Every parent knows that the thing that they most want for their unborn child is to be healthy and when you are told that your newly born child may not be - it is an unbearable burden. Over the weekend my daughter learnt that when one of her new born twins stopped breathing a week or so after he was born, he might have suffered some damage to his brain. I cannot pretend to comprehend how she must have felt all I know is how I felt and she and my grandson have not been far from my mind ever since. At such times we realise that life is not just about development in a positivistic sense. It's about coping with things that fundamentally turn your world upside down, that require love and empathy in a profound way and I ultimately providing practical help and support wherever and whenever it is needed in ways that you never imagined before. This is profound mental and emotional adjustment within a set of relationships that lie at the centre of your life. As a parent it has hard to discover anything that is good in such a situation until you see the way your daughter starts to cope with the worst situation she can imagine and becomes positive and hopeful again. It is a lesson in the resilience of the human spirit and the profound love a mother has for her child or as she calls him - her little angel.
Sunday June 24
Every parent knows that the thing that they most want for their unborn child is to be healthy and when you are told that your newly born child may not be - it is an unbearable burden. Over the weekend my daughter learnt that when one of her new born twins stopped breathing a week or so after he was born, he might have suffered some damage to his brain. I cannot pretend to comprehend how she must have felt all I know is how I felt and she and my grandson have not been far from my mind ever since. At such times we realise that life is not just about development in a positivistic sense. It's about coping with things that fundamentally turn your world upside down, that require love and empathy in a profound way and I ultimately providing practical help and support wherever and whenever it is needed in ways that you never imagined before. This is profound mental and emotional adjustment within a set of relationships that lie at the centre of your life. As a parent it has hard to discover anything that is good in such a situation until you see the way your daughter starts to cope with the worst situation she can imagine and becomes positive and hopeful again. It is a lesson in the resilience of the human spirit and the profound love a mother has for her child or as she calls him - her little angel.
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The concept of everyday creativity Ruth Richards suggests(1) that we are forever creative but sometimes its very hard to recognise any sort of creative thinking or activity in a single day. Yesterday was like that. I spent most of it in the garden trying to get it back to some sort of order after being away for a few weeks. The combination of rain and sunshine had made the grass grow to the point where it looked more like a cultivated crop than a garden. It was very physical and I was very tiered at the end. But I suppose that churning in my head were all sorts of thoughts and feelings about my recent visit to China and the people I had met and how I might continue to develop my relationships with some of them. If there was any creativity in my life that day it was in thinking how to build on my existing relationships. I had planned to set up and launch a Tweet Exchange on the theme of personal creativity and I had done this on Saturday so my focus today was in trying to engage people. So I invited all the speakers who had participated in the Chengdu conference and by the end of the day several had replied. It doesn't seem much but it meant a lot to me that people I had met only a few days before where making contributions to our topic and drawing other people in from their own network. At the end of the day I felt we had made some progress and as Teresa Amabile says - the sense of making progress provides the best conditions for nurturing our creativity (see video below ). So perhaps I will be creative today? 1) Far from being a minor or specialised part of our lives, our everyday creativity - our originality of everyday life- is first of all, a survival capability. It is also a universal capability. But,........our everyday creativity offers us more: It offers a dynamic process and a powerful way of living. When developed, it can open all of us to new depths, richness and presence (Richards 2007:3). Richards, R., (2007) Introduction, in R. Richards (ed) Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature. Washington: American Psychological Association. 1-22. Teresa Amabile - Progress Principle ![]() There is nothing quite like experiencing a new place for bringing home to you the importance of place and space in determining who you are and I have always thought that travel, especially if it involves going somewhere you have never been before, can fundamentally change your understanding about the world I have just spent 5 days in Chengdu, a large city in the west of China, to attend a conference on creativity in higher education. I was met at the airport by two very likeable student volunteers who are studying English and translation studies at Sichuan University. By volunteering to meet and greet they felt they were enhancing their education. The plane was delayed so it was quite late when we arrived but I was greatly relieved to see them and they whisked me the hotel in the centre of the city and then helped me check in - which was great because I my room booking hadn't worked and the receptionist did not speak English. It required quite a lot of negotiation. The city at night looked like any other city but I took a walk in the early morning rush hour and it is quite different to anywhere else I have been. We are on a busy main road, 3 lanes in each direction and tall grey concrete buildings on either side. At 8am it was really bustling with traffic in all directions including bikes and motorbikes/scooters on the pavement. The sounds were like any city but the smells were different to anything I had experienced before, except perhaps for Chinatown in London. The people looked similar as they walked briskly to work or university, which is just next door to the hotel. One interesting thing I noticed was that the footbridges over the busy road did not have steps that had stepped ramps and then I realised these were to enable scooters to ride over them. When I got back I went to breakfast determined to try the Chinese cuisine. In fact, there was only Chinese cuisine. A long table with perhaps 30 dishes on it and many vegetables I had never seen before (there were no labels). I had a good go at trying about 15 of them I recon.. Only small amounts but enough to discover which I likes and which I didn't. Many of the tastes were familiar from the Chinese food I'd eaten before but a lot were alien to my taste buds - quite a lot were very bland or subtle depending on your point of view. What was also strange to me was sitting at large round tables with people who I didn't know. In English hotels we have small tables and you keep to your own space. It does us good from time to time to experience a new place which is culturally very different from our own in order to remind us what it feels like to experience that sense of foreignness and inadequacy (because of an absence of language and cultural understanding), unfamiliarity and uncertainty because the context is so very different to what we know. ![]() The conference itself was focused on how to bring about change in higher education so that it is more able to develop students' creative potential..with a strong focus on the reform of Chinese universities so that can prepare students so that they are more innovative. I was an invited speaker and I was treated with great respect. My presentation, on the afternoon of the first day on developing personal creativity through lifewide education seemed to be well received although the ideas were alien to many of the participants. When I reflect on the conference I don't think I learnt very much about creativity - there was too much replication of existing ideas and not enough new ideas (for me). But I realise I wasn't there for me. I was there to play my part in sharing some of my ideas. And what really struck me was the enormous thirst for knowledge and new ideas that might form the basis for new strategies to help China move forward in the direction it has set itself. I was delighted and honoured to be told that my book Developing creativity in higher education was being translated by students of the university as one of 10 books on creativity that have been selected to provide a starting point for creative scholarship and practice. ![]() So what did I learn? By being in Chengdu, by listening to the Sichuan University institutional leaders, talking to participants especially the students who did all the behind the scenes organisation and looked after participants individual needs, I felt I learnt a lot about Chinese higher education and what it was trying to accomplish. From the students I learnt what it was like to be a student and for a young person to live in China today. In other words my most important learning was contextual and relational. I also learnt a lot about what is valued in Chinese culture. Throughout the conference the meals had been one of the highlights - Sichuan food is some of the most delicious food I have ever taken and it is a very social affair. We were also treated to some wonderful restaurants - some of which were in buildings constructed in a traditional way. Chengdu is full of wonderfully recreated old buildings that enable you to appreciate the past. But the last day in Chengdu was very special. The university had provided us with a conducted tour of the city with an emphasis on giving us a flavour of their cultural heritage. The tour guide 'Bobby' was a brilliant and knowledgeable communicator -perhaps the most creative person I had met all week. Written on his T-short were the words There are two sorts of people in the world - those that entertain and those that observe.. he was most definitely in the first category. ![]() We set off at 8.30am and he talked us through the day on the way to our first stop the Panda sanctuary about an hour out of the city where I expanded my knowledge of Panda's a thousand fold..and got some great photos.. ![]() Then it was back into the city for a wonderful traditional Sichuan lunch shared with the other participants on our day trip. - the wonderful multidish Sichuan 'snack' ![]() After lunch we went to the most amazing museum built on the site of a 3000 year old town - the Jinsha site museum. The architecture and the methods used to display the site will remain with me for ever... It was impossible not to be humbled by the creativity and craftsmanship and use of technology by these ancient people and at the same time be overwhelmed by the creativity in the architects' designs (apparently a graduate student who won an open competition, and the way artefacts had been displayed. I could not help but compare these concrete manifestations of creativity with our thinking and talking about it in an abstract way. ![]() After another splendid meal in the evening we went to the Sichuan opera and were treated to another cultural feast - including opera, shadow shapes, Erhu music, drama, and costume/face changing.. all local traditions and very interesting.. Again I was struck by the enormous creative talent on display. The audio file records some of the Chinese opera. Postscript: At the end of my talk one of the participants asked me a question which I did not fully understand.. he was making a comment about the contribution of personal creativity to culture equating to the production of low culture... It was only after experiencing the things that I have described that I now understand what he was saying. I think he was saying that personal creativity unless it is dedicated to contributing to a form of art or craft that is accepted as an important form of cultural reproduction will only ever produce/re-reproduce low cultural forms - popular culture.
![]() One of the ways that personal creativity is more likely to have social value is if the creative object is co-created ie where an individual expresses their creativity through their particular talents and another individual who understands the symbolism in the artefact and guides its creation with suggestions. I have recently experienced an example of this in working with an illustrator to create a cover design for a Guide to Reflection we are publishing. In commissioning the work the artist was sent a copy of the Guide and title page 'Learning through Life' A Guide to Reflecting on Experience. But the first sketch that came back was disappointing seeming to represent life as an up and down linear journey. (image 1). Following an initial email conversation that this did not represent the sort of understanding of lifewide learning that we were trying to convey, K created a series of sketches over a few days and I gave him feedback to move the imagery in the direction that contained more meaning for me and for the other people involved in our lifewide learning project. The following series of sketches depict the evolution of a new design through a continuous email conversation. ![]() To: Norman Jackson <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, 24 May 2012, 14:55 Subject: RE: chalk mountain commission Hello Norman, Please find the revised front cover image roughs. I have read the text you sent me and worked on the thought that Lifetime Learning is not linear and introduced a sort of jagged structure to try and indicate this rather that try the mountain based approach. I have also included typography in the illustration, to make the ideas much stronger, as well as adding more colours. The image can be edited and I can move the text around and make them bolder. Please let me know your thoughts and if you feel this is the right direction for the rest of the illustrations. Please also let me know from the previous batch what needs altering or, after seeing this, if you would like all of them redone in similar fashion. I would be grateful if you get back to me as soon as you get this, the quicker your feedback, the quicker I can refine and edit the images. Regards K On 26 May 2012, at 08:38, "norman jackson"wrote: Thanks kiboko this much better. Here is a little more guidance to help us get us there 1) Bottom left box needs the word DISCOVER under it and an image of someone finding something.. like a eureka moment .. perhaps kneeling down to look at a flower? 2) Image of person on the right needs the word LEARN written vertically behind him so the words around him are REFLECT, IMAGINE & LEARN 3 Top right figure needs to be kneeling putting his hand out to help the person climbing the ladder. 4) Get rid of two back packers at top and word DISCOVERY 5) The word next to the top figure lending a helping hand should be SHARE 6) I would also like the word LEARN to be written along the diagonal line where the boy is reading. best wishes norman ![]() We were now well on the way to creating an image that I thought had the right sort of meaning. My suggestions were to add an image of someone exploring the unknown and to add another image of the person on the bottom right at the top with the word BECOMING next to it. ![]() This is the final drawing which I thought represented the ideas very well. ![]() And here is the final image which I really like. Looking back it was an enjoyable experience working with K to produce an image that we both took ownership of. Although I did not create the image I did contribute to the form and content of the image so that it held the meanings that were important to convey in the guide. |
PurposeTo develop my understandings of how I learn and develop through all parts of my life by recording and reflecting on my own life as it happens. I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life
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