 28th picture. "I've been looking at David Hockney's exhibition in London showing his I ipad paintings I've recently bought an ipad in order to understand how he painted one say this one on April the 28th [Angie is looking at the catalogue] I have attempted to recreate it on my iPad"  This practical down to earth demonstration really helped me understand her practice and david's practice as an ipad painting craft.

I was so inspired by Jeanie's demonstration that I borrowed my wife's ipad, downloaded a paint app and had a go for myself. Its a finger digital painting of my garden and I enjoyed making it so much that I am going to invest in some digital brushes. On a small scale this is an example of being inspired to do something I'd never done before and it came from two people sharing their practice. The advanced practitioner shared his passion and revealed the beauty in the landscapes I sometimes take for granted. The competent practitioner showed me how simple it was to learn the techniques and that gave me the confidence and will to try for myself. The result was satisfying and it felt creative to me (but not necessarily anyone else although my wife felt it was). I can now see the potential in the medium for doing more. I am not a complete beginner, I have drawn and painted off and on throughout my life but not in the last 18 years. I guess this proves to me that, in some areas of practice, we can be creative and productive with relatively little knowledge and skill.

​What can Hans Zimmer (musician/composer) teach us about his creativity in his practice?
Here are a bunch of short video clips of Hans Zimmer the famous film composer talking about his practices and showing where he practices. You don’t have to listen to them all (unless you want to). The invitation is to dip into some of them and identify something he is saying that resonates with you and your practice and explain the connection.

Hans Zimmer - influences and backgrounds 
Importance of mentorship. Seeing how other people solve problems.. You have to put your hours in.. great believer in 10,000 hrs to get good at something 

​Hans Zimmer Making of Intersteller
Reveals a process but not the details of practice.. appreciate a set of relationships..and interactions between people (director, musicians, family)  story…   stuff emerging in action

​Hans Zimmer & Christopher Nolan The Making of Dark Knight
The conversation and interactions between Director and Composer. The Director pushing.. Huge amount of experimentation..  9000 bars… ‘joker is there but you have to find it’

Hans Zimmer in his studio Part1
Works in a very particular space, tools, books lighting, and surrounded by other musicians able to have a conversation with other musicians

Hans Zimmer in his studio Part 2
I don’t have confidence.  I have no idea how to so this I’m not good enough to do this .. it happens on everyone..

Hans Zimmer in his studio Part 3
Every movie I work on I try to have a concept … I do try to figure out some new ideas and a new tone and a new style…

I  felt positive about the way the conversation had unfolded and what I had learnt in spite of the small number of participants, and hoped on day 2 that more personal stories would be shared as we focused on the environment in which we conduct our practices.
 
Drawing on your own practice experiences in any aspect of your life, how does the physical, social, cultural, organisational, virtual, intellectual and psychological environment we inhabit, influence our practices and our creativity in our practices?

As a stimulus I used what I can now see as an enchanting exploration of Japanese culture by Dr James Fox (BBC TV). http://www.creativeacademic.uk/creativehe.html The programme (one of three) provided me with a great illustration of the way in which an artefact can enchant me and I hope other participants.

Russ Law was first to respond by painting a dismal picture of the educational environment he witnesses through his professional, personal and voluntary practices.
 
“I'm exercised by the contradictory pressures and requirements imposed by successive secretaries of state for education, especially around the curriculum. Schools are held to account, supposedly, for providing a broad, balanced and creative curriculum, while at the same time creativity is obstructed by the time spent by teachers and learners on highly prescriptive and narrow criteria (on which they will be judged), that require teachers to play safe and use every available minute for the core curriculum that is formally assessed. We have token amounts of time allowed for the arts, but these aren't valued enough. The only real creativity we see is that used by teachers to survive the time-consuming bureaucratic demands and relentless pressures they endure.”
 
From my own interactions with teachers in higher education I know that if you invite a group of educational practitioners to talk about what inhibits their creativity some reference will be made to the bureaucratic and regulatory environment, and the culture of risk avoidance that characterizes university environments.  So if this is an important constraining factor in the environment, how do so many practitioners overcome or get round this constraint to practice in ways that enable them to use their creativity to encourage students to learn in creative ways?
 
But this is the tip of an iceberg. A few years ago I made a study of how the factors and circumstances that enabled and facilitated a group of higher education practitioners to innovate. After interviewing over 20 people who had been involved in the innovation project I constructed a questionnaire and then invited them to complete it. I was shocked at the number of factors and conditions in the work environment influenced them and their practices as they tried to innovate. It shows just how complex the idea of environment is to an educational practitioner who is trying to be creative to change their practice.

A story of making practice 
Teryl Cartwright provided a really engaging story about the way her practice and creativity was affected by her environment in the context of her pottery class. The video clip she attached helped bring her written description of the environment to life.
I’ve been taking a pottery class this past month and it has been a joy to enter into such a creative space.

When you drive to Shiloh Pottery, you go past small towns and farms and then up the driveway past the chicken house of noisy residents to what looks like a log cabin. The door handle is actually a wooden latch you pull up. You walk into a room of the finished pottery and are greeted by a golden retriever named Bear. The grey and white cat is named Dog. He has another name now but I prefer that one. As you walk into the workspace, the instructor Ken greets you. He’s like Santa with a gruff and whimsical sense of humor and long-standing patience. He sometimes carries a pen in his beard. There are always others there, students or helpers, working or visiting, or as Ken calls it, “playing in the mud.”

To the left of where I usually sit at the wheel is a huge aquarium with two turtles the size of dinner plates. The spigot where I fill the bowl of water is a dragon fountain, spewing hot water instead of fire. The tools which I borrow are along the wall near the chemicals which make the glazes. The mixed glazes are kept in the huge garbage cans with towels thrown on top. The de-aired clay is on a shelf by the work my daughter and I did the previous week as we learn to throw our pots. We cut the clay with wire and weigh it before patting it into balls. If you get air in the clay you knead it out on the table as if you are making bread with a vengeance.

The plate which holds the clay on the wheel is called a bat and the ball of clay is to be slapped to its center after I wet the bat slightly to make the clay stick. If you do that slap right, the thunk does sound like making a hit in baseball.

When the wheel spins and I must center the clay, I’ve been learning how to keep my hands still. It seems like the most counter creative thing you learn. Usually, you think you have to be moving to be creative but while the wheel spins and you center the clay, your hands learn not to fight the clay as much as hold still and surround it. The clay is like a wild animal that needs firmly but caringly trained, much like creativity.

Your knees have to be pressed on either side of the wheel and your elbows sit on your knees, twice the power of The Thinker. After the clay has been centered which is the most important thing (even in creativity centering is everything!), you press into the center with your thumbs to make a space and you use a pin tool to see how thick the bottom of your pot is.

Finally when you get that depth right you overlap your thumbs, making them into a “W” and you use your middle fingers on the inside and outside of the clay to form the sides as evenly as possible by moving them up together at a uniform speed at the three o’clock position with the other fingers alongside them for guidance.

You can bring more clay up from the bottom based on your pressure of your fingers but you have to gradually let go as you get to the top or the clay will form lopsided edges or worse, break. You can’t keep going over and over the edges either, Ken calls that “loving it to death” and it doesn’t fix your mistakes, it often creates new ones.

I think one of the most unrated parts of the creative space though is not the sights but the sounds. It’s been interesting how differently my pots come out and I know some of this is influenced by the variety of music in the background often from the 60s and 70s. Then there are the sounds of the wheel as I press the pedal at different speeds like I’m driving. There are the muted conversations, the voice of the instructor, the blending of the glaze in the trash cans with a power tool that sounds exactly like a kitchen mixer, the water from the dragon, and the thunk of the clay ball hitting the bat, all these little things inspiring me to create pottery.

I sometimes close my eyes as I’m centering the clay and centering myself to listen to being creative and to hear myself being in a creative space. I don’t know what sounds creative to you, but it has been fun to find out here in this new creative space in my life that sounds so different than the small thunkings of a writer typing on a laptop.Teryl CartwrightA2: Thank you +Teryl Cartwright I really enjoyed reading this - and the evocation of th

I thought this was a wonderfully emotionally engaging story which engaged really well with the question of how our environment influences our practice and creativity and also yesterday's question about when are we able to use our creativity in the process of developing entirely new practice. The description provided a sense of embodiment as she grappled with the physical materials, the technology and the space drawing on all of her senses. It seemed like an authentic account of a personal ecology of practice that had been lived and experienced.

The same thoughts prompted Sandra Sinfield to comment "I would like our HE classrooms to be more like primary school (where people can stay in and decorate and own a space) - rather than secondary ones (where people are nomadic moving from room to room - propelled by the bell). Or to use a more university descriptor - I wish we could all have more of a Studio style space - so that the room itself started to denote and connote the sort of activities that take place there and the modalities both adopted and inhabited. So that work is displayed - and can be taken up again - and that the very air and light and sounds create that 'making' atmosphere.

Another maker story
When I woke up on day three I found another maker story by Kym Drady

The only creativity I have engaged in recently, other than the #HE Creative meet up, is to do with my hobby, dogs and showing, the creative act is designing my annual Christmas Dogs fancy dress costume and set. Fancy dress has a history in our family, when my son Joe was younger, he used to compete in the summer fair fancy dress competition. The first year he went as a collection road signs and he won, next year he went as a smartie tube, won again, by this point it was highly competitive. The final year was world cup year, and he wanted to go as the world cup, it took my friend and I 3 full weeks (and several bottles of wine) to recreate a costume and make him the world cup, we wowed never again!!!!!

And 10 years on here I was preparing my second charity dog fancy dress, last year we went as the 'Fairy Tail of New York' and won and this year we made 'Dachshund through the snow' I had obviously been racking my brains as to what to do and mid November middle of the night I awake with the idea from nowhere???. We identified a day, I collect all the materials and we set about, bouncing ideas off each other and bit by bit, and gradually the large cardboard box and the craft bits take shape, we had only 1 day, we had no idea where it was going it just evolved bit by bit. I wanted falling snow in the set, and was gutted I could achieve this, snow machines are too big and too powerful for our box scene and fans (tried many and fake snow) wouldn't work. So while the outcome is pleasing, it was disappointing I couldn't recreate the visual set I wanted. We had to satisfice.......in terms of the model we are probably somewhere between novice and expert but not really either. We try things, play about and definitely build on each others ideas changing and modifying as we go along. Our first outing with the costume set is this coming weekend, wish us luck, hoping to raise lots of money. Hi   Thanks for sharing your interesting story and creative artefact.
 
I was struck by many things. The first was the long history of involvement infancy dress making and her successes in competitions which must certainly have put Kym well up the scale of expert practitioner. The second thing that struck me was how she adapted her environment to ceate a ‘maker space’ for herself and friend with materials and presumably tools to make the fancy dresses. The bottle of wine suggested a sociable setting. It sounded as if the idea of what to make came from the associations we make while we are asleep but imagination and reasoning were entangled through the act of making – an interactive, physical and emergent sort of process. I gained a sense that the competition was an important motivational factor. I think the disappointment about not quite achieving what she wanted is often associated with creative acts, and it’s another motivational force that encourages us to try again.
 
 These are just a few thoughts arising from the conversation

It’s always an anxious moment when you start an online conversation – will anyone join in? So I was relieved and grateful to Paul Klieman for setting the ball rolling..
 
“Hello Norman and everyone, The ‘from Novice to Expert’ is intriguing when I think of part of the research I undertook for my doctorate. I asked colleagues, via a questionnaire, for the words and phrases they used when describing creativity or ‘being creative’. The c. 2500 words and phrases that resulted (from 81 individuals) fell into five main categories in descending order: Thinking, Making, Doing, Solving, Dreaming.  Now, I can see how the Novice to Expert applies to ‘Making’ and ‘Doing’, but I’m not sure how it applies to the others. Is N➡️E consistent across the range? E.g. to be an Expert ‘Maker’ does one have to be an expert ‘Thinker’ etc. There are many Expert craftspeople who rigidly follow taught rules etc. Just some early morning thoughts.......”
 
My thoughts were, perhaps it depends on context and the levels of complexity involved in practice. Making a simple artefact might require only limited thinking relating to replication but producing artefacts on a commercial scale would involve a lot more variables to be juggled and balanced and a lot more interactions to be orchestrated. Paul had a point that the idea of progressing from an absolute beginner to expert has to be contextualized in real situations and practices for it to be meaningful and comprehendible. I suspect that all of Paul’s categories could be involved (perhaps substituting imagining for dreaming).
 
David Andrew thought the novice to expert model “suggests a linear development from novice to expert, a model that pervades current views of education, concepts such as learning gain being hugely popular, and in my view dangerous. It also doesn't reflect much of the research, for example in chess players, which shows that experts are not better at doing what novices struggle with, but that they do different things”.   Paul agreed, “Yes, it’s the linearity and implied hierarchy (it’s in the language) that bothers me. I would not wish my ‘expert’ surgeon to no longer ‘rely on rules and guidelines’, though I would hope that should some need to improvise occur he/she would use their ‘expertness’ to deal with it successfully. And, yes of course, context is all. An expert in a highly specialised field may be a complete novice in all others.”
 
In an attempt to encourage others I shared a personal story. Over a year ago I decided, with a friend, that we wanted to learn how to record our band. We purchased a second hand ‘digital mixer’ and had a go at trying to get it to talk to the computer which hosted the processing software, but we didn’t manage to make it work. Other things then got in the way and we left it. A year later, feeling quite ashamed at our lack of progress, we resurrected the idea with a different level of motivation and over three or four weeks, and quite a lot of time and effort, and some expert help, we reinstalled the software and managed to get it to work, we set up the mixer and recorded our band and fumbled to do some post-recording mixing on the computer.

I have found that the biggest source of help and aid to learning is not the 350 page manual but google. When I reach a block I type my query into google and either the relevant page comes in my manual comes up, or I find a forum where the problem has been discussed and often resolved or I find a video on YouTube that gives me an answer that demonstrates the practice which I can then imitate. Copying in order to do something is the way I'm learning to practice at the moment and there is no creativity involved as far as I can tell.

When it comes to developing the knowledge and skill to record and mix our music I am at the very start of my journey. Trying to get to the next level of understanding and competency is a painfully slow learning curve with every procedure needing to be looked up and practised by imitating what I had seen. Nothing is intuitive and nothing is automated and I am often in a state of perplexity – what do I do next? and anxiety - when I think I have done something wrong to the recording equipment. Perhaps another way of representing this state is through the well known journey to competency matrix. This is often attributed to Maslow but it does not appear in any of his works so is best attributed to Noel Burch. As far as recording and mixing is concerned, I am at the start of a long learning curve so I place myself in the conscious incompetence category and I know I will have to put considerable time and effort in my learning project to reach the conscious competence level.

Since being creative is a conscious and deliberate act, I am wondering whether our ability to be creative in a particular domain is essentially limited to the right hand field of this matrix. Adapting the notes on wiikipedia would yield the following scenario.

Unconscious incompetence - The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. At this stage there is no reason or capacity for creativity.
 
Conscious incompetence - The individual is interested in developing the knowledge and skill. Although they do not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. They make a start. There is a lot to learn and a lot of the learning is through following instructions and imitating people who can already do these things. Making mistakes is an integral and necessary way of learning. Confidence grows as learning is applied and new procedures are tried. There is little opportunity for the individual to be creative at this stage although they might be driven by a desire to eventually use their developing skills in a creative way.

Conscious competence - The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration and effort. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill. The individual can begin to reason solutions to problems and they can also see the progress they have made. They are now in a position to experiment with a degree of confidence and make use of their creativity in the process.
 
Unconscious competence - The individual has had so much practise with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. Furthermore, the individual can see and appreciate how all the tasks in a sustained project are connected. They can see and imagine the whole rather than only the individual parts. Different approaches and actions can be imagined and their effects anticipated. Problems can be visualized in different ways opening up more possibilities for solution and quicker routines for problem solving. An individual is able to make good use of their creativity in their practices.

Stumbling towards something
A little later in the conversation Paul Kleiman introduced the idea of 'stumbling' in practices that sometimes led to creativity.

“My occasional blog (I really MUST start writing again) is called ‘Stumbling with Confidence’. That also came out of my research and the in-depth interviews I undertook as part of that research. The interviews always started with asking the individual to talk about what they would consider to be a creative experience in regard to learning and teaching. Once they had recounted the story, I asked them what made them pursue that particular course of action. So many times the answer would be “I stumbled across something” or something similar. As we stumble across ‘stuff’ all the time I was intrigued why a particular ‘stumbling’ led to something tangible and creative. The key ingredient was CONFIDENCE. Having whatever it takes to just ‘have a go’, but also having the confidence to deal any consequences including that it may not work out."
 
Paula Nottingham suggested that “the idea of ‘stumbling’ works well with the automatic – but the questions is [really about] the awareness of when you have reached your destination”. I agreed that being aware or conscious of what you were doing, even if not why you were doing it, and being able to recognize the significance of what was encountered along the way was important in this discussion.  There is a great difference between stumbling with the awareness that comes from a level of knowing and understanding, and the stumbling we do when we don't really know what we are doing. As I am doing in my learning to record and mix story. I think there is something important here to the story of when our creativity becomes significant in our practices and how it emerges as we try things out and stumble across something that we are able to recognise as being meaningful and significant.

Learning trajectories, contexts and complexity
Paul Kleiman found my story interesting. “It accords with the Creative Continuum that I have been using for a long time now, which runs from Replication (‘I do, you copy) at one end, through Formulation (‘Yes, there are rules and guidelines but also flexibility’), Innovation (combining existing materials etc into new forms) to Origination (the genuinely and completely new which can also be the, initially rejected, ‘shock of the new’).  There is no hierarchy, and as your experience shows, both within and across our various and very varied practices we move constantly one way and t’other along that continuum".
 
His comments reminded me of Michael Eraut’s model of learning trajectories in complex professional roles where practitioners are developing or regressing along different trajectories according to the nature of the work they are doing and the experiences they are having in their practices. So might this mean that our opportunities for using our creativity are also waxing and waning along similar lines. In any complex role there will be aspects where the work is routine and perhaps unchallenging where opportunities or motivations for using creativity are limited, while other work might be unfamiliar and challenging with lots of opportunity and motivations for personal creativity.  

Taking this reasoning a step further I can connect these ideas to John Stephenson’s 2x2 matrix  (left) that explains why our main opportunities for creativity lie in those aspects of our lives (or practices) where the contexts and problems or opportunities are unfamiliar. It is in these areas that we are forced to think differently and with imagination and often adapt existing practices or invent new practices.
 

We might also marry this context map to levels of complexity in the context.  Dave Snowden's framework (right) for understanding complexity in any situation is helpful here. On day 2 Sandra Sinfield shared a story that showed how she was developing new practice (creativity as practice).

“I hesitated to respond cos I have mentioned this before - but how I learned to be creative in my practice was first to create a space for something to emerge - I let myself follow a path I knew not where - I gave myself permission to stumble - and take creative leaps. In practice this meant that after not really drawing anything at all for over 30 years, I started doing a daily water colour for the first ten minutes on arriving at my office each day ... I really got into this - and experimented with 'blind drawing' and more water colouring... Unexpectedly - this not only provided a meditative space to decrease my stress, but it also increased my joy and my self confidence. So, I enrolled on an #artmooc (a big leap of faith) - and each week as I practised what we had to practise - I also asked: How might I use this in my teaching (practice)? I took another #artmooc and continued this process... Just now I am on a F2F art class with the specific goal of taking lessons learned back to my EdDev practice.

Her story illustrates how in some areas of newly formed practice we can make use of our creativity very quickly and gain satisfaction and joy from the experience and what we produce. Her story shows how we can help ourselves by creating the right environment and circumstances to enable our creativity to flourish, and exploit opportunities in the environment for further development. It also reveals the value of practising the skills in a disciplined way so that practice develops and confidence grows. And as it develops we see and find more opportunity to use it. Perhaps this is a general pattern for the way we develop and sustain new practice and grow our ability to be creative within our practice.

So the journey from inexperienced absolute beginner to more experienced and expert practitioner (or the journey to conscious competence as represented above) is different for every domain and field of practice. It may be simple and sequential (eg in the case of learning or relearning to paint pictures) or long and arduous involving a multiplicity of journeys involving situations and projects of varying levels of challenge, risk, uncertainty and complexity within which an individual’s opportunities and motivations for creativity vary enormously (the journey to a neurological surgeon comes to mind).  In this way the purpose and goals of practice, and the contexts and environments in which practice takes place exert an important influence on both the affordance for creativity, the nature of creativity and our willingness and need to use our creativity. Which brings us nicely to our theme for day 2 of our conversation.

Footnote​
Chrissi Nerantzi opened a new area of inquiry wondering, “how much or if we really learn from an "expert"? and/or what needs to happen to enable this. Thinking of the distance the word "expert" even, can create...”  I could readily relate my story to this comment as a member of our band is pretty nifty on the mixer but he assumes so much and doesn't share his thinking out loud so it's not easy to learn from him. I end up photographing the settings on the mixer and either just accepting them or trying to work out as to why they have been set. Perhaps we learn from experts when we can already think and act with a good degree of proficiency, and more importantly ask the right questions and make sense of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Chrissi’s question prompted the idea that in order to teach, a person’s expertise in a field needs to be complemented by a willingness to help others who are less expert to learn. My wife who is a GP exemplifies this very well and there is a culture amongst medics of - see one, do one, teach one. At the very least advanced learners need to put themselves in the shoes of the less advanced learner and see the world as they see it. To perform this role well - expert practitioners also have to devote time and effort to developing themselves to fulfil this role. Disciplinary HE teachers provide a good example - and perhaps the cognitive apprenticeships that learners serve in higher education, and the way they develop practice through signature experiences that are relevant to practice in a particular field, connects this question to HE teaching and learning practices. So for HE teachers (advanced learners) the question becomes ‘How can I help/enable my students (less advanced learners) to think and practice in a particular way?  This connects to the idea of signature pedagogy and signature learning experiences in a discipline.

Its time for another conversation about creativity on the #creativeHE platform  This one is focused on the relationship between personal creativity and personal practice and it will launch our year long project on the same theme.
 
Being creative and producing a creative artefact or performance means different things in different practice settings as people interact with their environment and everything in it to achieve something of value.  By ‘practice’ we mean ‘action rather than [just] thought or ideas’1, ‘the application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to theories relating to it for example, the practice of teaching.’2 The term ‘practice’ does not have to be restricted to professional activity it can also be used to describe the actions and activities relating to a person’s hobbies and interests, being a parent and many other contexts.
 
Exploring my own practices
I will use my blog to explore these ideas in my own practices, particularly those relating to the facilitation of this particular conversation.  But what does facilitation mean in this context? Firstly it means making it happen, by having an idea around which the what will happen can form, knowing what has to be done to make it happen and then doing the things to make it happen. These things that make it happen begin well before the conversation itself begins. They involve preparing and helping to establish good conditions so that conversation can happen.  'Making it easier to participate in the conversation' by removing things that get in the way. Nurturing and encouraging things that enable conversation to flourish, helping participants see and appreciate what is important (although everyone will draw their own meaning) and eventually doing things that enable the most important aspects of the conversation to be preserved / curated.

Every #creativeHE conversation provides an opportunity to engage in and practice the practices I have developed over several previous iterations of #creativeHE conversations. So what are these practices?
 
The will to practice  -  You cannot have intentional and deliberate action (practice) without the will to engage in such action and that will is linked to some distal goal or long term vision. My interest in the idea of creativity in practice has grown out of my interest in learning ecologies, ecologies for creativity and ecologies of practice. It seems logical to relate practice to the environment in which it is situated and motivated. Every year in July-August I undertake a review for Creative Academic and try to identify the themes we should try to explore in the coming year. The idea of creativity in practice emerged from this reflective process and was discussed with other members of the Creative Academic team. The possibility of a discussion on the #creativeHE platform with the owner Chrissi Nerantzi although we did not fix the date until November.
 
Finding and creating artefacts for mediation - In October, when visiting my mother in Australia, I spent time writing an article to illustrate how creativity might feature in the practice of a field geologist making a geological map. This was a role I performed in the early part of my career that I could relate to so, it was a form of preparation for engaging. I intended to use it as a mediating artefact to explain to others the sort of narratives that would be useful to develop to represent an ecology of practice in different roles. I knew I could use it in a similar way in my facilitation of a #creativeHE conversation.
 
Creating the infrastructure/resources  In the weeks leading up to the #creativeHE conversation I spent time searching for published research that might inform our discussions and found several articles, and a PhD thesis that were relevant. I emailed several authors and invited them to join our project and conversation.
 
In the week before the #creativeHE conversation I searched for, watched and evaluated video clips that I could use to stimulate thinking and discussion. I also created a couple of ‘posters’ (right) that showed lots of practices – relating to work, hobbies and interests. I attached these to posts I made.

​I redesigned the existing #creativeHE conversations and courses web page on the Creative Academic website which provided the resources page and updated it each day of the conversation. I created a rough plan for the conversation: it can only ever be rough!. I also created an infographic to provide an overview of the main questions that would help us explore this subject.
 
Promotion - You can't have a conversation without people and my biggest fear and challenge is to involve enough people, and enough different people to enable the conversation to happen. I have the belief that the people who become involved conduct the conversation on behalf of everyone else and I hope for a critical mass of at least 10 people. About two weeks before the #creativeHE conversation I started to promote the conversation. I contacted, by email, a number of people who regularly participate in #creativeHE conversations to invite them, and used several mail lists to circulate a notice. I also made a number of posts in groups on Linked-in to try and stimulate interest. Two days before the conversation was due to start I made several posts on twitter copied to #creativity #practice and #creativepractice. Past experience has shown me that it is important to start engaging potential participants before the official start of an on-line conversation so, three days before the conversation began I made an introductory post on the #creativeHE forum linking it to an article about an action theory of creativity (one of my mediating artefacts).

Promotion does not end when the conversation starts: it continues right through to the end. On the first day I established a routine - 1) make the daily post on #creativeHE forum by 8am  2) post the theme of the day on twitter and linked-in with invitations 3) throughout the day check regularly each of these sites and respond.

Engagement - once the conversation started my focus switched to engaging participants. Following my initial daily post made by 8am each morning, I checked the conversation every couple of hours and to respond to any comments or posts, while trying to make further connections to the key questions. 

Self-awareness and reflection - In past #creativeHE conversations I have found it very useful to keep a blog to record my own involvement and learning. It's the way I make myself accountable to myself and  participants. So, two days before we started the conversation I thought about my own practice in preparing for the conversation and wrote this post. In writing it I created another mediating artefact to explain to myself and others what we are trying to explore.

Curation - I feel that the facilitator of an on-line conversation should also be a curator, organising, synthesising and making available the content to participants and the wider public who might be interested. In the past this has been a post-conversation activity but on day 1, because of the small number of contributors, I could accomplish this role while the conversation was in progress. I decided to use my blog as the medium for curation. The discipline of writing the blog at the same time as facilitating enabled me to draw more meaning from the conversation.

My unfolding ecology of practice
​So what does this reveal about my practice? The first thing it reveals to me is that there is both a history to my practice and an unfolding present. I facilitated my first #creativeHE conversation two years ago and since then I have been involved in five other conversations. My practice has been learnt through experiment and experience, and by observing others. I have, and will, also drawn upon practices I use in other aspects of my work. My unfolding present involves me in executing my rough plan and refining the detail as I go, and also responding to what emerges as I interact with the posts people make in the Google+ forum. As leader of the conversation I try to respond to every post and open up further discussion. This aspect of practice cannot be predicted so there is an element of going with the flow and it is in this dynamic where new possibilities for practice emerge.
 
My second observation is that my practice follows the general pattern I have established for a learning ecology (right). There is a context – the work of Creative Academic and #creativeHE to facilitate the sharing and development of knowledge about creativity and this creates the purpose that relates to serving our communities of interest. I recognize the affordance in the #creativeHE platform and network to share ideas and experiences and learn. I interact with my environment and myself to find and create resources that can be used in a process that I will eventually facilitate. We are utilising a particular virtual space for the conversation, in the form of the #creativeHE platform and working with the affordances and constraints of that space. My initial practices must envision and prepare for the process I will try to facilitate that will enable a conversation to unfold. I have begun to develop new relationships to draw in people with particular knowledge and insights and have utilized existing relationships to develop the conditions that will enable and sustain the conversation. I have always thought that the way you contact people out of the blue via email is so important to gaining their interest, trust and involvement. I put a lot of effort into crafting emails to try and achieve this. I have begun the process of documenting and reflecting on my experience through my blog in order to record and learn. 

Where is my creativity in all this?
In the lead up to the online event I would not make claims about being creative other than perhaps through the writing of my narrative – ‘an ecology of practice making a geological map’, which I will use as a mediating artefact. Writing is the most important medium I use to express myself and I think the making a geological map article is an example of how I use my own life to explore and develop theories of learning in contexts that I understand. ​I also enjoy producing infographics that help to explain and elucidate complex ideas. Creating pictures often annotated, is another important medium for my self-expression.

​While I was writing this post I came across this infographic on twitter from Maria Popova 'Brain Picker' one of the very best disseminators of wisdom on the internet. The simplicity of design and power of the message 'enchanted' me and I had never thought about the role of illustrations in this way before. It articulated in a clever way the truth that a good illustration or infographic not only communicates and explains ideas but it captures attention in an emotional way - it enchants or inspires us to think differently or more deeply about something. It shares wisdom not just information.
 
I will continue to develop the story of my ecology of practice during the #creativeHE conversation between Dec4-8th

​Sources
1 Cambridge Dictionary available at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/practice
2 Oxford Dictionary available at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/practise

​Posted 02/12 revised 04/12, 05/12