Incubating Social Creativity and Regenerative Creativity

T. Fisher photo of Stancell's Mural "We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest"

The fields of social learning and social incubators are cultivating, I would suggest, the endeavor of incubating social creativity.

Social Learning. Wals and Leij (2007) in their prefatory remarks to a book on the topic of social learning and sustainability education (free downloadable ebook available) point out the spectrum of meaning for social learning --  from learning among deeply socially contexted inviduals to focusing on the learning processes of 'social aggregates' (pp. 19-20). They suggest that social learning involves facilitating dynamic contexts for richly socially contexted, diverse groups to engage with sustainability challenges along this spectrum. Complexivists have referred to this as extending the locus of learning to the learning community [and not (only) the individual] (Davis & Sumara, 2006) or as the learning of collective beings (Minati & Pessa, 2006). Sterling (in the 2007 volume linked above) imagines a "connective cultural consciousness" in which sustainability social learning can help cultures "ride the storm" of climate change by undertaking radical social learning at the scale of paradigm change.

Granted, these ideas of social collectives are not actually novel. To note, elder cultures (such as those featured by Bowers' scholarship on the learning commons and traditional cultures) have long understood that learning communities offer a deep connection, empowerment, and nurture than individuals operating in isolation or even individuals collaborating.  Educational theory is still catching up.

At the same time that learning theory is learning to jump scales and study aggregates, enterprise theory and incubation of entrepreneurship (and ecopreneurship even) is undergoing a similar shift from rugged individualism to .... social incubators.


Social Incubators. Social media, crowdfunding, honoring social good and values-infused endeavor, and open-sourcing as well as increasingly accessible organizational infrastructure through internet technologies have radically opened the field of enterprise innovation. The idea of separate "enterprises" are themselves melting as densely interconnected networks of creatives and service brocades transfigure entrepreneurship. The rise of social enterprise incubators (also these examples) and the generosity economy all reflect a parallel to the shift described in educational theorizing toward attending to the social dimensions of learning and social learning. 


Incubating Social Creativity. Without falling into the western tendency to reify the new (as is often the case in unconscious neophilia), the social evolution of our species involves attending to complex emergence. Our culture is evolving to attend to emergence, autopoiesis, and self-organization as signs of complex innovation and novelty.  Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichtenstein (2010) propose complexity-informed strategies for facilitating ecologies of innovation. 

Attending to innovation in a deep sense means attending to creativity. Csiksentmilhalyi (1999) noticed how the systems of field and culture contexted and vetted individual creativity. R. Keith Sawyer (2010) takes off from jazz improvisation to develop a complexity-informed social creativity called collaborative emergence. In collaborative emergence, creative collaborations by groups of people spark emergent phenomena at the group scale. Ecologies of innovation extend this emergent process to locality and cultural scales, even innovating public services (for example in Peterborough). At the scale of locality and neighborhood, the Transition Town movement exemplifies this shift; City Repair and Placemaking serves as another beacon. Social creativity has been credited with rapidly accelerating software innovation (Granof, 2013). Many other theorists have also explored social creativity (including John-Steiner, 2000 and Sawyer, 2008). Social as a descriptor in social creativity can function in two ways, either to convey that the phenomena is generated by social aggregate or that it is geared toward social good.

Researching Incubating Social Creativity. My original mixed methods research is surfacing methods and means for catalyzing social creativity. I research the "social" in creativity across both dimensions of meaning of social: (1) that it is generated by groups and systems of creativity and (2) that it has an intention toward social good, in this case sustainability and regeneration.

I am studying how to incubate multi-scale creativity. By generating processes, habits of curiosity, and cultures of individual and small group creative processes as well as setting up learning cultures favoring social creativity, we can facilitate and encourage the underlying practices, habits, and cultural matrix to nurture social creativity.

The research is surfacing how creativity, the seedbed for innovation and personal and cultural flourishing, can be sourced in nature and bioculture and aligned with increasing the integrity of culture, place and planet. This regenerative creativity emerges at multiple scales and produces empathy, connection, and earth-aligned action. Incubating social creativity catalyzed by ecofractal patterns from nature and bioculture develops what Bowers (2012) calls ecological intelligence and what Goleman, Bennett & Barlow (2012) name ecoliteracy, an emotionally and socially engaged ecological intelligence.  I would suggest that to incubate this kind of regenerative cultural and social creativity can source shifts not only in social learning and social enterprise, but also in multiple other domains and transdisciplines as part of the enlarging and interconnecting tapestry of cultural regeneration beyond sustainability to thriving.

In the coming months we will be sharing snapshots of the emergent findings from this research.

Resources

• Bowers, C. A. (2012). The challenge facing educational reformers: Making the transition from individual to ecological intelligence in an era of climate change. In D. Ambrose & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), How dogmatic beliefs harm creativity and higher-level thinking (pp. 112-122). New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
• City Repair. (2013). Website. Retrieved from http://www.cityrepair.org
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). Implications of a systems perspective for the study of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity. New York, NY:
  Cambridge University Press.
• Dawson, J. (2012). Building an economy on gift and generosity [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/blog/building-an-economy-on-gift-and-generosity-jonatha-dawson
• Goldstein, J., Hazy, J. K., & Lichtenstein, B. B. (2010). Complexity and the nexus of leadership: Leveraging nonlinear science to create ecologies of innovation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Goleman, D., Bennett, L., & Barlow, Z. (2012). Ecoliterate: How educators are cultivating emotional, social, and ecological intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass and the Center for Ecoliteracy.
• Granof, P. (2013, October 9). Social creativity: The engine of software development [Blog post]. Wired - Innovation Insights. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/10/social-creativity-the-engine-of-software-development-in-the-social-era/
• Sawyer, R. K. (2008). Group genius: The creative power of collaboration. New York, NY: Basic. 
• Sawyer, R. K. (2010). Individual and group creativity. In J. C. Kaufman & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of creativity (pp. 366-380). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Stancell, P. Mural of "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." On Wikimedia Commons. Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts Program.
• Transition Network. (2013). Website.  Retrieved from http://www.transitionnetwork.org/
• Wals, A. E. J. (Ed.). (2007). Social learning towards a sustainable world: Principles, perspectives, and praxis. Pays-Bas: Wageningen Academic Publishers. Retrieved from the publisher at http://www.wageningenacademic.com/sociallearning 

Image Credit: 

Photograph by Tom Fischer, 2009, of a Mural on the wall of row houses in Philadelphia. Mural Artist is Parris Stancell, sponsored by the Freedom School Mural Arts program. Photo Creative Commons 2. Left to right: Malcolm Shabazz (Malcolm X), Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass. The quote above the mural is from Ella Baker, a founder of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), a civil rights group that helped to coordinate "Freedom Rides" in the early 1960's (from Wikimedia Commons).

Complexity Conference to Include Everyday Creativity Scholar Ruth Richards

Creativity research has pivoted away from the "lone genius myth" (in the words of Montuori and Parser, 1995) and is moving towards what scholar Ruth Richards terms everyday creativity (Psychology Today article linked here provides background).

Saybrook creativity professor Ruth Richards will be the Friday keynote at the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences 23rd Annual International Conference this July 25-27 at Portland State University.



Program available here:
http://www.societyforchaostheory.org/conf/2013/

An excerpt from Everyday Creativity highlights how we can miss the stunning beauty all around us.

We create the sight even as we become conscious of it. We do not simply see it. In our daily lives, who or what is doing the selecting? And why? Is this predetermined? Can we -- in the here and now – make a change?  Can we see further?  Can we see better?  Can we  even better our world? - Ruth Richards

Ruth Richards has also studied fractals and creativity as well as her research on everyday creativity. David Schuldberg, who is also active in everyday creativity and whose chaos-psychology contributions include "vortices of thought"will also be speaking at the upcoming conference.

A few citations for the curious: 

• Richards, Ruth. (2001a). A new aesthetic for environmental awareness: Chaos theory, the beauty of nature, and our broader humanistic identity. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 41, 2, 59-95. 
• Richards, Ruth. (2001b). Millennium as opportunity: Chaos, creativity, and Guilford's Structure of Intellect model. Creativity Research Journal, 13(3/4), 249-265.
• Richards, Ruth. (2010). Everyday creativity in the classroom. In Ronald A. Beghetto & James C. Kaufman, Eds., Nurturing creativity in the classroom (pp. 206-234). UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Richards, Ruth. (Ed.). (2007). Everyday creativity and the new views of human nature: Psychological, social, and spiritual perspectives. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons public domain, Forest path in Yvelines, France

Joanna Macy and Active Hope

          Recently I heard Joanna Macy at the Unitarian Church in downtown Portland. This was my third time hearing Joanna in Portland, and I also had the good fortune to attend a weekend intensive with her while I was studying down in the Bay Area. Her 2012 talk was an introduction to her new book, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy (Macy and Johnstone, 2012).

Joanna talks about “the great turning.” We were in the great hall of the downtown Unitarian church, and before the lecture we were blessed to hear some really brilliant, integrative live folk music by a young man who’s studied with her. Songs such as “The Uni-Verse/The One Song” and an invocation for a time of global prayer tied to the Olympics, the organizer sharing “Each of us carries an essential thread of this rebirth of the tapestry for this holy Earth.”

Macy, the Clear View, and Redefining Active Hope

Joanna did speak of getting a clear view, seeing what is, even if painful. Macy’s work emphasizes how, in a culture of domination and power-over, even if it’s painful, even in the midst of highly developed brainwash, to choose to see. Then identify the values we’d like to see, and takes steps to move in that direction. She spoke of how our perception is affected by the stories surrounding us, whether it’s the story of business as usual, the great unraveling (in which the industrial growth society is shredding system connections in a way that is unreweave-able), or the great turning. She spoke of how she didn’t want to call the book “hope” – she doesn’t believe in it, has railed against hope for years [to which I was eternally grateful, I agree and was surprised when I saw the title. I’ve been meaning to change the earth empathy site from the beginning from "despair and hope" to "despair and justice," perhaps her words will spark me to make it so]. She described how, even though she did not prefer the language of "hope," her views did not come to fruition; the subtitle is her original desired title. So what she does in one chapter, with the co-author, is redefine active hope so it doesn’t really have to do with hope at all. Instead, it’s about seeing things as they are, being willing to, doing it, having the heart break open from it, and holding the clear intention and taking the action anyway. “The guiding impetus is our intention, not weighing our chances.” Joanna Macy clarifies: “This work does not require our optimism.” That resonated deeply with me. “It’s about stepping into a state of aliveness that makes our life meaningful.”

Dori Midnight, from Joannamacy.net

“Seeing with New Eyes”

She named four stations in the truth mandala that The Work That Reconnects uses: She suggests we ground in gratitude, then bring our awareness to our great sorrow and outrage, and then see with new eyes so that fourthly we can go forth, bringing full presence to the work. The third station was “seeing with new eyes.” Macy suggests a perceptual move of seeing with new eyes, meaning that as we learn/believe/experience (a la the work of deep ecology and the ecological self) “that we are a living part of the living earth, a shift happens.” A wider view of time emerges. The synergy with the natural world also widens and strengthens us. We are closely related to all the other beings through space and time. Other life forms have so much to give and share. We shift toward a different kind of power, from power-over to power-with, from one-way causality to collaborative approaches, power as synergistic, our interactions working with others. Like grace, there is no limit when we work together. 

 Here's Joanna on the possibilities:

The truth of our inter-existence, made real to us by our pain for the world, helps us see with new eyes. It brings fresh understandings of who we are and how we are related to each other and the universe. We begin to comprehend our own power to change
and heal. We strengthen by growing living connections with past and future generations, and our brother and sister species.

Then, ever again, we go forth into the action that calls us. With others whenever and wherever possible, we set a target, lay a plan, step out. We don’t wait for a blueprint or fail-proof scheme; for each step will be our teacher, bringing new perspectives and opportunities. Even when we don’t succeed in a given venture, we can be grateful for the chance we took and the lessons we learned. And the spiral begins again.  - Joanna Macy

Earth Dreaming Research

Mariko Mori, "Dream Temple,"
photo by R. Learoyd

In a multi-scale world of imbricated (woven) co-arising and emergence, the Earth system continues to come alive and communicate in and through us. How can we design research with Earth as an active co-researcher/participant?

One recent initiative hypothesizes that certain kinds of dreams might represent "earth dreams" and constitute expressions of the earth system through humans. This is an extension of the concept of earth empathy, in which the planetary system and wisdom comes alive through human ways of knowing and being. As part of the research work of the Institute, this earth dreaming research is conducting mixed methods research with a cohort of dreamers who are incubating earth dreams. If you have what you believe to be "earth dreams" or encounter them in your readings or life experience, please contact earthdreamingresearch AT gmail DOT com. It might be that your earth dream could be considered as data for this research project in its initial or a future phase. We will post occasional information and ideas pertaining to these topics via this blog.



Image credit: Mariko Mori, "Dream Temple," photo by R. Learoyd From http://www.hubculture.com/groups/47/news/102/

Vandana Shiva Describes Earth Design in the University of the Seed in a Yes! Magazine Video Interview

In the January Yes! Magazine video interview "Vandana Shiva: Teachers for a Living World," Madhu Suri Prakash offers engaging questions and Dr. Vandana Shiva offers examples of how Bija Vidyapeeth (The University of the Seed) focuses on the earth, seeds, and grain as inspirations for sustainability education design.


Dr. Shiva demonstrates that by setting the school within a biodiversity reserve and embedding the learning in living communities, the learning honors the Earth as a sacred community and connects with Gaia as a universal consciousness.  "Teaching composting, all the forgotten foods and disappeared knowledges ... that are living around us" strengthens learning by embedding it in living and dynamic examples, surfacing the amazing traditions and knowledge of the place. 



She explains that the naming of the school was birthed from the name of the movement. In a field farmed continuously in older techniques, a peasant explained that the nine seeds grown there reflected the cosmic/universal balance -- the nine planets (related to each crop) -- and the health-giving, balanced nutrition of the contexted nine plants that grow from them- surfacing from folk traditions the connection between biodiversity, cosmology, and health. She wanted to avoid genetic reductionism of referring to seeds as "genetic resources," which is impossible to convey in indigenous dialects. 


Referring to the content that includes Gandhian principles she finds more relevant than ever in an epoch of accelerated globalization, she says "the seed became the spinning wheel for our times." 


Dr. Shiva has now been invited by the country of Bhutan to extend their orientation around the longer term metric of "Gross National Happiness" instead of GDP (gross national product) to move to exclusive organic agriculture practices. Highly recommended interview...

http://www.nationofchange.org/vandana-shiva-teachers-living-world-1327770383

Winter's Gifts of Earth

I live in the northern hemisphere. For us, the winter comes now. What does the winter mean? I am from peoples who knew seasons, there are other peoples who live closer to where the earth doesn't seem to tilt so much. But here, where a seasonal cycle's circle becomes an undulation of infinity over the arc of larger orbits, winter is a significant teacher.

What are winters gifts? Winter is the time of earth, when all other growth is spared and  color is pared down to rock and branch. Brown and black and grey proliferate into a thousand chromal subtleties. Space opens between things, some things sag and some things tighten. The action is all invisible, with roots as superhighways for the churnbuckets of earth. Worms create new life in this womb of the year. Our futures gestate in the fallows of earth and brain.  

We lean into the cold, which reminds us about breathing, re-members in us by cold sensory illumination the constant lung root networks whereby air travels to every cell in the earth of our bodies. Winter turtles us under the carapace of cloud, every sky movement an opportunity for nature divination.


This is a time when silence and subtlety remind us to listen closely, to stay quiet so as not to miss the ten thousand voices of crunch, chirrup, breath. The hands of leaves press onto earth's skin and dissolve into her, leaving traceries of the skeletal structures of love in tannins and resolve. We nourish and tend.

We are not estivators, we upright furless monkeys. We rest deeply, but we stay awake. Earth remembers in us in winter how things are made, the starting point before the forms of birth quicken and expand. We live in the seed and kernel time, taking the dense savings and codes of future growth into our own bodies to replicate possibility.

Winter sheds and leans us, a kind of sensory celebration of the subtle form. We make our own seeds from the orbits of the preceding year's growth and decorate. Is this year more hull or pit, more sunflower or nectarine? Has this been a year to grow exoskeletal protection or a time to strengthen at our core? By following the grooves and patterns of what has passed, in winter we hone and harvest. We design and structure. We incubate and portend.

Still now, listen deep. More rock and gesture of leafless branch. More grinning worm shitting earth. More cold air and spacious. Spare and nurturing. Condensing and revealed. Dissolving and forming. These are winter's gifts of earth.

Creativity

Ken Robinson, in his February 2006 TED Talk (available here), challenges us to redesign education to nurture and support creativity. Here's some snapshots of his great talk. "Does School Kill Creativity?"

Children - Capacity for Innovation

"All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly."

"My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status."

Creativity Requires the Space to Make Mistakes

“Kids will take a chance. If kids don't know, they will take a go, they aren't afraid of being wrong.”

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

In our culture now, adults stigmatize mistakes. "We are educating people out of their creative capacities."

"We don't grow into creativity, we get educated out of it."

Imagine Shakespeare as a Child

We don't think of Shakespeare being a child. Ken lived near where Shakespeare's father lived.

“Shakespeare was in someone's English class. Imagine Shakespeare as a child. 'Go to bed now. Put the pencil down and stop speaking like that.'”

Against the Arts at the Bottom of the Hierarchy of Subjects, Critique of Industrial Education as Reproducing Lopsided and Disembodied Head-Focused Experience

Robinson argues against the current hierarchy of subjects. Reading Math, then Humanities, then the Arts. Within the arts, there's a hierarchy. art and music higher status drama, dance

"There's no school system that teaches dance everyday. We all have bodies, did I miss a meeting. As children grow up, we educate them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. If we were to visit education as an alien and ask what is it for, you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors, they're the people who come out on the top. We should not hold them up as the high water mark of all human achievement, they are just another form of life. They live in their heads, up there and slightly to one side. They are disembodied. They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings."

"Our education system was ... to meet the needs of industrialism. Most useful subjects are at the top. Don't do music, you won't be a musician. Now profoundly mistaken. Second is, academic ability. academic intelligence. The whole system is a protracted entrance exam to university."

“In the next 30 years, more people will be graduating from education than any time in history. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything….Before, if you had a degree and if you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.” Now you need a higher and higher one- whole structure changing.

Intelligence is Diverse, Dynamic, and Distinct

"We need to radically rethink our understanding of intelligence. .... It's diverse. Secondly, it's dynamic. Intelligence is wonderfully interactive. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value." It comes because of going across disciplines (13:50). "The third thing about intelligence is that it's distinct."

Dancer, not Deficient

Story about Dancer [now captured in his book, The Element (2009)], GIllian Lynne was sent to a specialist because the school suspected a learning disorder, when the doctor figured out, she was a dancer. "'Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer.'" Gillian was able to attend dance school and eventually choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

A New Human Ecology Based on Building Human Capacity

"Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our understanding of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the same way we've strip mined the Earth, for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children."

Need to Re-aim Education at Creativity to Change Human Planetary Presence for Healing/Generative Purposes

 "Jonas Salk...said, 'if all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years, all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, all forms of life on earth would flourish.' And he's right."

Celebrating the Human Imagination

"What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios we've heard about. The only way we'll do it is to see our creative capacities for the richness that they are and understand seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being so that they can face this future. By the way, we might not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it."