The School of Co-Creativity
see our manifesto | vision | keywords
these notes are intended for use in writing future funding applications
The Organisers
(Go to the management team)
(1) Co-creative Learning
- We believe that the current global meta-crisis has changed the ultimate purpose of learning. If our species is to survive we may need to make radical changes at several levels. For example, we will need to re-invent the university system as a more long-sighted, inclusive, transdisciplinary, nimble and adaptive system.
- In the UK the current business model of universities is part of the problem. It is ironic that the UK government sees the university system mainly as a driver for 'economic growth'(★), given that so many students and universities are experiencing financial hardship. Unfortunately, governments usually make small incremental reforms rather than shifting to a better paradigm. We therefore applaud UNESCO's vision of the university system as a potential agent of change.
- The current university system has produced an excellent scientific community which did a fine job of predicting the climate emergency. However, this has not changed the irresponsible behaviours that drive it. We need a more creative and inclusive approach. The current model is based on discipline-based curricula and the numerical grading of individual students. Instead, we will create a bespoke and co-creative culture of self-evaluation and team learning.
(2) Our Vision
- We envision the future University system as an Indra's Net of local 'Micro-Schools'.
- Tuition would be free of charge (i.e. repayable on completion or pay-it-forward).
- It would act collectively as a citizen-led framework of micro-local initiatives.
- It would welcome exceptionality rather than standards or commonalities.
- Learners would develop their personal situated awareness and presence.
- Learning would follow the learner's curiosity and creative aspirations.
- It would emphasise team-learning rather than educating individuals
- There would be less need for a top-down curriculum or syllabus.
- A diversity of diversities would inspire a synergy-of-synergies.
- Some unthinkable ideas would be seen as opportunities.
- New forms of creative democracy would emerge.
(3) Our Aims
Inspired by UNESCO's vision we aim to offer applicants a radical alternative to the prevailing model of university education. This will foreground creative and co-creative thinking. WHY? The current economic order is still based on the logic of extraction (e.g. oil, mining and AI) which inevitably work according to the Law of Diminishing returns. Creativity offers society a Law of Increasing Returns. (See our forthcoming article on Co-Creation).
Subject to funding we will run the first pilot Saturday class from September<?> to September<?> 2027.
- Our aim is to help learners
- to value exceptions
- to think more creatively
- to manage their curiosity
- to learn how to learn better
- to redefine wisdom in their own way
- to think beyond disciplinary boundaries.
- to contribute to the survival of our species
- to manage their career ambitions and options
- to value learning via the Head (e.g. critical thinking)
- to value learning via the Hand (e.g. manual skills / dance)
- to value learning via the Heart (e.g. emotional understanding)
- to value learning with Humour (e.g. ability to play / make mistakes)
(4) A learner-centred summary
- What is it?
- an experimental part-time foundation course
- Who is it for?
- What's its point?
- What would I learn?
- How would I learn this?
- Who designs the syllabus?
- Where would it be located?
- How much would it cost me?
- When will the course take place?
- What about my specialist knowledge?
(5) Some Unique Features
- N.B. The following headings are indicative of our current aspirations and mission.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (reducing dependency on it)
- AI cannot think or feel in the human sense. It has no imagination, heart, limbs, or soul, so your conscience cannot be converted into a LLM (Large Language Model). Moreover, AI systems are not (yet) designed to emulate the multiple levels of entanglement inherent in our Self Evaluated Learning Framework (SELF). We invented this simple framework in 1992 and have implemented its use in several countries. It helps learners to manage their predicament and options in a creative and potentially entrepreneurial way. It makes plagiarism futile and hard to hide.
ChatGPT versus Gradescope
- SELF is a simple mapping tool that helps learners to navigate their situation or predicament. It helps them to create options and opportunities that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. It is not designed to answer, but it may frame important questions for the learner. SELF encourages to ask yourself outcome-seeking questions or opportunity-seeking questions. The SELF framework replaces some of the need for individual assessment by lecturers because it encourages the learner to map a whole professional context including a nominated reader.
ADAPTABILITY
- We applaud the growing appreciation of neurodiversity's importance to society and industry. A more transdisciplinary and co-creative approach would also complement . We believe that foresight, agility, imagination and playfulness are now more valuable than ‘academic rigour’ (Wood, 2012). While the Newtonian logic of ‘scholastic rigour’ may sound convincing in speeches to funding councils it is a dubious metaphor when applied to creative learning and research.
BESPOKE LEARNING
- The need to 'think outside the box' and challenge the idea of a syllabus as an empty vessel that can be filled with any new content. Instead we will depend on specific values and capabilities. By self-awareness/reasoning/sensory/imagination/thinking/creativity) rather than
CHILDLIKE GENIUS
- Unlike the Enlightenment's exceptionalist idea of 'genius' as an individual man with a special gift, NASA defined it in a way that resembles the playful and co-creative abilities of a five year old child.
CO-CREATIVITY
- As all creativity is combinatorial, rather than summative or aggregative (Koestler, 1961) we advocate mapping situations in ways that reveal the potential relationships between things. Koestler's term 'bisociation' challenges the mythology of genius as an isolated and exceptional source of innovation. It acknowledges the combinatorial nature of all creative thinking. Using Koestler's method, several seemingly incompatible frames of thought are forced together to produce a creative leap that may surprise all. If acts of creation are always co-located, then 'co-creative acts' might equally well derive from different regions of one brain, or from different individuals within a group (see our article on Languaging Co-creation.
HEAD / HEART / HAND / HUMOUR
- Our holistic approach values individual differences between learners as an asset to effective teamwork. We therefore created a fourfold model that reconciles head, hand, heart and humour. It will mean valuing the tacit skills of knowing, sensing, doing and making as aspects of one's judgment that build a sense of moral compass. We will encourage playfulness and humour as a way to embrace failure as a vehicle for unexpected opportunities and fun. We will conduct immersive experiments in ecological awareness or set philosophical quests for 'unthinkable possibles'. We will value compassion and altruism whilst helping learners to prepare for paid employment.
HEALTH
- Learning to adopt lifestyles that are healthier, happier and more convivial.
HUMAN SCALE THINKING
- The scale of teaching has grown from the Ancient Greek pedagogies of 1:1 teaching into the monolithic institutions of the 21st century. The factory-style methods of the 19th (?) century, led to the managerial processes (ranking & grading / syllabus repetition /standards of fairness / quality-assurance). Driven also by the recent implementation of an unfair fee system, these managerial imperatives now eclipse the need for curiosity and learning for its own sake. While the human mind can conceptualize more than 4 simultaneous social relations (Dunbar, ) we are poor at applying this to more complex situations. Four is a ‘sweet spot’, in cognitive (Fuller, 1949) and mnemonic terms (Cowan, 2001) because our brains 'chunk' information in fours and because quartets imply twice the number of relations than trios, and six times more relations that a duet.
LEARNING BY DOING
- The idea of integrating /embedding intended learning experiences within useful tasks is not new (e.g. apprenticeship schemes). As Ivan Illich put it, "Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. " (Ivan Illich - De-Schooling Society)
META-METHODOLOGY
- We will apply our own relevant metadesign tools (c.f. Wood, 2024) that were conceived as a generalised superset of design thinking and a creative framework for re-scoping design.
OPTIMISING ACHIEVEMENT
- Training oneself to generate ‘luckier’ internal narratives in order to become 'luckier' (Wiseman, 2003).
PRESENCE
- The growing use of screen-based technologies appears to have narrowed our attentiveness to the immediate locality. We therefore aim to develop sensory awareness and responsiveness to what is around us.
RESPONSIBLE CITIZENSHIP
- We will encourage learners to become more aware of their thoughts, sensations and feelings and to see and feel their relevance and impact on their immediate locality. We would also encourage them to imagine themselves as co-creative and empathetic agents within the universe as a whole.
RESPONSIBLE EDUCATION
- We envisage our School of Co-Creation as working as a fractal similar to responsible citizenship as described above - i.e. with the University comprising a de-centralised network of tiny, micro-local schools.
SYNERGISTIC REASONING
- The mathematics of synergy in preference to summative reasoning and aggregation
TEAM LEARNING APPROACH
- We find the 'lone genius' (Enlightenment) myth to be unhelpful as it reduce the effectiveness of good teamwork. Rather than focusing on individual performance we will develop a co-creative team learning approach in which team members learn to develop reciprocal support for their respective passions and interests. We will use Hellinger’s Constellation workshops as a diagnostic and team development method.
WISDOM REDEFINED
- We will continue to re-define the concept of Wisdom as a perpetual task. Our current definition acknowledges the role of ignorance within a whole system that includes non-human forms of life. Learners are invited to integrating and harnessing diverse ways of thinking. Used in conjunction with the Self Evaluated Learning Framework it should help individual learners to developing their metacognitive sense of themselves. It will mean encouraging learners to apply critical skills of reasoning to their lived experiences and ethical views. (c.f. Wood, 2024, AI v. Ecological Wisdom).
(6) What is a University?
(6a) Unmixed Messaging
What we might recognise as a 'mainstream' university has its roots in Ancient Greece and elsewhere. It was only after the Coldstream Reports of the 1960s that British Art Schools were formally absorbed into the University system. While the two systems may appear to have coalesced at the organisational level (e.g. when ratifying grades in joint Examination Boards) their ideologies have yet to be reconciled. This is a missed opportunity for learners and society as a whole. One obvious cultural difference is how creativity is understood and applied. For example, whereas scientists traditionally tend to seek predictable ‘laws’ of Nature, artists are more likely to look for exceptions rather than norms and rules (Ljubec 2022).
(6b) The University's 'DNA'
The traditional University evolved from the mediaeval monastic culture of books. As this still remains the dominant paradigm for higher education it may be hard for many of us to imagine The University without the primacy of alphanumeric writing. Ironically, although the Latin word 'universitas' implies a fully comprehensive syllabus, the first European University (1088) was a cloistered environment designed for priests to study the written and oral arts of theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic and the law. At this time, books were revered for their rarity. It was before the advent of printing, and the need to copy texts painstakingly by hand may explain some of the idiosyncracies of scholarly writing practice that linger on in the modern classroom. Some stylistic conceits, such as consistency, comprehensiveness, detachment, explicitness and completeness, remain, even though their purpose may be inappropriate for many contexts. (c.f. Panofsky, 1968).
(6c) The Art School
Today's Art School system owes less to the book-oriented traditions and more to the mediaeval crafts guilds. Loosely speaking, scholarship was part of a 'truth-centred' and contemplative culture. By contrast, the Art School offered a more hands-on, situated and co-creative culture of being, doing and making. The hegemonic status of the book explains a long-held disdain for Art Schools as an inferior mode of education. It was therefore widely assumed that the Coldstream Reports (Ministry of Education, 1960; Department of Education and Science, 1970) insisted on granting honours degrees to art and design students on condition that a written component be included in the syllabus. Art school heads therefore began to recruit ‘complementary studies’ lecturers who were au fait with the arcane conceits of 'scholarly' writing (Raein, 2004). Ironically, the word ‘writing’ was not mentioned in the Coldstream report. So, despite assumptions to the contrary, writing has never been a mandatory component of an honours degree in art and design (Lockheart, 2018; Lockheart, 2016). This oversight reveals the lack of attention given to the Art School legacy. As Sir Ken Robinson said, we have learned nothing from the last few hundred years of University education.
- "Conformity continues to triumph over individuality. Curriculums are still arranged in tiers, with mathematics at the top and the arts at the bottom." (Robinson, 2026).
(6d) What is the Purpose of Universities?
What began as a lofty Socratic pursuit of self-awareness, altruism and moral development has descended into expedient concerns for institutional brand value, attainment targets and assessment procedures. After 1945, education in the UK was made free for all. This gave less privileged learners a greater chance to reach their full potential. Affordable tuition fees were introduced in 1998, but increased to £9K over the following decade or so. With it came a Quality Assurance culture in which concerns for accessibility and fairness risked eclipsing the idea of learning for its own sake. As students could now regard themselves as paying customers, exam grades acquired an inflated importance . Unfortunately, this is likely to create anxiety and unlikely to encourage better learning outcomes. (Chamberlin et al., 2023).
- "If the purpose of education is to score well on a test, we've lost sight of the real reason for learning."
- (Richard Feynman)
A recent report★ predicts that, over the next 5 years, one in six 16-24 year olds are likely to become 'NEETS' (neither in training, further education or job-seeking). It attributes this partly to the way we educate young people. Some believe that universities lost touch with their primary purpose long ago (Hitz, 2019) and that the financial causes are recent.
(7) 100% Human Creativity
Until recently, most of our political leaders were products of a classical education. They were steeped in the fact-based logic of history, philosophy and in the ancient arts of rhetoric and debate. Many had been taught the dogmas of macroeconomic theory but had not acquired the creative skills to reinvent them. The system seemed viable when politics was characterised by codes of decency, ballot boxes and the rules of law. Today, however, a few authoritarian leaders and tech oligarchs are 'gaming the system' with the aid of digital toolkits. Some believe that their tools are influencing, or even contaminating the human values that underpin social relationships, how we learn, and what we mean by 'learning', 'education', 'qualifications' and 'learning'. Meanwhile, revolutions in cognitive science and digital engineering had begun to challenge traditional distinctions between 'education' and 'training'; 'knowledge' and 'information'; 'information' and 'data'. As generative AI systems became freely available to all, universities had an opportunity to reconsider their long-term purpose and to reinvent their modus operandi accordingly. Instead, they chose to embrace AI on a 'wait and see' basis. As a result they have become impotent bystanders in an arms race between the artificial simulators of learning and the gadgets designed to detect them (c.f. Wood, 2024, AI v. Ecological Wisdom).
(8) POSSIBLE Workshops
Outlines of suggested workshops (yet to be agreed with the relevant parties)
Further Reading
- Chamberlin, K., Yasué, M. and Chiang, I.C.A., 2023. The impact of grades on student motivation. Active Learning in Higher Education, 24(2), pp.109-124.
- Wood, J. article about creativity and Art Schools)
- Hitz, Z., 2019. Lost in thought: The hidden pleasures of an intellectual life. Princeton University Press.
- Humphrey, N., Curran, A., Morris, E., Farrell, P. and Woods, K., 2007. Emotional intelligence and education: A critical review. Educational Psychology, 27(2), pp.235-254.
- Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S. and Auld, G., 2012. Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy sciences, 45(2), pp.123-152.
- Biely, Katharina, 2024, Paradigm changes in research: Kuhn meets socio-ecological transition theory,