We are surrounded by stories - the stories that make up our own life, the stories that make up the lives of our family and friends, the dramas on the TV, in the news on social media. I went to see the film 'Lion' this week.. my goodness what a powerful emotionally engaging story that is.We and the world seem to be made up of stories and some of them move us greatly.

I had an email this week from a close friend who told me that she had started writing children's stories again 'I have started writing again and it seems to help be have a balance... it is an escape from academia... and a way to create new realities.' I recognised the wisdom in these words that it is important to have spaces in which to create that are different to the spaces we normally inhabit for work. And the things we create are often stories.. quite apart from any other artefact that emerges.

In the last couple of months I have been cultivating a space with one of the members of my band (G) in order to try and create a musical. Every song in it is a story and together they make a single overarching story.  This is a significant undertaking in time, effort and challenge. We began in November throwing some ideas around and shaping a narrative and I'm now well and truly inhabiting this space on a daily basis. I know I'm fully engaged when I can't leave something alone I have to keep going back in and tinkering and I wake up with an idea of how to improve something, or the idea comes to me when I'm doing something else.

Our process is fundamentally a story making and story telling process through words and music.  Over many years G has written many songs with some great tunes. He is very talented. We began by creating a narrative that provided scope for incorporating the songs. It's a typical boy meets girl, they fall in love, they have a baby and fall out with parents, they struggle, they grow apart, he messes up, they realise they do love each and come back together so there is a happy ending. We have selected 25 of G's songs and effectively we are repurposing them as the objects in the story. We will have a narrator but the emotional engagement will be through the songs.  So my contribution has been to develop the narrative (the spoken words of the narrator) and re-write the lyrics so that they reflect the story.  Like most things the more effort you put in the more you get out and this week I have put a lot of effort in rewording ten of the 28 songs.  I have put all our recordings onto my website and I listen to the tune while I rewrite the words. G is away at the moment so I have been emailing the revised songs to him for his approval. The process is one of adaptation but the final effect will be to create something entirely new.. It fits the idea that much of our creativity involves  taking something and combining it with something else to make something new... in this case we are taking existing tunes repositioning them within a narrative to produce a new song.... then all the songs and the narrative add up to hopefully a new and substantial (for us) creative work - a musical story..that has never existed before.. Then we will move to the next stage which is performing it with the help and involvement of other people..   I think this picture which I adapted from an  picture by David Kananga nicely captures our process.
 
source http://wombflashforest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/soundtracks-2-methods_11.html

Yes it is really good to have a space for creativity that is very different to the spaces we  use to express our creativity in our working life. Its not so much a particular physical space in fact I realised that this type of project happens in lots of different spaces.... we have a rehearsal room (specialist space) where we play (experiment and try things out) and record, but the work of creating can be done anywhere.. sitting here at my computer, out for a walk on the hill...(in fact that is a good space), strumming a guitar in the living room or driving somewhere. It is an ecology in which there is a constellation of places and spaces for both of us but we only physically come together in one space/place the rehearsal room.

Invention takes place in a combination of physical spaces that contain within them the mental/emotional spaces in which words, lines, stories, images and tunes can be imagined, searched for, discovered, played with, refined and recorded. While its possible to be creative without technology (you can hum a tune and put words to it and sing it) technology really facilitates the process. We use instruments, recording devices, computer and resources on the internet (rhymezone is particularly useful) and the internet (my website) enables us to curate our recordings and narratives, and communicate and share ideas via email as they emerge, rather than waiting for some future moment.

Here's one of our songs G singing and playing guitar me on drums  'It happened Suddenly' 

​One of the great joys in life is to discover something that we did not know. Sometimes it’s by chance but often it emerges through deliberate acts of searching in order to find out. We explore to put ourselves into the places and spaces with highest potential to find what we are looking for and often discover other things along the way. This is the simplest act of exploration and it's something that is innate to being human.

Exploration occurs in all non-sessile (not fixed) animal species. It's the way in which organisms make sense of their environment and change their environment if they have to. It's a fundamental part of an organisms ecology for surviving: an organism's life depends on the success of it's explorations to find food and water if they are a land animal, security (safe places to rest) and procreation (they need to find mates to propagate their species). Exploration is programmed into the DNA of life and is a fundamental process in the ecology of every organism and every ecosystem.
 
This goes for people too. The history of mankind is a history of exploration - countless small steps and few giant leaps. Only through exploration have we come to understand the world and the universe we inhabit. There is no other way of achieving this. Every period of history, every culture and every advance in knowledge and technology is the product of many explorations, many of which did not succeed, and often unique to an individual who was motivated to explore something that no-one else had.
 
To explore or the act of exploring are used as 'transitive verbs' to denote either 1) systematic investigation, study of, search for or analysis, testing or experimentation or 2) less systematic forms of searching eg. to look into something, to become familiar with, to get a sense of.... Exploration and exploring involve travelling physically, virtually and mentally into places and spaces that are unknown or unfamiliar. Exploration is one of the ways in which we can engage all of our senses - remember when you visited a place you had never been to before and you experienced the sights, sounds, smells and pure physicality and mystery of that space that triggered all sorts of thoughts and emotions.

​To explore or the act of exploring are used as 'transitive verbs' to denote either 1) systematic investigation, study of, search for or analysis, testing or experimentation or 2) less systematic forms of searching eg. to look into something, to become familiar with, to get a sense of.... Exploration and exploring involve travelling physically, virtually and mentally into places and spaces that are unknown or unfamiliar. Exploration is one of the ways in which we can engage all of our senses - remember when you visited a place you had never been to before and you  experienced the sights, sounds, smells and pure physicality and mystery of that space that triggered all sorts of thoughts and emotions.

We explore to experience the world and to learn and understand it, and often ourselves, better. The number of contexts for exploration is only limited by our imagination and that is pretty limitless. My Christmas read this year is a book called ‘Pragmatic Imagination’(1) after I got through the glowing endorsements, of which there were many, I came across these words, ‘efficacy in the world today requires a productive entanglement of imagination and action’. I think nowhere is this productive entanglement more apparent than when we engage in exploration regardless of whether we are exploring the far reaches of the universe or are own limitations and capabilities: in fact the two are often interlinked. Indeed life itself is an exploration from the moment we play with our first toy to the moment we close our eyes for the last time.

Exploration can be a psychological process of examining ourselves, our own thinking, emotions, purposes and actions, and or a cognitive process of inquiry involving the investigation of ideas or problems in any subject or any context or circumstance.  It can involve travelling through physical spaces and landscapes that are new to us, for example when we explore a new place. And it can involve journeys in and through new virtual environments, using technological tools that are new to us and the new social interactions they present. It can involve contexts and phenomenon in our unfolding present, reconstructions of the past or imaginings of the future.

Each discipline or professional domain develops its own tools and methodologies for conducting explorations that are relevant to its particular field of knowledge and practice. For example, I once practised as a geologist working in Saudi Arabia (photo right) I travelled hundreds of miles across the country exploring the geology then used analytical techniques to date the rocks and discover their chemistry to deduce their origin. Later I worked as an exploration geologist searching for mineral deposits in western Saudi Arabia. I used satellite and airborne remote sensing techniques and prospecting methods on the ground, I mapped and recorded what I found on aerial photographs, I conducted geochemical surveys and all used all sorts of imagination and reasoning based on the knowledge I had acquired through study and my experiences while conducting exploration, but often finding something useful was a matter of chance, of putting myself into the areas of highest potential, of walking a little bit further up a dry river bed because I just had a feeling that I might discover something. And that sort of hunch or gut feeling drives a lot of what I call 'wandering with intent': mostly nothing comes of it but sometimes our persistence pays off and we discover something that is significant to us.

We explore when we innovate and we explore when we are not sure where to go next. Exploration underlies research and it underlies, what John Dewey called 'productive inquiry', 'finding out what we need to know in order to do the things we need to do'. Exploring is an attitude or orientation requiring the willingness to engage with things that are not known or are poorly understood. It may involve overcoming fear and anxiety and dealing with uncertainty but also unimagined affordance. Exploration involves a physical and mental journey as we venture into the unknown or unfamiliar and it requires courage, confidence and self-belief that we will be able to cope with whatever emerges. Being willing to explore, to put ourselves into unfamiliar contexts to deal with unfamiliar situations and problems is an important orientation that we need in life - especially when life is disrupted or when we need to break away from existing routines in order to develop.

​Exploring in order to develop something like an idea, is a necessary part of creation. Being willing to explore, and the act of exploration are important features of a self-determined ecology for learning or achieving something new. Exploration can be in any part of our ecologies for learning and achieving(2). It's the means by which we search for, develop awareness and begin to realise the potential of the affordance for something in any aspect of our life. It can be undertaken to understand the contexts and situations we are in - the problems, challenges and opportunities we have to deal with. The potential, limitations and constraints of the spaces we have at our disposal. To find and develop resources we need to achieve something, and to develop new relationships. The importance of exploration is manifest in the rich vocabulary we have developed to describe and give meaning to what we do when we are exploring. Common expressions like searching, seeking, questing, trying, playing, experimenting, investigating, developing, tinkering, messing around, poking around, sucking it to see what might happen, adapting, tweaking, examining, testing, probing, scanning, hunting, evaluating, inquiring, questioning, surveying, mapping, sifting, reviewing, studying, delving or digging into, having a look, convey not only the sense of activity and behaviour but also the mental processes that accompany our 'doings'.
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The challenge for educators is to encourage learners to explore, to embark on journeys into what is unknown to them in order to learn. Given the way higher education is structured and assessed many might feel that we squeeze out much of the affordance for more explorative and discovery-oriented forms of learning, and this is the challenge educators face all over the world.
 
Developing students’ capability and capacity to explore is not simply a matter of developing the requisite knowledge and skills to explore in a particular domain. It also requires the building of confidence and attitudes, orientations and character like the willingness to take risks, to work with uncertainty and environments that are often not well ordered, to persist in the face of disappointment, and to try again if efforts fail to realise a goal. It also requires learners to harness their pragmatic imaginations to not only visualise a fuzzy goal but to imagine and turn into action the steps to achieving such a goal. To follow such a pathway without being sure of reward requires self-belief and trust in one’s own processes and practices. Learning environments that foster these imaginings and behaviours have become increasingly rarer as our higher education system and society for that matter has become more risk averse and where teaching efficiency and predictable outcomes are the most valued indicators of a quality education. Developing the explorative capacity of students is a challenge to educators and educational institutions all over the world, but it is something we have to do if we are to enable each new generation to solve the problems created by previous generations.

Lifewide Magazine is our vehicle for exploration: every issue explores a theme that is relevant to our educational mission. In issue #18 we explore the idea and practice of exploring to develop a better understanding of the way in which exploration features in our ecologies for learning, development and achievement. Eighteen contributors share their perspectives on, and experiences of, exploration. Through this exploration we might recognise the importance of exploration in many aspects of life and its importance in personal development and the achievement of things which we value. Through this exploration we might also recognise shortcomings in the affordance for self-directed, self-motivated exploration in undergraduate education. While exploring what was already known about exploration it struck me that very little has been written about the concept of exploration so I hope that our Magazine will help expand awareness of its importance in learning and education and in the achievement of goals that are of both personal and societal value.
 
You can download a free copy of 'Exploring Exploration' Lifewide Magazine #18 from the magazine page. In the next issue of Lifewide Magazine (July 2017) we will focus on exploration in disciplinary and professional contexts and we welcome contributions from our readers. If you would like to contribute please get in touch.

Norman Jackson 
Commissioning Editor Lifewide Magazine

Citations
1  Pendleton-Jullian and Seely Brown J (2016) Pragmatic Imagination
2 Jackson, N.J.Exploring Learning Ecologies LULU
3 Exploring Exploration Lifewide Magazine #18
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As I was doing this I was also thinking about the idea of 'exploration' which is the theme for our January Lifewide Magazine. I am writing about the ecology of exploration - how we build ecologies in order to explore something and I can relate this idea to this musical project. as we are both exploring the creative possibilities in our ideas and at the same time we are exploring the potential in our relationship for producing this musical. 

Our ecology is being co-created.... we are both bringing our past experiences to bear (we have a long history of playing in a band together, being in a band and feeling we are not developing much as musicians simply playing the same music over and over).

Our shared context - we are both retired, have time to play and do things we have always wanted to do, and we enjoy making music,  and our purpose are intertwinned -G has had the idea of a musical for many years and I am encouraging him to commit time and creative effort to bring this to fruition. I am making his purpose my purpose.

We are both driven by the idea of performing this musical at some point in the future - probably 6 to 9 months from now. We have already talked about where we might perform it and who we might involve (eg musical theatre groups and other singers and musicians). In other words we are using a vision of this completed work as a motivational force to deepen our commitment and engagement with this project. Affordance is in the fact that we have time and interest, we can both play instruments and our talents are complementary, we have access to appropriate spaces, tools and other resources - a rehearsal room, our instruments and recording equipment (which we have yet to learn to use properly - another driver for the project). We have resources (G's songs which we can adapt) and our own ingenuity. And we will, in due course develop new relationships with people to enable this project to come to fruition. The project is achievement focused - we want to produce and record a musical - but it requires us to adopt a mode of 'working' which is explorational and developmentally oriented - there is a lot of experimentation - trying something out to see what it sounds / feels like and asking does it fit? We anticipate that everyone who gets involved will also shape the eventual outcome as they interpret and make their own suggestions. Exploring and developing this musical is an iterative process.. Its has begun with forming a vision of the end product or the whole story and then working down into the detail of the components (individual songs) that make up that story, which in turn help refine the individual parts of the narrative. Its very much a case of two minds are better than one even something as simple as coming up with the title of a song eg we changed a songe from 'Riding on the Back of Giants' to 'Climbing up the Corporate Ladder' with me suggesting climbing up the ladder and G adding corporate - and that is the way this thing evolves.

​Being a retired academic, has its advantages, but I have the tendency to analyse every project for it's learning potential. This week I began a new project and I have felt my energy levels and interest rising as a new experience is forming in one of the parts or circumstances of my life - my main hobby.
 
I'm a drummer in a band and we have been together for many years. While being part of the band gives me a lot of pleasure, it's an important part of my identity, playing the same tunes over and over again can dampen the fun, especially when I don't like some of the tunes. One of the members of the band (G) the one I have played with for the last 16 years, is a talented song writer and musician. Over the years he has created well over 20 songs and has talked about the idea of a musical about a couple's life journey so many of the songs have been connected in his mind as he has written them.
 
G retired a few months ago and, sensing that both he and I were at times a little fed up with the limitations of the band, I started to suggest new projects that we might get involved in. Firstly I suggested that we might by some recording equipment, which we did, but have not yet managed to make it work (that's another story). then I suggested that we might try work with a female singer to make different sorts of music - which are currently trying to make happen.  Then I suggested that we might work on his songs to bring his 'musical' idea to fruition. Yesterday we had our first get together to go over the songs he had written and create a narrative: an old fashioned love story, the lifelong journey of two people, who get a bit lost and confused in mid-life before realising that their futures still lay together as they revisited where they had began their life together. It was great fun and over a few hours we batted ideas backwards and forwards until we had a rough story into which we could place over 20 of his songs. It was amazing how things seemed to fall into place and we could, with a bit of imagination, invent a story that seemed to work. Creating the story meant we had some gaps to fill with new songs especially at the front. We had to introduce the two main characters and begin the narrative. As we talked we hit on the idea of using the Eagles 'Hotel California' a song we both like and do well when we play as a band as a key part of the story and G's tribute song 'Return to Hotel California' and the latter became our working title as we created meaning around the idea. 
 
After we had finished I wrote out the ideas and began to create new narrative around the Hotel California - Return to Hotel California songs while listening to the song as we recorded it in one of our band rehearsals. I sent the first draft to G to try and keep things moving. 

The next morning I was buzzing and spent the first few hours refining what I'd written the night before. Adding more detail to the narrative and creating some images to make the ideas more concrete, while listening to one of our rehearsals of the song Hotel California. I sent the revised draft to G who was obviously sitting at his computer and we bounced emails back and forth while getting more an more expansive as we visualised where this might take us. We talked about musicians we might involve and even a drama group. I even found a venue where we could perform it! Perhaps we were getting carried away but I think we were trying to develop a shared vision of what the end result might look like. Without this how could we work towards it?

​Then G emailed a few lines of the first new song.. I felt that we were being inventive/creative in our own terms and that we were feeding off each other.

The band playing Hotel California which features quite a bit in our new musical.

This reflection came about because of an email G sent
 
Hi Norman
From your academic perspective and for our guidance you might like to google ... how to write a musical .. there is a lot out there. I'm sure it will be interesting to compare our approach .. almost a grounded theory one at present although we will be tainted by ones we know about
Regards G
 
When I googled up How Musicals are Made: How To Write a Musical by John Kenrick
http://www.musicals101.com/write.htm. It was full of useful perspectives and advice. In asking the question WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO IT?  these sentences caught my attention. Do you care so deeply about it that you must tell this story or die?  Believe it or not, that's a very good sign......Your best bet is always to go with material you care about deeply, a story and characters that you believe in.
 
I have to admit that I do not care so deeply about the story or project that I would die for it. But I do care about wanting the pleasurable experience of working with my good friend (a talented song writer and musician) in ways that I know will be productive and creative - I already experienced this in the first 24 hours of our collaboration as we bounced and developed ideas back and forth. What I can see is that the situation holds affordance for our joint creativity. It's about putting myself in a place or space of high potential, so I can try and do something that I have not done before that will take me into new territory, and which will, I know give me a sense of fulfilment along the way as we accomplish the tasks that emerge, and when it has been accomplished. If the result makes other people happy then that's the icing on the cake. But fundamentally I am doing this for myself to invent something new and challenge, improve and satisfy myself in the process, as well as having fun on the way.

Already, I can see that from an initial idea 'wouldn't it be fun to do this' we have begun co-constructing an ecology through which we will achieve something that we both value. Something that is growing from the shared circumstances - people, events, projects, materials, interests - of our lives.

Last week was particularly busy for me. On Sunday I flew from Australia to Singapore to  participate in the ICOLACE4 conference where I met some lovely people from such places as Nepal, Philippines, Pakistan and the Middle East, and made a visit to a wonderful primary school in Singapore that was embracing a lifewide perspective for the development of its pupils. It brought home to me again the value of a lifewide approach to education and the holistic development of young people.

The challenge I had been given as a presenter really made me think about how higher education ecosystems evolve and the background article I wrote with Rob Ward enabled me to explore new ideas.

A conference is an ecology, which though designed and facilitated by the convenor who has created a structure for social learning. What really matters is the space and affordance they create for participants to discover things for themselves and make connections and relationships that are meaningful to them. The relaxed gentle unfolding of this event with lots of space for chatting outside the sessions provided a climate that was good for the formation of new relationships. In fact a relationship I formed with one delegate - Arcie Mallorie has led to a new collaboration this week as he is contributing to our Google+ conversation on the theme of Creative Pedagogies for Creative Learning Ecologies. A great example of how a relationship formed in one learning ecology can flourish in another ecology for learning. During the conference I was delighted to be invited to be the Vice President of the International Association for Lifewide Learning. I believe that it is often the potential that new relationships hold that are the most important outcomes from an event like a conference and I have had many examples where such a relationship has led to new opportunities for collaboration and contribution. I have a feeling that the relationships I made in this event offer new affordance that just would not be in my life if I had not joined in.

​After flying back to the UK, I participated in the BERA Creativity SIG conference which aimed to provide a forum for diverse perspectives on creativity research to be shared across the different parts of the education system.

It was a completely different format and experience to the ICOLACE event: jam packed, high energy, lots of contributions and attempts to draw out what participants felt was significant through table conversations.

So here are a few things I learnt from the ecology for social learning that organisers Pam Burnard and Teresa Cremin organised and facilitated.

Jenny Gibson talked about 'how people unfold' and introduced me to architect Simon Nicholson's ideas that:
‘In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.’ Simon Nicholson  http://www.aneverydaystory.com/2013/03/05/the-theory-of-loose-parts/

Nicholson was talking mostly about playground and school design and rethinking the static play equipment and environments, proposing instead one incorporating loose materials to engage children’s natural creativity and inventiveness. His Theory of Loose Parts suggests that materials that can be moved around, designed and redesigned, and tinkered with; create infinitely more opportunities for creative engagement than static materials and environments. Basically, the more materials there are the more people can interact. It got me thinking that life is actually an environment full of loose parts and the more loose parts we create the richer affordances it contains. So attending a conference is adding a new loose part to your life out of which new learning or relationships might develop. I could also see the  relevance of the idea to learning ecologies and this picture I used in my presentation helped me to visualise the enormous number of loose parts that an ecology for learning created by a teacher might contain.
 
Kerry Chapel and Teresa Cremin talked about policy drivers that forced teachers to adopt particular pedagogic stances which I thought was just as relevant to higher education where our quality assurance systems are founded on certain assumptions about learning (like all outcomes should be specified in advance) which forces teachers into a particular position.
Teresa talked about the need for teacher involvement in researching their own practice which seems self-evident to me.
 
Jo Trowsdale talked about STEAM education and her imaginarium at University of Warwick and provided some nice examples for pedagogies that involved making and performing that encouraged young people to use their creativity. She talked about connecting mind-body(in making/performing), disciplines. The idea that we learn and find things out  through our whole bodies not just our cognition.
 
She summarised the essence of the pedagogy used in the imaginarium as:
1) Novel tasks to hook
2) Illustrate concepts
3) Feed curiosity and inquiry
4) Experience - design, embody, make,
5) Witness
6) Visualise, sense & abstract
 
Relationships - building of self-belief and the sociality of context. Journeys from concept through design to making and performing. The value of approaches used in arts education to promote learning in science, technology and maths.
The idea of being 'situated in a learning project 'as if' you were a practising scientist, engineer, artist.  All these ideas seemed very relevant to the idea of learning ecologies.
 
In an interesting talk Bill Nicholl - talked about the need to involve learners in authentic tasks and real world problems using tools (like gloves and glasses) that enabled them to experience and feel what it is like to have impaired functionality. In this way enabling learners to appreciate the challenges and empathise with the end users of products, services or environments. He talked about psychological tools to help learners think inside the box so they can design and make outside the box. This gave me insights into the ways in which a teacher's pedagogy might seek to encourage empathy and the idea of 'encouraging learners to put themselves into someone else's shoes' as a means to encouraging creativity. He identified the 3A's of Authenticity, Autonomy and Ambiguity.
 
The final session of the day was a talk given by Guy Claxton on embodiment which certainly made me think about the ways in which embodiment features in our ecologies for learning and opens a new avenue for exploration.

So a busy week of being exposed to new people and ideas and so much of what I learnt I am making use of in the conversation I am now facilitating on Creative Pedagogies and Learning Ecologies on the #creativeHE platform

This week I visited the World of Wedgewood - the factory for the making of wedgewood pottery and the museum and archive that tells the story of Josiah and the generations of family and workers that have been part of this great enterprise. I feel quite inspired - firstly by the man who founded an enterprise through which so much creativity has flowed, but also by the creative way in which wedgewood are telling their story through the 'world' they have and are creating. Josiah Wedgewood was a visionary who wanted to make a difference to the world. He imagined and then succeeded in creating a world inhabited by people from all levels of society who used the pottery his business created. He combined craftsmanship and his insider knowledge of the making of pottery, with a commitment to experiment in order to innovate - to produce better kilns and better forms of pottery. He combined the imagination skill and creativity of an artist craftsman with the curiosity and discipline of an experimental scientist with the business acumen and vision of an entrepreneur and imbued his enterprise with the will to survive and flourish in an ever changing world for over 250 years.
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Josiah Wedgewood teaches us that we all have the potential to be creative and that we all have potential to achieve great things by inventing a purpose for ourselves and committing everything to achieve that purpose. Josiah Wedgewood is amongst the Big C creatives - the people who impact culture and the world well beyond their own time. His creative genius teaches us that creativity is not necessarily contained in one thing we do but that it can be contained in connecting many things we do so that we bring something new - not just the invention of an object that might be creative in its own right but an ecology that can encourage and embrace the creativity of many people and outlive our individual efforts and grow and change over the decades and centuries.
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During our conducted tour of the factory we met and chatted to man called Bruce (right). His quiet modesty, dedication to his work and wonderful skill and focus which enabled him to produce his exquisite gold designs impressed me greatly and epitomised the idea that  “Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance” Josiah Wedgwood.

I can relate these thoughts to our latest Creative Academic project where we are trying to discover how teachers encourage and enable their students to use their creativity, I can see the parallels in how teachers use their knowledge and skill to create an ecology within which their students can learn to use and develop their creativity.

Why not be inspired by visiting https://www.worldofwedgwood.com/
Image credit  Bruce : http://flat15.com/2016/07/25/the-world-of-wedgwood/
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Last week I attended a funeral of Peter Wright who I had worked closely with over 20 years ago when I was a member of the Higher Education Quality Council's (HEQC) Quality Enhancement Group. Peter was the senior member of the team and very much a father figure who acted as a sort of mentor and intellectual guide to the rest of us who were at least ten years younger. He was a lovely man full of whit and endless anecdotes many of them very funny. I would often hear him talking to colleagues in the adjacent office and roaring with laughter. It made for a very enjoyable work environment and we were as a team seriously productive. During the last two years of our existence between 1995-97 we engaged in what was called the Graduate Standards Programme (GSP)  a large scale research project into the way academic standards were perceived and the ways in which they were constructed and assured in a higher education system that had undergone massive expansion in the previous six years. It was my first taste of how to engage a whole higher education system in discussion as we all participated in conversations and discussions the length and breadth of the country. The numerous reports we produced informed the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education Chaired by Sir Ron (later Lord) Dearing and some of the Committee's recommendations relating to assurance of standards  that later became the foundation of the Quality Assurance Agency's regulatory framework, can be linked to the GSP work. Yet there is virtually no mention of this work on the internet, or HEQC for that matter. It's as if it never existed. So, as a tribute to Peter, and the work of our small GSP team, I decided to scan (with the help of my daughter) the two final reports published in 1997. REPORTS
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The death of a friend and former colleague is always sad but it is a great stimulus for reflection and for reconnecting with people you once shared your life with and they with you.

The photo shows members of the Quality Enhancement Group in 1997 The core members of the GSP Team were Robin Middlehurst (leader - front row second from right), Peter Wright (back row third from left) Robin Jackson  and myself (back row first and second from right), Alan Crispin (fourth from right) and Vivienne Rivis (back row second from left).

I've had a break over the summer from writing - actually that's not true I have done quite a lot of writing but its been in the form of a book about my family's history that I have been completing. Well its just arrived from the printers and I'm pleased with the way it has turned out. I learnt a lot about my family in the process.
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Even though I'm retired my work patterns seem to be in sympathy with the academic cycle. In the last couple of weeks I have been working on a plan for Creative Academic's work in the coming year with co-founder Chrissi Nerantzi. It's been a very energising process as we have generated and connected ideas, then approached people we thought might be interested and getting feedback and usually commitments. While a plan is only words on a page the affordances contained within it are huge, what it does do is build a picture or a vision of what might be in a year's time. It's both the vision and the concrete steps that make the plan both a motivating device and a tool for engagement.  http://www.creativeacademic.uk/2016-17-programme.html

So much of my learning is social. I'm working on an article with Rob Ward and this afternoon he sent me something he had written and I followed up a link to a Youtube recording of a talk given by Randy Bass on e-portfolios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWJN6Aap9nU  I found it quite inspiring in the way he argued for the redesign of higher education for 2030 and his ideas linked well to my ideas on lifewide learning, creativity and learning ecologies It's well worth watching and it's got me thinking of how we might draw on some of his ideas in our creative pedagogies and learning ecologies project. Once you have a plan you have a tool for both imagination and integration.

I have just finished leading and facilitating a 7 day conversation on the #creativeHE platform aimed at exploring the idea of creative ecologies. It's been such an interesting, enlightening, rejuvenating and rewarding experience. #creativeHE is special because it supports a very human experience replete with deep and meaningful conversations founded on shared experiences, caring, compassion, empathy, humour, insights and inspirations, creativity and commitment abound. In this post I want to share my understanding of my own ecology for learning and creativity which I am unashamedly proud of because of the way 'it helps me become a better version of myself' (one of the phrases used by a participant in the conversation).

Background - the past
I have been working with the idea of learning ecologies since 2013 and through a succession of learning ecologies formed around particular events and projects (many of which have been shared in my blog posts) I developed and codified my knowledge in my book 'Exploring Learning Ecologies'. In the book I touch on the idea that ecologies for learning development and achievement are also the vehicles for our creativity. Creativity is not separate from the things we want to achieve and from the ongoing development of ourselves as the person we want to become. I had the idea of trying to form a developmental conversation around the idea of creative ecologies on the #creativeHE platform and Chrissi Nerantzi who owns the platform readily agreed.

Near past
Prior to the event I thought about the way I might support a seven day conversational process. I prepared four background articles (resources) to stimulate discussion 1) an article that set out the basic idea of what a creative ecology was based on the ideas I had developed through my book 2) my interpretations of how my model of a creative ecology could be applied to the creative processes and practices of two people who had provided insights to their processes in blog posts and videos 3) an example of how I applied the model to my own learning and development process which led to my book.  I left myself space within the process to produce two more articles that were responses to some of the posts that were made. I set up a page on the Creative Academic website to enable participants to access these resources should they wish to do so.
My ecology for learning, development and creativity
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It became clear during the conversation that people have to create their own meanings to the idea and make their own interpretations and visualisations. The way I make sense of my own ecology is to create a picture of it using powerpoint. In this picture I try to identify the elements that I have in my model within the experience I have had. Figure 1 attempts to represent the experience and the way in which the elements of the experience relate to my model. An ecology for learning involves everything in a person's life that directly or indirectly relates to their learning project. This I think explains some of the difficulty in grappling with the concept. If something seems to be important to someone and does not appear in the model then there is a problem with the model. In creating the model I tried to create high level categories that could embrace everything that is likely to be involved. So for example, there was discussion as to whether resilience and courage should be included in the model as they did not appear in the words used to describe the model.  Yet they are in the model as these are qualities/attributes that the person brings to the situation.
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Figure 1 A representation of my learning ecology. The picture is part of my learning ecology and is an artefact I can use to explain the idea to other people.

Some new perspectives on creativity and creative ecologies
It's been a rich and interesting conversation with many thought provoking posts and insights that we can use to develop our understanding. Much of the conversation has been about exploring perceptions of creativity rather than the idea of creative ecologies. I realise that this was necessary in order to try to create a foundation of shared perceptions on which to base discussion. We all take away different things from a conversation - which is another way of saying that our unique complexity sees different value in the meanings that are shared. I will just pull out a few perspectives that caused me to progress my own understanding.

Co-creation of many meanings and selection of meanings that have meaning
Social learning is all about the individual and collective creation of meaning. During the week long conversation is was clear that many participants were trying to make their own sense of learning ecologies which they tried to express in the language and visual symbols that made sense to them. In the creation of meaning there is no right answer only lots of possibilities.


Figure 2 the #creastiveHE platform for the sharing and making of meaning.


This struggle to comprehend and create meaning was one of the most creative aspects of the conversation  and there were many illustrations of what a creative ecology might mean.  They are all valid if the person who invented them feels that it embodies and represents their creative experiences and self-expression.  This open sharing of personally constructed meanings is a sign of a healthy conversation. But it takes confidence and courage to publicly share ideas, thoughts and feelings, and the meanings you have created in the #creativeHE space and I suspect that many participants monitor the conversation but do not post because of this. I hope through our consistent behaviour in the #creativeHE conversational space we are creating a culture of encouragement, trust and respect whereby most people feel empowered to contribute. At the end of the day is for us as individuals to take those meanings that have been shared and assimilate them into their own framework of knowledge and understanding.

I didn't fundamentally change my understanding of my model of a learning ecology as a result of the conversation but I did develop my understandings of some aspects of the model and more importantly I did see how other people tried to make their own sense of the ideas and create their own meanings.

​Interstitial spaces - are not always inconsequential spaces for learning
Jonathan Purdy talked about how Different spaces afford me different things. They alter my mind set. In my garage I'm looking to use something old, often something with its own history that will live on in whatever I create with it and that I will get satisfaction from using up. In the store I'm being afforded the solutions to problems that others have designed, and I sometimes have to re-cast my problem to fit their solution. And in the drawing space - well, anything goes! Similarly Andrew Middleton also talked about spaces particularly informal and non-formal spaces and the creation of a map showing the diversity of spaces/places that a group of people attending his workshop believed they learnt.

In my representations of learning ecologies I pay attention to the big obvious spaces but not so much the little ones. The reality is our life is full of little spaces often transitional between bigger seemingly more important spaces Andrew Middleton's idea of interstitial spaces struck me as being important to an ecological perspective of learning.

Jonathan and Andrew's posts made me think of all the incidental and interstitial spaces and moments that flow through our ecologies for learning which help us connect up the dots of our imagination, critical thinking, reflective, associative  and integrative (synthetic) thinking to make the whole of what it is we are trying to do and achieve. All these seemingly insignificant spaces offer us affordance to think. In particular they offer affordances for creativity because  we may not be thinking in a conscious deliberative way about a problem or situation they provide us with affordance for the associative and synthetic types of thinking when ideas come into our head seemingly from nowhere.

So in future  I will view the interstitial spaces in my learning ecologies with more respect and ask how did these spaces contribute to my learning. In this ecology my interstitial spaces were restricted as I'm mainly around the house recovering from a knee operation, so they are mainly in my garden eg chatting to my son Navid as we cut the hedge and chatting in the kitchen over lunch. Both of these homely interstitial spaces were important in this ecology.

Creativity and synthesis
Navid Tomlinson made an interesting point that in his view people are 'human synthesizers, we are all continuously taking little bits of information and combining them in different ways to create different outputs, outputs which can be anything from the way we conduct ourselves in conversation to books we may write or even the way we play games. Under this definition we are all being continuously creative but to differing levels of complexity.'  

This suggests that at the heart of our learning ecology is a synthesizing process through which we create new meaning. I like the idea that our creativity reflects the fact that we all have the innate capacity to be inspired and take information in through all our senses, across all the different parts of our life, and throughout our whole life span. We are able to filter and make use of this information at particular times, either by accident or design, by connecting and combining it with other thoughts to create new thoughts and feelings that mean something to us.

Figure 3 A wonderful depiction of the way we integrate and synthesize lots of observations and information to create new understandings.

I realise that I try to do this all the time and perhaps it is the main creative process for most academics. When I am interested in something I put lots of time and energy into thinking about it. I take lots of information and ideas and try to connect them to ideas and beliefs I already hold in ways that make sense to me to make a more complex understanding that I try to apply and justify. It happened with the ideas of lifewide learning and learning ecologies and my attempt to embed the idea of creativity within the affordance provided by a learning ecology is another example that we have been grappling with. Going back to my days as a geologist I engaged in synthesis all the time in my research and practice as a field geologist - making a map is a way of synthesising and presenting geological information and creating a mediating artefact. I suspect that the tendency to synthesise is programmed into us so that we can transfer the tendency from one domain or context to another.

​I think this perspective freshens and reinforces a belief I already hold about my learning ecology. At the heart of my learning ecology is the seek (information) sense (filter, process, create meaning from information), share (synthesised meanings)  model that has been developed by Harold Jarche.

Figure 4 Seek, sense share model of information processing Jarch (2014)
​https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/270356783855764581/

Irene Stella Vassilakopouou made the important point that although we may create and share the meanings we create through synthesis, 'the way we understand things doesn't [necessarily] make sense to others, so sometimes  [the results of] our creativity may frustrate the other people.' Simply sharing the meanings we have created and share does not mean that someone else will accept these meaning in the same way. I read somewhere that once you have shared a meaning with an audience you no longer control it. It becomes whatever each person in the audience feels it means and this is the likely process within our conversation and the likely outcome of the conversation. Perhaps our creativity only becomes recognised when enough people in the field accept the meanings we have created

Creativity through synthesis with different levels of complexity
Navid Tomlinson argued that 'If creativity is simply creating something new then it cannot be more or less creative, creativity is an absolute'. In order to distinguish between creative acts he uses the idea of complexity. At the heart of his concept is the idea that creativity can be differentiated by the levels of complexity involved in the synthesis. [If]  I have synthesised multiple sources, thought about and grappled with [multiple and]complex ideas, [I have] produced a complex product - my change in understanding.  ...................It seems to be there is a direct correlation between the complexity of our ecology and the complexity of our creative products, 
 
I would  suggest that we should see complex ecologies as a method to help us produce complex creative outputs. Complexity may be reflected such things as the scale and scope of our learning ecology, the amount and level of knowledge and skill we need to develop the number and quality of relationships we need to form, the number of people who are directly involved who influence and co-create the ecology, the time scale over which the ecology is developed and its connectivity to other learning ecologies, the resources that we need to support it. 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v6SpLGknfG0zRJ5KEat7LM3PFXp0FJUhBaN-u2L9Px8/edit
I thought there were a lot of interesting ideas in Navid's article so I sat down and wrote my own article to work out my own understandings.

Complexity and people
We might begin by recognising that people themselves embody different levels of complexity in their personalities, behaviours, cognitive and imaginary abilities and psychologies. The social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied the lives of 91 eminent creators, what he terms “big C” creatives who changed their domains, in search of what they might have in common. He concluded  If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude." (Csikszentmihalyi 1996).

By "complexity" he meant (Rivero 2015) having personalities of “contradictory extremes,” such as being both extremely smart and naïve, or traditional and rebellious, or objective and passionate. There is little middle ground. Creatively complex people are nearly impossible to “peg” as this or that. Their capacity to tap into a fuller range of what life has to offer is what allows them a broader response to life’s problems and questions, whether practical or artistic.

Complexity in situations, problems and opportunities
The human condition is to try to understand situations in order to make good decisions about how to act (or not to act). Some situations are easy to comprehend: they are familiar and we have dealt with them or something like them before and we are confident that we know what to do. Others are more difficult to understand and some are impossible to understand until we have engaged in them.  Situations can be categorised according to whether the context is familiar or unfamiliar and whether the problem (challenge or opportunity) is familiar or unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity, is one aspect of complexity.

We might speculate that the increasing complexity of situations will demand increasingly complex learning ecologies to deal with them. We might also anticipate that highly complex situations and problems cannot be resolved by individuals but require teams of people working together over considerable periods of time.  We might visualise different levels of complexity in social situations using the Cynefin framework developed by Snowden (Snowden 2000). There are four domains within the framework.

In the simple domain things have a simple cause and effect. Complicated  situations are not single events but involve a stream of interconnected situations (many of which may be simple) linked to achieving a goal (like solving a difficult problem or bringing about a significant innovation or corporate performance). They can be difficult to understand: there cause-and-effect relationships might not be obvious but you have to put some effort into working out the relationships by gathering information about the situation and analysing it to see the patterns and look for possible explanations of what is happening. Engaging in these sorts of challenges is the way you become more expert in achieving difficult things and a lot of professional work is like this.

Complex situations are the most difficult to understand. They are not single events but involve multiple streams of variably connected situations linked to achieving a significant change in the pattern of beliefs and behaviours (culture) in a society or organisation. In such situations the cause-and-effect relationships are so intertwined that things only make sense in hindsight and sometimes well after the events have taken place. In the complex space, it’s all about the inter-connectivity of people and their evolving behaviours and patterns of participation that are being encouraged or nurtured through the actions of key agents. The results of action will be unique to the particular situation and cannot be directly repeated. In these situations relationships are not straightforward and things are unpredictable in detail

Levels of complexity in learning ecologies
In developing capability for dealing effectively with situations we are developing the ability to comprehend and appraise situations, and perform appropriately and effectively in situations of different levels of complexity.  The idea of learning ecologies has been proposed to help explain the relationships of people to their environment / contexts /resources, their problems and perceived affordances and the pattern of interactions and outcomes, as people pursue learning and achievement goals (Jackson 2016). We might make use of the Cynefin tool to evaluate the situations, problems and opportunities our ecologies for learning and creativity are engaging with. I illustrated the idea with examples of simple, complicated and complex learning ecologies.

Figure 5 My own synthesis combining the 4C model of creativity Kaufman and Beghetto (2000) with the complexity model of Snowden (2000). An adaptive creative product of the conversation.

​Kaufman and Beghetto (2000) suggest that human creativity can be categorised into 'Big-C' creativity that brings about significant change in a domain; 'pro-c' creativity associated with the creative acts of experts or people who have mastered a field, including but not only people involved in professional activity; 'little-c' creativity - the everyday creative acts of individuals who are not particularly expert in a situation and 'mini-c'  the novel and personally meaningful interpretation of experiences, actions and events made by individuals. I attempted my own synthesis to integrate a complexity perspective into the 4C model of creativity. We might speculate that little-c creativity involves relatively simple and complicated situations and problems pro-c creativity involves complicated and complex situations and Big-C creativity would be mainly concerned with situations and problems that are complex but would also subsume simple and complicated situations within complexity.
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New appreciation of the relationship between creativity, complexity and creative ecologies
Synthesis has been a recurrent theme in the #creativeHE conversation and my new understandings are of this nature. I like the idea that ultimately our motivation to be creative reflects both circumstances and affordances we perceive in our environment, our highly individual qualities and capabilities as a person and our intrinsic need or desire to do things for ourselves that help us become 'a newer [and better] version of oneself' (Paula Nottingham) in the manner Navid Tomlinson describes and Rogers  (1961)equates with self-actualisation. I think it's this combination of a person interacting with themselves (their complexity) and their environment (affordance and complexity) that shapes the way a person's creativity emerges. It is not surprising to me that the combination of an individual's unique complexity (personality, orientations, passions and other emotions, capabilities, experiences/past history, values, beliefs and ambitions .....),  perceiving an environment in which there are affordances - potential for acting in certain ways to achieve particular things, should choose to act in ways that leads to outcomes that the individual would believe were creative (in an absolute rather than qualitative way), if they held a concept of creativity that accommodated these outcomes. It does not mean that other people will perceive these outcomes as being creative as they may lack the knowledge to make a judgment and/or hold different understandings of what being creative means.

Looking back over the week I can see my own creativity in action in the way I played with and develop ideas that were shared and combined and synthesised them in real time with ideas I already owned. Once again I am reminded of two concepts of creativity that seem to explain what was happening in me as I interacted with my complex world with my unique complexities that make me who I am and who I want to become namely:

Creativity is
'the desire and ability to use imagination, insight, intellect, feeling and emotion to move an idea from one state to an alternative, previously unexplored state' (Dellas and Gaier's 1970)
'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, people, or circumstances of his/her life', (Rogers 1961/2004:350).
 
References
Csikszentmihalyi M (1996) Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by, published by
Dellas, M., & Gaier, E. L. (1970) Identification of creativity: The individual. Psychol. Bull. 73:55– 73
HarperCollins, 1996. https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality
Jackson, N J (2016) Exploring Learning Ecologies Lulu publishing
Jarche, H. (2014) The Seek > Sense > Share Framework Inside Learning Technologies January 2014, Posted Monday, 10 February 22 014 http://jarche.com/2014/02/the-seek-sense-share-framework/
Kaufman, J.C., and Beghetto, R.A. (2009) Beyond Big and Little: The Four C Model of Creativity. Review of General Psychology 13, 1, 1-12.
Rivero L (2015) Creativity’s Monsters: Making Friends with Complexity Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creative-synthesis/201502/creativity-s-monsters-making-friends-complexity
Rogers, C.R., (1961) On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin, A Sense of Time and Place: An Ecological Approach to Sense Making and Learning in Formal and Informal Communities. Conference proceedings of KMAC at the University of Aston, July 2000 and Snowden, D. (2000) Cynefin: A Sense of Time and Space, the Social Ecology of Knowledge Management. In C. Despres and D. Chauvel (eds) Knowledge Horizons: The Present and the Promise of Knowledge Management, Bost on: Butterworth Heinemann.
Stephenson, J. (1998) The Concept of Capability and Its Importance in Higher Education. In J. Stephenson and M. Yorke (eds) Capability and Quality in Higher Education, London: Kogan Page.
Tomlinson N (2016) Complex ecologies and creativity
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v6SpLGknfG0zRJ5KEat7LM3PFXp0FJUhBaN-u2L9Px8/edit#