Over the past week we have been having an interesting discussion on creativity and value in the #creativeHE forum  https://www.facebook.com/groups/creativeHE Who values creativity has been dominant theme. What has emerged is a general agreement that creators themselves are first and foremost their own judges of value and are presumably motivated to engage in creative thinking and practices by the possibility and potential of creating something of value to themselves or others. But we live in a social-cultural economic world and other people have views on whether a practice, performance or product has value and it’s their views that count as to whether something has value in a social-cultural or commercial sense. In the latter part of the discussion we saw that value was multidimensional and it is therefore not surprising that we value ‘things’ differently according to the weight we accord the different dimensions. For me, the really interesting aspect of this is how we learn to value what we value through a lifetime of exposure to the norms of our family, friends and peers, our interests and work and our culture and other cultures, noting that it is only by pursuing things which lie outside the norms that we can creatively achieve. I find this a fascinating part of the conundrum that is creativity and perhaps what we value and our judgement of it in what we do, is an part of our unique creativity.
 
As Carly Lassig mentioned in her post we can use the 5C framework (1) we developed from the 4C framework (2) to map the contexts for creating new value and the location of norms for judging the value of creative achievements. By this I mean a tangible expression or manifestation of someone’s creativity (thinking and actions) in the formation of something new (practice, performance or product). To keep it simple the following narrative focuses only on individuals rather than collaborations or group enterprises.

In all domains of the 5C framework creators are engaged in thinking and practices that have the potential to create novelty and new value. As Carl Rogers’ humanistic perspective on creativity tells us (3), first and foremost it is the creators themselves who value their creative achievement. Only they can understand why and how the phenomenon emerged in the circumstances of their life and only they can experience the formation of a creative achievement. The value they ascribe to an achievement might be very different to the value that others ascribe.

​In the little-c domain individuals pursue novelty and create new value in the circumstances of their everyday life. Their creative achievements might only be known and valued by themselves or by the people who their achievements directly affect – for example a mum preparing a novel meal (not the norm) for her family. But such achievements might be broadcast more widely and appreciated by others – people who use Instagram, Twitter or Facebook for example have friends/followers who might be interested in their creative achievement. In such an environment some of these little-c achievements have the potential to ‘go viral’ to become part of popular culture, even if its only for a short period of time. It can be argued that the advent of social media enables more people to be exposed to individuals’ little-c creative achievements, and therefore implicated in their valuation, than at any time in our history.             
                                  
In the educational domain (ed-c) judgements on the value of an individual’s achievement are usually made by a teacher against a set of pre-determined criteria but may also include external examiners if performance is in the context of an examination. As Carly indicates in her post based on her own research (4) – how a learner values their creative achievement may be different to what a teacher values. Teachers have an important role to play in sharing their judgements of value through verbal or written feedback during the production of an achievement – whether a performance or artefact. Much of this feedback is informal and spontaneous as a teacher interacts with her students, but some of the feedback might be more formal and deliberative as a teacher formally evaluates and judges a piece of work and provides written feedback. Chrissi’s post on her interactions with her tutor on a creative writing course, show values can be shared, communicated and progressively understood through this interactive relationship. Peers also may be exposed to an individual’s achievement and their teacher’s comments and they also form opinions on value. In fact, this context for being exposed to the achievements of others is the way in which we come to understand the norms of our environment and it prepares us for learning what this means in the domains in which we will work.

As we move into domains of expertise, more people are involved in decisions as to whether a creative achievement is of value. Every context is different, if we imagine the development of a new innovative product it might include peers in a design team, managers, sales reps, managers of retail outlets and the buyers and users of the product – the customers. In an entrepreneurial environment like a start-up the valuation of a new product or service it might also involve investors. In the commercial world factors other than creativity come into play in the valuation of a novel product. In the academic world where the development of new knowledge and ideas is the product of creative achievement – it is experts in the discipline who act as peer reviewers, journal editors or who sit in the committees of grant awarding bodies who judge value. If we imagine someone in the performing arts field it might include other performers, a performance director and production teams, audiences and professional critics. Of course, amongst this diverse group of actors some voices will be more influential than others in determining value and persuading others with their opinions.

The Big-C level is an extraordinary achievement in any field in which the value of what is created is widely acknowledged. The valuing of such achievements is usually led by experts in the field and promoted through awards, media and education. One of the features of Big-C creative achievements is their enduring character. They are often the foundational building blocks for culture in a domain and so are valued in a historical sense for advancing some aspect of the domain.
​
Perhaps one of the most interesting perspectives to emerge from the discussion related to where access to new ideas or products are restricted for commercial, political or other reasons, so that value can only be appreciated by those with the power to control the flow of information.
​
Thanks to all who contributed to the discussion.
 
Sources
1 Jackson, N.J. and Lassig, C. (2020) Exploring and Extending the 4C Model of Creativity: Recognising the value of an ed-c contextual domain. Creative Academic Magazine CAM15 https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
2 Kaufman, J and Behgetto R (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity Review of General Psychology Vol. 13, No. 1, 1–12
Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/.../228345133_Beyond_Big_and...
3 Rogers, C. (1954). Toward a Theory of Creativity. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 11, 249-260.
4 Lassig, C. J. (2012) Perceiving and pursuing novelty : a grounded theory of adolescent creativity. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/50661/

​ SOURCES

1. Kaufman, J. C., & Beghetto, R. A. (2009). Beyond big and little: The four c model of creativity. Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013688
2. Rogers, C. (1954). Toward a Theory of Creativity. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 11, 249-260
3. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins
4. Bettencourt, K (2014)   Rogers and Csikszentmihalyi on Creativity The Person Centered Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1-2, 2014 https://www.adpca.org/system/files/documents/journal/Bettencourt,%20Kristen%20(2014)%20-%20Rogers%20and%20Csikszentmihalyi%20on%20Creativity.pdf
5. Jackson N J & Lassig C (2020) Exploring and Extending the 4C Model of Creativity: Recognising the value of an ed-c contextual-cultural domain Creative Academic Magazine #15 p 47-63 Available at: https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html
6. Lassig, C. J. (2012) Perceiving and pursuing novelty : a grounded theory of adolescent creativity. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/50661/

This week we are tackling the question of how creativity relates to health and well-being and this morning I invited participants to share a story about something they do fairly regularly that gives them opportunities to express themselves creatively which impacts positively on their wellbeing which I take to mean a ‘dynamic state, in which the individual is able to develop their potential, work productively and creatively, build strong and positive relationships with others, and contribute to their community. It is enhanced when an individual is able to fulfil their personal and social goals and achieve a sense of purpose in society’.(1 p10) The ability to fulfil one’s individual and social potential, is therefore a defining feature of wellbeing.

As Ken Robinson is fond of saying ‘academics live in their head’ and writing is perhaps the way that most academic’s communicate to others what is in their head. Probably the only things I do on a regular basis i.e. most days, is write and create illustrations alongside my writing. If someone asks me what do you do? My first thought is, ‘I write a lot’. I write blog posts and content for websites, journal and magazine articles and books, in the past I have written a multitude of reports and working papers. I hate to think what proportion of my adult life has been spent writing. Perhaps, for people like me there is a need for a ‘writing app’ like the ‘footsteps app’. I have led the life of a writer in many different contexts for work and for pleasure. Writing and illustrating are ‘work’ in the sense of producing something for an audience and a purpose, and a hobby – in the sense of producing something for myself. In fact, all my writing starts off as writing for myself and then some of it is re-purposed for an audience and a context.

Writing is the means by which I am able to immerse my ‘self’ in my thoughts. It’s a process of growth whereby thoughts and feelings are represented in words and then words and phrases are written and rewritten over and over again until the point when I let them go. I cannot read anything I have written without making changes to it because there is always a better way of saying something. Ever since I started writing for audiences other than teachers (as a doctoral student) I have also turned ideas into pictures or diagrams. This is a form of self-expression driven by a desire to understand the relationships, interactions and processes between the ideas and the things I am trying to explain. I enjoy working with illustrators who are more talented than I am to turn ideas into graphical narratives. But I prefer to write by myself as this is the essence of my self-expression.

I can’t say that sitting at a laptop for many hours a day is healthy. In fact its positively bad for my posture and health as I stumble out of my chair and try to get my knees working again. Furthermore, the combination of writing and my wife’s delicious cooking has dire consequences for my shape. I do try and get outside to do something physical most days. But even then I may well be thinking about the stuff I am writing about.

Writing is a process in which I crystallise ideas and feelings from my cognitive/psychological world. It’s always wondrous to me, in the sense that I have no idea what will emerge on my screen until it has emerged. It feels creative even when there is a struggle to put words on a page. It is a sort of emergent synthesis in the sense that I connect up particular ideas, in particular orders with particular words to create sentences with meanings some of which feel original to me and may well be original to others or even to the whole of mankind for all I know. What I write may, and often does, start off not making much sense but by the time I have finished it more or less makes sense to me. Writing is a way of searching for and eventually discovering new meaning: it’s all about the creation of meaning and perhaps persuading others that these meanings have value.  And this is particularly the case in a body of work like a book or article. The creative value is in the collection of meanings that are brought together in a way that no-one has ever brought together before. Writing is not an act in isolation -thinking, reading, writing and illustrating are woven together in the experience of writing. It is the process of weaving things together that results in something new and unique, and this gives me pleasure, makes me feel fulfilled and sustains me (my ‘self’) as a scholar. Perhaps it is this idea of sustaining and developing an aspect of myself that I value that is at the heart of a key part of my wellbeing.

There is one more aspect of writing that I should acknowledge. I wrote a lot of journal articles and several books for publishers until I began to realise about 15 years ago that this meant that most people would not read them Since then most of what I have written is openly accessible through my own websites or hosted on platforms like academia.edu and ResearchGate. It was one of the reasons I started my own open access on-line magazines to bypass publishers intent on making money from writers.

I get little feedback from people who read what I have written but when I do it is generally positive and it makes me feel good. More importantly, I know I benefit hugely in my work from the literature I have read and it’s only because others have shared their ideas through their writing that I am even able to have my own ideas. So writing is the way I honour this tradition and add my own ideas to my culture. And I know that when I read and I’m enthused by the writings of people long gone like - John Dewey, Eduard Lindeman, Carl Rogers to name a few I know their ideas live on in me. And I know that in some small way my own writing may spark the imaginations of others and this thought provides me with a vague sense of immortality which is also good for my soul.

I wrote this post without looking up a definition of what wellbeing meant and I added the definition after I had written it. I think my story captures well the idea that through my writing I am able to develop my potential and work productively and creatively on work that I find meaningful. Teressa Amabile makes the point that to be positive about doing something we have to find what we are doing meaningful. Writing is generally a solitarty activity so I am not directly building strong and positive relationships with others. I am however building strong relationships with the ideas and materials I am working with and perhaps indirectly I am connecting to the readers of my work. Also in the #creativeHE forum I am through my writing contributing to my community and I believe I am contributing to my cuture - the discipline and the field. I believe through my writing I am fulfilling my individual and social potential

​And just to let you know, writing this little piece has given me pleasure  and helped me understand myself a little more.

Source
1). The Government Office for Science. (2008). Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project: Final project report. (Foresight). London: The Government Office for Science

POSTSCRIPT 01/05/20

Slowly, over the discussion this week I have realised that my sense of wellbeing is as subjective as my concept of creativity. My wellbeing is linked to my health – whether I am free from illness and pain, and my level of fitness and physical capability, my identities – who I think I am embedded in the life I lead (my circumstances), what I value in my life – the people I love, the people who love me, my home, family and friends and the network of people who I interact with in my work, and my way of life - the things I love doing and the sense of achievement and fulfilment I gain from involving myself in these things, like being with my family, my work and hobbies, working in my garden, travelling and seeing new places, having new experiences and sharing the things I have produced with others.
 
After reading about psychological wellbeing I learn my wellbeing has two components. Firstly, the “hedonic” or happiness, dimension of subjective well-being (SWB, 1) consisting of a cognitive component that evaluates how satisfied I am with every aspect of my life and an affective component characterized by the prevalence of positive emotions rather than negative emotions as I experience my life. The second element is my psychological wellbeing (2), the “eudaimonic” component, relates to the search for and creation of meaning in my life, as I seek and find purposes and try to realise these purposes and become a better version of myself (3).
 
At any time the way I feel about myself, my circumstance and my life (past, present and imaginings of the future) changes as stuff happens. Mostly, it has been positive and has enabled me to grow and become a different person but there have certainly been times in my life when my life have been transformed. I have been fortunate in being able to absorb the ups and downs but sometimes what happens impacts profoundly on one, several or all aspects of the above to the point where I will never be or feel the same again. For example, the loss of my first wife over 20 years ago, or the serious illness of one of my children seven years ago, or making a radical career change 30 years ago.

​For the first time I am beginning to appreciate that my creativity must play into my complex mix of subjective and psychological wellbeing. Quite how, when and why it does are questions to be pondered. But the subject of this post, my writing as a medium for my creativity, is probably embedded in the eudaimonic aspects of my psychological wellbeing linked to my identity as a scholar.
 
Sources
1 Kahneman, D., Diener, E., and Schwarz, N. (eds). (1999). Well-Being: The Foundations of hedonic psychology. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
2 Ryff, C.D., Singer, B.H. and Love, G.D. (2004) Positive health: connecting wellbeing with biology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 359, 1383-1394.
3 Ryan RM, Deci EL. On happiness and human potentials: a review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. A Rev Psychol. 2001;52:141–166. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141.

This week we have been discussing the educational domain as an environment for the development and use of creativity. Facilitating the discussion forced me to think of key questions I might pose and knowing that our community contained representatives from all levels of educational systems and representatives from different national education systems I tried to be inclusive in the way I formed the topic for discussion. Out of it (building on the earlier conversations see previous post) has come the dawning of new ways of thinking about creativity in the educational environment drawing on Carly Lassig’s threefold categorisation of creativity developed through her doctoral research and grounded theory of adolescents creativity (1) namely:
 
1 Creative Personal Expression - expressing aspects of self – personality, emotions and ideas in novel ways            
2 Creative Task Achievement - using creativity to achieve a particular task or external demand    
3 Creative Boundary Pushing - extending typical and expected knowledge in order to pursue new understandings and outcomes.
 
This way of viewing creativity has triggered new insights for me. While acknowledging the wisdom in ‘you can’t make blanket claims about education’… I am going to argue that Carly’s threefold categorisation of creativity offers a crude first order mapping of learner practices and creative responses within our education system.
 
I blame my need for pictures to explain ideas on my being a geologist but perhaps I was attracted to geology in the first place because narrative pictures are an important feature of communication in the discipline. So I created a picture from Carly's categorisations.

If it was be possible to map particular contexts, practices and outcomes accurately we might anticipate that most situations in education where creativity is manifest, would plot within the conceptual space near the base of the triangle with creative self-expression tending to characterise early years and primary level  of the education system and the arts and perhaps humanities disciplines at secondary and tertiary level.
 
At secondary and tertiary levels of our education systems creative effort is more likely to be focused on problem solving in disciplinary contexts perhaps with some opportunity for creative self-expression. Creative effort in research-based post-graduate education and perhaps research-based project work at undergraduate level is directed towards task accomplishment and extending the boundaries of knowledge fields. Again, both of these contexts may well be accompanied by some opportunities for creative self-expression.

​So is Ken Robinson, in his much watched TED Talk (2) ‘Do schools kill creativity?’, wrong in the assertions he makes? Is it not the case that he is seeing creativity through only one of the three lenses that Carly identifies? When we view our education systems as whole systems, are they trying to encourage creativity and apply creative effort in the three different ways that Carly Lassig reveals.
 
In doing some background research for this post I discovered an interesting TEDx talk by Tim Leunig “Why real creativity is based on knowledge”(3). It offers a different and I believe a more considered and accurate representation of creativity in schools to that offered by Ken Robinson. This passage in an RSA blog post (4) captures the proposition.
 
“What is striking about the two talks is how different are the definitions of creativity on which they are based. To Robinson, creativity is about imagination, self-expression and divergent thinking. In contrast, Leunig’s examples of creativity show how, through the use of logic and the application of scientific principles, existing knowledge can be marshalled to create innovative new solutions to longstanding problems. To Robinson, creativity is natural – something you’re born with. Whereas for Leunig, it is highly dependent on the prior acquisition of biologically secondary knowledge – something you need to be taught. For Robinson, creativity is an alternative to literacy, and is often displayed by those who struggle academically; people who display what Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner would describes as an alternative or non-cognitive form of intelligence. For Leunig, creativity is a cognitive competence that gains form and substance within particular knowledge domains – domains to which the illiterate cannot gain access.”
 
Looking at the systems level of education (not the experiences of individual learners), it is my belief that, although we might criticise our systems of education for placing too much emphasis on focusing creative effort on externally motivated tasks and assessment exercises at the expense of creative self-expression, this is not surprising given that this type of creativity serves the knowledge economy rather than health and wellbeing of individuals. I now see more clearly that the creative effort within our educational systems is biased towards preparing people for disciplined ways of working in the Pro-c(5) domain of creativity. This is why, I argued with Carly Lassig in a recent Creative Academic Magazine article(6), we need to recognise an ed-c domain for creativity.

What works at a systems level for a society that creates this type of system does not necessarily 'work' for individuals in particular learning contexts. The system is organised for populations and societies not for individual needs, interests, aptitudes, talents and so on. At this implementation level it is down to the interests, skills and expertise and motivations of the key agents in the system - the teachers and their assistants and their parental allies, in encouraging and coaching individuals to discover for themselves their own creative spirit. It is at this level that people feel that the ‘system’ is not working for them. It is at this level that people feel the creative spirit that drives them to express themselves in particular ways is quashed and the potential as an imaginative creative being is inhibited. And this goes to the heart of the problem of creativity in education - how is creative effort at the level of individuals and small groups actually inspired, encouraged, supported, facilitated within this blended system of creative effort? It seems to me that this is the level where pedagogy really matters. Where teachers who care about the creative development of their students must develop a repertoire of skills and practices to encourage creative self-expression alongside the more discipline-based and assessment-driven problem solving which may demand qualities of detachment, objectivity, evaluation, critique, assessment and judgement that are likely to inhibit or destroy self-expression.
 
The words of Tim Ingold, who was commenting on a paper I had asked him to review, ring in my ears. "First, it seems to me that the paper touches on a key area in which the actual practice of science (here, geological mapping) flies in the face of ‘official’ scientific protocols, and comes much closer to the work of art (and indeed of anthropology). For in it, imagination and experience are creatively fused rather than held apart, as official science requires; moreover that fusion is deeply embedded in the personal sensibility of practitioners, in their hands and minds, in their perceptual acuity and ways of working. Geologists literally become one with their rocks! And that is quite contrary to the principle of scientific objectivity which requires that scientists remain personally immune to what they study, an immunity conferred by ‘methodology’. I have written about this in my Anthropology and/as Education book (specifically, pp. 70-1)."

I take these words to mean that somehow we have, through our education systems, to bring together the science of problem solving in which creativity plays a part, and the art of creative self-expression. People as they interact with their problems and the things they care about in their particular environments are the agents for blending these different dimensions of creativity together to create new meanings, new things and solutions. It is this blending of creative thought and effort that makes people and not machines. This should be the goal of the ed-c domain of creativity to lay the foundations for creativity in domains where experience, knowledge and expertise are grown not through books and lectures but through a world of enactment in a world in formation.
 
Sources
1 Lassig, C. J. (2012) Perceiving and pursuing novelty : a grounded theory of adolescent creativity. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/50661/
2 Ken Robinson Do Schools Kill Creativity TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&t=28s
3Tim Leunig “Why real creativity is based on knowledge https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=93&v=vajIsWwHEMc&feature=emb_logo
4Julian Astle Do Skills Really “Kill Creativity”?  RSA Blog Post 25th April 2018
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2018/04/do-schools-kill-creativity
5 Kaufman, J and Beghetto R (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity Review of General Psychology Vol. 13, No. 1, 1–12 1
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228345133_Beyond_Big_and_Little_The_Four_C_Model_of_Creativity
6 Jackson N.J. & Lassig, C. (2020) Exploring and Extending the 4C Model of Creativity: Recognising the value of an ed-c contextual- cultural domain Creative Academic Magazine #15 Available at:
https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

ADDENDUM evaluating the idea of creative self-expression using the 4C contexts and norms framework

The latest issue of Creative Academic Magazine CAM15 curates the recent #creativeHE discussion ‘You Can’t Teach Creativity But You Can Learn It’. It also explores and extends the well known 4C model of creativity and advocates a new #ed-c (educational) domain for creativity. 

The 4C model of creativity developed by James Kaufman and Ron Beghetto in 2009(1) provides a useful framework or cognitive tool within which general concepts of creativity can be located. It helps to explain some of the complexity associated with the phenomenon of creativity. The value in their framework was to extend the ideas of everyday personally meaningful small-c creativity, and Big-C eminent culturally meaningful creativity to include "mini-c"—creativity that is inherent in the process of learning, and "Pro-c" creativity—relating to the creativity of experts working in a professional domain i.e. a domain where specialist knowledge and skill is needed to perform.
 
This map of creativity as a phenomenon made a lot of sense to me and I used it whenever I was invited to talk about creativity. But two things happened last year that caused me to see more potential in the framework.

In May 2019 while attending the UK Creativity Researchers conference at the University of Central Lancashire I enjoyed a talk given by Thomas Colin, a doctoral researcher at the University of Plymouth. During the talk he showed a representation of a 2x3 grid for understanding creativity with ‘context’ and ‘norm’ as the labels for the two axes of the grid. I assumed his diagram was related to the 4C model of creativity. On the train home from the conference I redrew my 4C framework diagram to incorporate the dimensions of context and norms and shared it with Thomas to find out how I might give him credit for his idea. He subsequently sent me an article which explained the background to his diagram, but he assured me that he himself had not related his matrix to the 4C model, although he could see the value in doing so.
 
Simultaneously I was facilitating an on-line conversation in the #creativeHE Forum in our ‘Lets Get Creative’ festival. During the conversation I introduced the 4C model of creativity as a tool to help us interpret our own creative involvement in the festival4 In response to my post, one of the participants recommended that I look at Carly Lassig’s PhD dissertation(2). After reading Carly’s work and appreciating the synergies in our ideas, I contacted Carly and she readily agreed to collaborate on an article(3) for the magazine.

Carly and I believe that there are a number of compelling reasons for recognising ed-c as an important contextual and cultural (norms and values) domain within which a person learns to use, apply and develop their creativity. Firstly, education, at least in the developed world, is something that every person experiences for between 10 or 11 years and many people experience for up to 15 or 16 years. Secondly, it’s a generic domain in which people have to conform to and behave within strong cultural norms, values and rules that impose strong constraints on the use of imagination and creativity. Indeed, education’s preoccupation with such things as ‘one right answer’, ‘the correct way of doing something’ and ‘only valuing and measuring what can be predicted’, may well inhibit or stifle creativity in many aspects of education. Education in fact, is a domain in which learners’ natural tendency to creativity in a way they might experience in their everyday lives, is often severely restricted or curtailed.
 
Educational commentators like Sir Ken Robinson, say that education kills a young person’s creativity, but another and more positive way of appreciating what education does, is to see it as an environment in which people learn to use their creativity in a way that is consistent with the requirements of the subject and the pedagogical task. This is the third and most important reason for why education should be seen as a significant and distinctive context for creativity. Through education people are introduced to disciplinary cultural ways of thinking and behaving and they begin to appreciate the domain specifics of creativity which they may later pursue in their careers. In education, learners develop the foundational academic knowledge and skills to make use of such knowledge that is essential for creativity in any knowledge work. They also learn what is valued in different subject and problem solving contexts, and in certain pedagogical environments they may also experience the creation of new value. Understanding both of these concepts is essential for the evaluation of creativity in a disciplinary learning environment.
 
Education is a domain of practice in which those with power and authority - the teachers, can act as agents for learners’ creativity. Through appropriate pedagogical practices teachers as the key influencers in the system, are able to encourage, support and facilitate learners’ creativity and creative development. Alternatively, their pedagogical practices can inhibit learners’ creative development. Creative development takes place alongside the intellectual ‘undergoing’ (academic development) of the learner within the cultural traditions and constraints of specific subjects, disciplines, institutions & systems. In other words, development is ‘pragmatic’ serving the needs and of priorities of education. Unfortunately, in many subjects in secondary and tertiary education, these needs and priorities all too often pay little attention to the creative development of individuals.
                                                                                                                             Figure 5C contexts and norms framework for creativity incorporating the ed-c domain

If the argument is accepted that the disciplinary foundations of creativity are laid down in secondary and tertiary education then we can also argue that ed-c is the stepping-stone to Pro-c creativity in a way that little-c never can be.  Such reasoning allows us to argue that education provides a significant generic context within which creativity is used, developed, recognised and valued and for many people it lays the foundations for future creativity in their chosen professional/work domain. Figure 8 shows how an ed-c contextual domain can be incorporated into the contexts and norms framework and how ed-c provides the foundations for discipline-based Pro-c creativity.



​SOURCES

1. Kaufman, J and Beghetto R (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity Review of General Psychology Vol. 13, No. 1, 1–12 1

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228345133_Beyond_Big_and_Little_The_Four_C_Model_of_Creativity
2.     Lasig, C. J. (2012) Perceiving and pursuing novelty : a grounded theory of adolescent creativity. PhD thesis, Queensland          University of Technology. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/50661/
​3      Jackson, N.J. and Lassig C J (2020) Exploring and Extending the 4C Model of Creativity: Recognising the value of an
       ed-c contextual- cultural domain Creative Academic Magazine CAM15  https://www.creativeacademic.uk/magazine.html

At the end of every #creativeHE conversation I facilitate I ask myself what have I learned through this process. As a facilitator I try to keep the conversation going with a daily post and respond to the contributions that others make. Inevitably I learn things I didn't know before. I use my creativity to try to make the conversation happen and one of the things I do is try to illustrate the process I am trying to involve others in. This week’s theme was ‘do something that feels creative to you and share it and your thoughts about how your creativity was involved’.

I decided to make a movie of a week in the life of my garden because I know how to make such movies and I have a blog called Garden Notes to which these movies could contribute. I also thought this project would enable me to explore what creativity might mean in the making of such movies. I didn't know how I was going to make the movie at the start or what I would make the movie about but I was confident that my garden would inspire me. On the first day of our #creativeHE discussion someone talked about the 1" drawings they make everyday and this gave me the idea of making a 1 minute movie each day. So that gave me a structure to the movie I would make. I imagined I would create a new theme everyday and try and make a movie about that theme – so that was my basic principle of design. In reality, although I focused on a new theme every day, I would also photograph and film other things that were not part of this theme to build up a pool of resources I could draw on throughout the week. I filmed between May 9-16th and made my movies between May 11-18.

As the discussion evolved it became clear that some people felt that some of the artefacts being shared did not fit their understandings of creativity. I ‘happened to come across’ a blog post made by Felicia Semple (1) who runs a craft making workshops business in which she said ‘often my making is simply a process I've followed which involves little, if any, creativity. Because making is not inherently creative.’

I tend to assume that because I make something, I bring that something into existence, therefore I have created it (in the sense that creativity is about bringing entirely new things into existence. I reason they are new to me and new to the world because I am unique and my contexts and circumstances are unique). But Felicity Semple argued that bringing something into existence is not enough, the idea for what is brought into existence must come first from your imagination. A similar point was made by Kevin Byron. So at the end of the festival and discussion I posed the question what is/isn’t creative? And here I explore in the context of my own experience and the 1 minute movies I produced.

Creativity is a process and it is not just about making the little dots, the individual activities, makings and doings, but about how these individual dots connect and combine in a way that produces a larger more significant form, which in turn, over longer periods of time may connect to other forms to produce a larger whole. We can think of connecting the dots as a mechanical exercise or we can think of it as a skilful process of ‘weaving’ or ‘knitting things together’ so that isolated events become a meshwork of more meaningful relationships, interdependencies and significance. I am also a great fan of Tim Ingold’s ideas about how creativity emerges from our interactions with our environment ‘what people do with materials ……. is to follow them, weaving their own lines of becoming into the texture of material flows comprising the lifeworld. Out of this, there emerge the kinds of things we call buildings, plants, pies and paintings’ [and in my case ‘movies’] (2: p97)

Day to day we might only see and appreciate the individual dots, and this is important, but our imagination is also working at a larger temporal, relational meaning making scale, and it is at this scale that the significance of creative work can be truly valued and appreciated rather than only the micro scale of the individual dot. This is the way I view my projects within which my creativity resides be it a book, a social enterprise, a body of work or my garden notes blog. So while my 1 minute movies and narratives were an attempt to generate content for the purpose of our #creative conversation, they also served the bigger purpose of contributing to the unfolding story of me and my garden an important part of the narrative that is my current life, a narrative from which I learn about myself and explore ideas about learning ecologies.

Are my 1 min movies novel (new and original, never been seen before)? I have made many movies but the movies I made this week are new to me and they have never been seen before and therefor must be new to anyone who views them on YouTube. So I am replicating a process that isn’t novel but producing content that is.

Are they a product of my imagination – No the content of the movie did not come out of my imagination, although the design principle did. But my one minute movies nested in a bigger structure and enterprise – My Garden Notes blog whose conception was definitely the product of my imagination. The 1 minute movies are the dots (the unfolding narrative) in my blog that originated in my imagination.

What my movies are though is my response to the environment I put myself into. They are an improvisation in which decisions are made in the garden about what to/what not to film in real time and these decisions are founded on feelings as much or as more as rationality. But there is also another process going on the emergence of a story or narrative that guides decisions about what to try and film so the process turns from one of spotting and filming something to searching for something because that is telling a story that I would like to tell, so that again is where imagination is involved. It’s entangled with perception, rational thinking and emotion. Through this entanglement the process shifts from ‘point at and shoot a nice scene’, to ‘weaving a series of scenes into a meaningful story’. What these short movies are is a way of creating and sharing meaning and creativity is all about creating meaning.

You might say “well you were lucky finding the animals to film” and I won’t deny this. On May 9th sitting having my dinner I looked up to see two deer outside my window. But in the words of Louis Pasteur ‘In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind’. My movie is in the field of observation being aware of possibility is an important part of this type of movie making. I know my garden and the animals in it and their daily rhythm and I follow photographer Dewitt Jones’ advice – I try to put myself into the zones of highest potential and look for possibilities and more than one right answer within the limitations of the time I had set myself to film and produce the movie. This is the way you have to work with the photographic medium in a natural environment. It is not only a matter of chance but of skilful placement of presence in the environment at the most likely time to witness the acts that can be woven into your story.

As for the editing it gives me real pleasure to assemble the photos and video clips in movie maker and try to put them together in a story. If I have done my job in filming I already have the elements of a story but the editing enables this to be shaped into a form that will be more interesting and emotionally engaging. Most of the 1min movies are made over several hours as I take bits out and move scenes around. The music I use or natural sound effects are very important. I listen to a lot of music while I work on the computer and I go through phases of listening to particular types of music. When I find a piece I like I save it ready for using in my movies. In this way my movies become tools for curating the music I like. This is one of the ways I create value for myself and create a deeper emotional response to the film. I love kora music and have discovered that it produces the sort of music that works well with my nature movies. Early in the week I searched for and found a piece I hadn't heard before from a concert given by Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita called Llongau Térou-bi. I watched it over and over again there was so much chemistry between the two musicians. It was a long concert so I had to extract a clip from it, something I hadn’t done before.

Are the 1 minute movies valuable – yes they are to me, they gave me pleasure making them and forced me to get outside and pay attention to what was happening in the world around me. I also enjoyed editing them and deciding where to cut, where to add and how to transition between scenes. When I watch them and listen to that lovely Kora and Harp music I smile and I am happy. That in itself is a value.

The discipline of 1min was a bit of a challenge but once I got into it I thought it was a great way to make a short story and overall the collection seems to hang together reasonably well. At the larger scale I have in my imagination that when this garden passes on to the next owner I will always have access to it via my Garden Notes blog –  I consider this a creative solution to offset the loss I will undoubtedly feel when it is gone and I can no longer physically be in the space.

I don’t know whether my 1min movies have social value but I do know that lots of people look at my garden notes blog so I guess it must have some social value. Regardless of whether it has social value I do share my movies through YouTube, my blog and with the Wildlife Facebook Forum – in case they might have value to others.

So as always, it’s a matter of how we interpret creativity. My interest is not just in the creative idea but in how such ideas emerge, along with other thoughts, and are given tangible meaning and expression in the process of a unique person interacting with a particular environment as they try to accomplish something they value. The creation of value is in the eyes of the maker and its up to the maker to share what he has made so that others can see whether it has value to them.

Ideas go nowhere without the creation of a process to do something with them. We often work with rough ideas which may not be original in themselves and create a process (I would use the term a learning or practice ecology). As we participate in a process that has meaning to us we create something that has value. We 'trust' our well used processes that they will deliver something meaningful and in the process we 'undergo' to use a John Dewey term. We become a little bit different and that little bit of difference leads to our sense of wellbeing and living a meaningful life.

I always come back to Carl Rogers concept of a creative process, ‘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’ (2 p.350). I think my 1 minute movies are novel (to me). They are relational products growing out of me a unique person (my interests, motivations and interactions) and the materials, events and circumstances of my life (my garden is an important circumstance in my life) as I engage in a process that means something to me – a process that gives me pleasure and a sense of fulfilment.

Not long after I completed my 1min a day movie making project I came across a doctoral thesis written by Marta Ockuly (3) in which she proposed a definition of personal creativity that is dynamic, imagination-informed, and phenomenon-based namely,  “Creativity is the person-centered process of imagining possibilities and taking embodied expressive action to make your idea(s) real.” (3 p ii). This definition is entirely consistent with that proposed by Rogers and I like it because it emphasizes the personal embodiment of the act, rather than the product or outcome which is all too often the focus when creativity is being discussed. Marta argues (p173) “Products are possible artifacts of creativity. Creativity lives in embodied process, not products. Ideas are important, but ideas alone are not creativity. The literature is full of definitions of creativity that build on the premise that creativity is an outcome to be evaluated rather than a dynamic phenomenon and lived human experience to be developed and appreciated.”

The idea of a 1min a day movie is just an idea until it is given substance through the embodied and personal acts that enable that movie to be brought into existence. Embodiment - the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form, is not something that can easily be unpacked into components that are creative and components that are not creative. Its manifestation must be seen and appreciated in its entirety as an indivisible whole.

You can view the 1min movies on my Garden Notes Blog posts between May 12 - 18 2019. 

Sources
(1) Making is not inherently creative by Felicia Semple
http://thecraftsessions.com/blog/2018/7/27/making-is-not-inherently-creative
(2) Ingold, T. (2010) The textility of making, Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 91–102.
(3) Rogers, C.R. (1960) On becoming a person, Boston: Houghton Mifflin