creativity, heterotopics and thirdspace tim corcoran [email protected]
TRANSCRIPT
What these students considered to be most important regarding their education and experience at school?
Skills or qualifications?
‘That’s what adults might say’
The group valued relationships as being the crucial element to worthwhile education
Overview
1. A brief review of creativity according to psychological theory.2. Thirdspace.3. Heterotopics.4. A psychology of joint action.
Glăveanu, V.P. (2010). Paradigms in the study of creativity. New Ideas in Psychology, 28(1), 79-93.
1. the Genius or the ‘He-paradigm’ • the Enlightenment (late 1600s to late 1700s) and philosophy of
Descartes, Bacon or Spinoza or the romantic period (late 1700s to mid 1800s) and poets such as Wordsworth or painters such as Franciso Goya.
• Creativity in these times was largely elitist and derived from the essential nature of the individual. The creative individual spurned news schools of thought or changed the course of history via their actions.
Glăveanu, V.P. (2010). Paradigms in the study of creativity. New Ideas in Psychology, 28(1), 79-93.
2. the creative person or the ‘I-paradigm’• the merging of emotional expression of the Romantics with
the Enlightenment’s advanced intellect. • more psychological understandings coming to the fore
engaging concepts like multiple intelligences, personality or subconscious process.
• creativity here we can move between scientific knowledge such as in the methodological reductionism of psychometrics testing, all the way to the Beatles
Glăveanu, V.P. (2010). Paradigms in the study of creativity. New Ideas in Psychology, 28(1), 79-93.
3. the social or ‘we-paradigm’• the social world is presented as something external to
the individual facilitating or constraining action.• social accounts of creativity claim to acknowledge
human interaction and collaboration, yet nevertheless retain a distinction or separation between person and their world.
A cultural psychology of creativity
A ‘living theory’ of creativity with 3 key considerations:1. Creativity is an everyday phenomenon i.e. in
the living of daily life we are continuously improvising responses to the world, making it up as we go along.
…the open world that people inhabit is not prepared for them in advance. It is continually coming into being around them. It is a world, that is, of formative and transformative processes (Ingold, 2008, p. 1801).
Tanggaard, L. (2013). The sociomateriality of creativity in everyday life. Culture & Psychology, 19(1), 20-32.
Tanggaard, L. (2013). The sociomateriality of creativity in everyday life. Culture & Psychology, 19(1), 20-32.
2. There is a close relationship between people and material tools. Contact with or resistance from materials with which we work can prompt new ideas. Embodied familiarisation…the dynamic, nonlinear means by which an agent becomes increasingly acquainted with, and capable of performing , meaningful activities in certain situations or in general – for example, becoming able (or better able) to engage in cultural practices and all that follows from such engagement, including tool use, problem solving, managing relationships, and attending to the affairs of everyday living (Yanchar et al, 2013, p. 219).
Tanggaard, L. (2013). The sociomateriality of creativity in everyday life. Culture & Psychology, 19(1), 20-32.
3. It is not only via divergence that an idea can be considered creative, it must also invoke value in social practice.
Baerveldt, C. & Cresswell, J. (2015). Creativity and the generative approach to culture and meaning. In Glăveanu, Gillespie & Valsiner (Ed.s) Rethinking creativity. Routledge: New York.
…cultural practices become empty and stagnant when they are acquired merely as formal procedures rather than as active generative principles […] If, on the other hand, my actions are genuinely creative, this is not just because they are new or unconventional, but because they remain connected to the social tensions and polarities that initially gave rise to them (p. 106-107)
‘a sausage-making model’Professor Yong Zhao at the 2014 Queensland Association of State School Principals conference
Creativity is job security, but our traditional model doesn’t like creative kids. We want people to become homogenous; we produce a lot of people with similar skills, with similar knowledge. Stop debating on test scores, on national curriculum, [and] think how do we utilise our resources ... to create a personalised learning ecosystem for every child so they can be passionate, so they can be great. (Courier Mail, 1 August, 2014)
Thirdspace
• Borrowing ideas from cultural (Bhabha 1994) and literary (Bakhtin 1986) theory, third space occurs in joint action (Shotter 1995).
• Bhabha (Rutherford 1990, p. 211) observes: ‘The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation’.
• Third space, according to Gutiérrez (2008, p. 152), ‘is a transformative space where the potential for an expanded form of learning and the development of new knowledge are heightened’.
Heterotopics: Learning as second nature
hetero: the other of two, other, different.topic: a kind or class of considerations suitable to the purpose of rhetorician or disputant.
At its most unambiguous heterotopia may be considered to be a space wherein ‘other considerations’ (i.e. heterotopics) are invited.
Foucault considered heterotopia to be a space ‘both utterly real...and utterly unreal’ (1998, p. 179). As well as this he suggested it to be a process involving ‘a kind of contestation, both mythical and real, of the space in which we live’ (p. 179).
Heterotopics: Learning as second nature
Heterotopics, as applied by psychologists, teachers or learners, enables options or alternatives to understanding reality providing authentically situated accounts for what is considered real at any given time.
Heterotopics, if used in our engagements with another, cannot set out to establish absolute certainty or essential truths because they are unable to furnish monologic outcomes.
Bakhtin
The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it – it does not approach the object from the sidelines (1981, p. 267-268).
What do communities make of education?e.g. skills, qualifications, etc.
Joint action
Heterotopics are a means to engaging process orientations to ontology.
For it is in our socialisation into certain ways of being that we learn how to do such things as making claims, raising questions, conducting arguments, sensing disagreements, recognising agreements, and so on. These ontological skills – these ways of being a certain kind of socially competent, first-person member of our society – are necessary for there to be any questions, or arguments, at all (Shotter, 1993, p. 78).
Creativity, heterotopics and thirdspace
When teacher and student meet in third space, ‘a deterritorialisation of one’s consciousness from the inside of one’s self to the outside, or into a Thirdspace between self and the Other’ (Kostogriz, 2006, p. 186) occurs. Education as creative activity: ‘the emergence of community envisaged as a project – at once a vision and a construction – that takes you “beyond” yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present’. (Bhabha, 2008, p. 334)
