What needs to happen to achieve this?
I am participating in the Creativity in Development project led by Prof. Norman Jackson and am capturing here some first thoughts. Warning, they will be messy and might not mean a lot to others. I am also trying to make sense of these as they develop and hopefully, grow into something that will help me develop my personal creativity but also help others?
No idea where to start really. The only thing that comes into my mind at the moment are the words I used during the recent SEDA conference in November 13. Sue Beckingham captured these for me in a tweet. Apparently I said in my session:
We need to unzip our minds and experiment with learning.
I think this summarises actually how I feel about creativity and how I work and learn, as Chrissi the developer in my professional life but also Chrissi the person in my private life. I am not really two different people and I don’t lead two different lives. There is only one of me and I live only once. I couldn’t be two people. I am just me. A free spirit that is full of curiosity to explore and discover new things, that loves to experiment, play; share and collaborate with others.
As part of this project, I will be looking at my personal creativity but it is really difficult to focus in. Hopefully this will come over next few weeks… I think, I probably have found a title for my personal creativity study “We need to unzip our minds?” or something like this but I have no idea yet where this will take me and how I will get there.
Thinking of a specific activity at work that could help me focus in and maybe I have found something. I will be working with a cohort of students on one of the PGCAP modules at MMU in term 2 (starting in January 14) and I have invited a colleague from outside my unit to do this together. Team teaching is not easy! In order to make this work, both need to complement each other and work as a team, ideally a creative team. I have picked this person and in a way it is an experiment if we can do this together and if we can infect others with our creativity. This is the most important part for me and this is why I see this as an experiment into professional relationships and creativity. Does this make sense? Capturing my reflections on this experience together with my colleague would, I think, help me gain a deeper understanding of our professional relationship, the process and our achievements but also the challenges. If we could then also involve our students and share our reflections with them, that would provide an additional perspective to this experiment and a very useful one.
Don’t know yet how to bring all these reflections together. As this will be a narrative inquiry, we could analyse our reflections and these of our students and identify if we managed to unzip minds and what contributed to this to happen so that we can unlock creativity in ourselves and others while also promoting and enabling creative expression and learning!
Can’t wait for comments on the above 😉
Chrissi Nerantzi 