In the context of the rapid and ongoing changes in science and technology, in his book, Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner (2008) identifies five essential dimensions of the mind necessary for cultivating informed, engaged and self-actualised citizens for the twenty-first century. One of these dimensions is creativity because, as Gardner asserts, ‘almost anything that can be formulated as rules will be done well by computers, rewards will go to creators—those who have constructed a box but can think outside it’ (p. xiii). Indeed, creativity ‘is widely acknowledged to be a key twenty-first century skills, and it is included in many countries lists of desired college and career-ready outcomes for students’ (Plucker et al. 2002, p. 1). As a desired skill, creativity is also a component of the ‘4Cs’ approach to pedagogy (Jefferson and Anderson 2017), which together with creativity, includes critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Framed in the manner of skills, creativity should be seen as an essential dimension that permeates the domains of knowledge and human activities, rather than a separated domain on its own. Despite being ‘well-defined, both explicitly and implicitly, for decades’ as a novel work that is accepted by a group as useful (Plucker et al. 2002, p. 1), within the framework of school curricula, creativity is mainly associated with the domain of creative disciplines such as visual arts, music, dance, drama and media.
Otherwise stated, in education, the recognition of creativity requires a product that is commonly considered artistically creative and is often confused with a display of well-developed skills in a certain discipline rather than a production of useful novelty. This view, in my opinion, corresponds with well-respected creativity scholar Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) model of creativity, in which he believes that the realisation of creativity is possible only through the interaction of three components: the individual, the domain and the field’s gate-keepers (p. 28). According to Csikszentmihalyi, an individual person is a source of the creative manifestation, but:
A person cannot be creative in a domain to which he or she is not exposed. No matter how enormous mathematical gifts a child may have, he or she will not be able to contribute to mathematics without learning its rules. But even if the rules are learned, creativity cannot be manifested in the absence of a field that recognises and legitimises the novel contributions. A child might possibly learn mathematics on his or her own by finding the right books and the right mentors, but cannot make a difference in the domain unless recognised by teachers and journal editors who will witness to the appropriateness of the contribution. (p. 29)
From the perspective of reconnected learning, the quote above represents a position of alienation on a few levels. It first separates the creative process and the creative outcome, placing the main emphasis on the final result: contribution. Conversely, the Ripples pedagogy seeks the achievement of learning within the reconnection of a process and its end product in a way that knowledge is gained through discovery, while doing and making. This strategy leaves behind ‘the passivity of the “sit back and be told” model’ and explores ‘the engagement with “making and doing” culture’ (Gauntlett 2011, p. 11). David Gauntlett elaborates:
This approach is open about the fact that learning is an ongoing process that everyone is engaged in – teachers themselves are engaged in a learning project […] Rather than displaying laminated examples of the ‘best answer’ on the walls, these classrooms show works in progress, experiments, even things that have gone wrong. (p. 11)
Second, by focusing on contributions, Csikszentmihalyi isolates a group of individuals who can be considered as a creative elite, or creative ‘geniuses’. The Ripples model of learning is designed for classroom projects and therefore orients itself to the recognition, appreciation and cultivation of every child’s individual creativity while they are working in class as well as in social media groups. Following a systemic approach, the pedagogical position of the Ripples model asserts that the creativity of life, borrowing from Capra (http://www.azquotes.com/author/17669-Fritjof_Capra), ‘expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability’. The instability within the Ripples learning is generated by feedback loops that facilitate the conditions of reconnecting personal affirmation within social collaboration. The emergence of this integration, drawing from Capra once more, ‘is one of the hallmarks of life. It has been recognised as the dynamic origin of development, learning, and evolution. In other words, creativity—the generation of new forms—is a key property of all living systems’. Learning, in this case, results from an expansion of the individual’s knowledge, altering their cognitive schemata and/or developing practical skills through the ‘growth into’ natural, social and cultural surroundings, and by doing so, modifying the surroundings as well.
In Csikszentmihalyi’s quote, the individual agency of a learner appears to be separated from being an author of his/her own knowledge-production tasks: he/she must first learn the symbolic systems of the discipline suggested to him/her by ‘tried and true’ sources, namely, certified teacher(s) and accredited text books. The Ripples method of study resists such an approach and envisions the dynamics of learning as a rippling field comprised of the individual, domain (discipline), the social group(s) and natural/sociocultural environments. Within this fluctuating medium, students are not prevented from, but encouraged to, take initiative in searching for data and their interpretations and reconstructions. A teacher’s goal, in this context, is not to restrain an individual student’s interest and natural desire to experiment in a certain domain of knowledge because he/she did not yet learn the symbolic systems and rules of that domain; rather, the goal is to recognise and foster students’ individual abilities and desire to do so and, by doing so, to teach them the symbolic systems and rules of the discipline. If education follows Csiszentmihalyi’s model, which I believe is currently typical, students are stripped of their autonomy and put in a position of dependence and distrust. The Ripples approach to knowledge-production strives to facilitate learning conditions where students as autonomous living systems develop their personal agency to interact with the systemic medium of their existence through the act of self-designing, thereby modifying their surroundings as well.
The rippling mobilised by ongoing feedback loops facilitates conditions in which students gain their knowledge not by reading from prescribed sources, memorising given facts and following arbitrary instructions, but by learning to make meaning and exercise their agency in the construction of their own reality. From this point of view, creativity is recognised not as a development of professional skills in order to apply them to achieve a creative impact, but as a creative force that motivates and orients learning towards authentically grounded personal growth.
Creativity is, therefore, ingrained in thinking, making and doing that are every day practice, routine but real-world useful creativity. As Gauntlett (2011) states:
We don’t only say that something is ‘creative’ when it has been recognised with a Nobel prize, nor do we limit the label to the kind of thing that each of us only does once or twice in a lifetime. Because we are inventive human beings, creativity is something we do rather a lot, and understood in this broad sense it includes everyday ideas we have about how to do things […] (p. 15)
Thus, framed within the Ripples approach, learning is achieved through creating. This comprises a new circularity added into the Ripples pedagogy: learningcreating. Given the centrality of the individuals in the construction of their knowledge, the prefix self- becomes a common denominator for both segments of the circularity, self-learningself-creating. According to a systemic perspective held by the Ripples pedagogy, the self does not exist in a vacuum but in an entanglement with the whole. Self, like any other ‘living system or organism is a semi-open material system, far from equilibrium with its environment’ (Bunge 2003, loc. 1000), semi-permeated by the pulsating and constantly creating micro-macro medium of existence.
Now we must give respectful consideration to the prefix semi- as a signifier of the self-defining and self-assertive properties in the process of self-learningself-creating. Although the self is an entity saturated with the natural, historical, sociocultural characteristics of its reality, it has its own determined structure, a boundary that, borrowing an analogy from biological science, is ‘a semi-permeable membrane’ (loc. 1000), is composed of:
physical and chemical microsystems and mesosystems, in particular water, carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids; all of these components are sufficiently contiguous so that they can enter into chemical reactions; and some components are control systems that maintain a fairly constant milieu interieur despite environmental changes within the bounds. (italicised by author, loc. 1000)
This milieu interieur, internal environment, makes us different from each other, so in mingling with each other and the environment we are not dissolving into it but rather maintaining our pre-determined structure. In keeping with Maturana and Varela’s (1998) notion of structural determinism, Ripples learning adheres to the concept that:
Structure-determined systems are systems, or composite entities, such that everything that happens in them or to them is determined in them at every instant by their structure and structural dynamics at that instant. External agents that may impinge upon a structure-determined system only trigger in it structural changes determined by its structure without specifying them. (Maturana and Verden-Zöller 2012, p. 159)
Adopting this view is one of the integral constituents in the Ripples pedagogy. It proposes a balanced distribution between the collective and individual creative agencies. It seeks not only to cultivate individual capabilities to be open to collectively triggered changes but also to recognise and find ways for expressions of personal creative potential without it being ‘rippled down’ by the dynamics of the collective.
8.2 DIY: The Path to Rippling
As discussed previously, a central tenet of reconnected learning rests upon a historically unprecedented condition, that is, a universal privatisation of the means and tools of knowledge-production. This circumstance changes the status quo in education and sheds on it a light that allows us to see the aspects previously hidden from view. For example, Marx’ theory of objectification and alienation now can be seen in a different spectrum of light. As he famously states, the object of labour, and in the context of Ripples model, the product of learning, is ‘the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he created,’ (Marx 1844, loc. 1383).
Marx sees the process of consciousness materialising in the physical explicit world as an act of a contradictory and gloomy self-alienation. He further writes: ‘In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him,’ (italicised by author, loc. 1383). Determining Marx’ theoretical orientation as historical ‘class struggles’ (Marx and Engels 1848, loc. 72), we can recognise a semantic application of the term ‘tear’. To Marx (1844), the word ‘labour’ is associated with the underprivileged class of those who do not possess the tools and means of production, and therefore ‘man’s species life’, that is, their labour, time, potential, effort and so on, are reduced to the level of a commodity. From this point of view, their objectified consciousness is ‘torn away’ from them and becomes someone else’s commodity. Consequently, they are alienated from the products of their labour and are thus transformed into lower-consciousness beings.
In drawing an analogy between Marx’s concept of alienated labour and traditional learning, the Ripples learning system takes hundred and eighty degree turn. It sees privatisation of the tools and means of knowledge production as a way to escape from alienated learning conditions. The act of objectification, that is, the materialisation of one’s consciousness, within the Ripples model is understood not as a self-alienation—in Marx’s words, ‘tearing’ away a product from its producer—but self-extension, and as a result, the expansion of one’s milieu interieur into the medium of existence, thereby reinventing oneself and recreating the world around one. Objectification in the Ripples pedagogy implies creative synthesis emerging from the material extension of the personal mind-cinema—rippling of the mental grasps—into the pulsating fluidness of reality. The Ripples approach investigates opportunities to design learning environments in which students acknowledge the forces influencing the world, such as nature, governments, peer pressure misalignment caused by the array of diversity, learn to evaluate them and establish their personal position as responsible citizens and creative and compassionate individuals.
As the Ripples system suggests a sharp turn from the practice of traditional learning that causes alienation, it also deemphasises the cultivation of experts within separate disciplines. Contrary to such an approach, it proposes a focus on everyday creativity as a common trait essential to the intellectual, social and emotional growth of an individual. Gauntlett (2011) defines this type of creativity as ‘applied form’ (p. 46). This is not a professional artistic movement, but rather, with the addition of ‘the democratic element’ is what ‘today we would call “DIY
culture” (p. 48). Identifying DIY culture, Gauntlett writes: ‘Today, the mainstream notion of ‘DIY’ is associated with everyday home improvement—putting up shelves, assembling flat-pack wardrobes, and fixing drainpipes oneself, without professional help’ (p. 49). Since 1960, however, the DIY movement has emerged, as Lowndes (2016) writes, ‘as a reaction to the “status quo”, having a relationship both to the artistic avant-garde
but also to working-class culture, youth culture and grass-roots politics’ (p. xvi). The rise of digital culture contributed to the progress of DIY, especially in the area of freeing itself from the control of gatekeepers by distributing work outside professional establishments. In terms of education, this aspect is yet another reason to look at Csiszentmihalyi’s (1996) model of creativity, that is, individualsymbolic system of domainfield’s gatekeepers, as lacking congruence with the contemporary digitally informed social conditions. Concentrating on gaining the skills and competency in the use of disciplinary semiotics, borrowing from Gauntlett (2011), ‘the formal education system had filled students’ heads with abstract information, supposedly of some background value for those who might enter the professions, but lacking real-world usefulness’ (p. 50).
The Ripples approach advocates a DIY creativity
as a bridge in connecting individual interests and abilities, as well as the freedom of creative expression with its motivational force for learning. For example, in the production of a multimodal learning task for Master of Education (Primary), I introduced the idea of DIY in the form of bricolage. It was well received and understood by the students, who produced some remarkable results.
Here is a line of snapshots from a video of an online student, James Mathews, who did a project involving his family and a quote from his reflective essay.
[…] When applying this creative arts concept of bricolage to my video I found that I was freed from the areas of this project that I would otherwise feel out of my depth completing. This included the areas of choreography and film editing, but when I realised that through bricolage I did not have to complete these tasks in a traditional fashion, that I could think outside the box and use the resources that I had access to in creative ways, I then began to enjoy these tasks more than I ever have before. (from the Student’s Reflective Essay) (Fig. 8.1)
Fig. 8.1
The screenshots from James Mathew’s assessment task video The Area Song
From this teaching experience, I have generated considerable data that helped me gain new insights and inspired me to further develop the Ripples pedagogical model and the DIY approach. In the following sections, I propose pedagogical strategies for the development of DIY creativity skills.
8.3 Creative Strategies
The previous two sections discussed creativity as an essential component for learning. In the Ripples model, creativity is an agent that permeates all learning activities rather than being confined to certain domains. From this perspective, creativity forms a strategic infrastructure for the methodised thinkingmaking through which the learning takes place. Within this method, the acquisition of disciplinary skills ‘ripples into’ the process of puzzle-solving, causing a formation of the personal innovative set of competencies.
The Ripples pedagogy suggests a few concepts and strategies, independent of disciplinary specifics, that together assist in the progress and evaluation of creative activities. To be more specific, the creative infrastructure is integrated into self-reflective and collaborative practices in a form of multimodal communication. The multimodal communication enables continuous feedback looping between self-reflectivecollaborative practices, enmeshing human intentionality and material affordances of things and environments to produce useful/novel configurations. Thereby, the Ripples model proposes a pedagogy that does not adapt new facts and algorithms prescribed by established one-size-fits-all standards but that engages the agency of milieu interieur to adapt to the environment in its useful and unique, i.e., creative way.
To facilitate the dynamics of a learning task, creating an infrastructure that enables and sustains the continuous ‘rippling’, let us start from developing an understanding of Arthur Koestler’s (1989) concept of matrices and codes.
8.3.1 Codes and Matrices
One of the illustrations Koestler uses to explain his concept of codes and matrices is the spider’s craft of engineering its web. Koestler describes the common spider work as guided by a biological algorithm, ‘a fixed code of rules built into the spider’s nervous system’ (p. 38). The fixed code of rules leads the spider to define and connect the topographically most suitable points for the web’s attachment. It then begins to spin radials between them, as well as reinforcing the frame and adding new threads. The sequential steps in the construction of the web are a fixed code in which ‘the centre of the web will always be at its centre of gravity’. The ‘lie-of-the-land’, the topography and, by extension, specific conditions of the particular area and circumstances, as well as the physical properties of the spider’s body, size and weight, regulate web engineering to its maximum usability, resulting in its individual uniqueness.
The production of a creative outcome, as Koestler concludes, ‘is always under the dual control (a) of a fixed code of rules (which maybe innate or acquired by learning) and (b) of a flexible strategy, guided by environmental pointers—the lie of the land’ (p. 38). This second flexible segment of web-engineering Koestler refers to as a matrix. In his further elaboration, he defines a matrix as a unifying formula, matrices of thought and behaviour, resulting from the individual abilities, skills and particularities of the environmental conditions. In Koestler’s concept, the two principles are not ‘different entities’, but ‘different aspects of the same activity’ (p. 40). To equilibrate Koestler’s concept of codes and matrices with the Ripples model’s purposes, they are considered as segments of the same circularity –codesmatrices, in which, in terms of functionality, one does not exist without the other.
As a thought experiment, we can hypothesise about how the construction of the web would be impaired in case of the spider’s ignorance of the ‘lay of the land’. For example, the strength of the threads and the number of the radials in the web directly correspond with the size of the spider’s body. This implies that if the size of an individual spider’s body is not considered during the web construction, the web’s sustainability would be compromised. Or consider another example, the spider’s sophisticated ability to sense intricate vibrations in the web and act upon these sensations while constructing the web. If this individual capacity is ignored, the structure of the web will be not maximised to the spider’s ability to sense and deal adequately with its prey. Therefore, the core intent of the web construction, food hunting, is not satisfied and the web is rendered useless.
Applying this analogy to contemporary education, we can draw a parallel in saying that if students are taught the rules of the code while excluding their individual agencies from acting upon their milieu interieur—personal interests and peculiarities used in accordance with the given circumstances—their life-skills are rendered unsustainable. The intention of reconnection, placed at the heart of the Ripples model for learning, aims to reconstruct the broken circularity of matricescodes, in which ‘the code is fixed, invariable factor in a skill or habit; the matrix its variable aspect’ (p. 40). Together, they form a synergetic alliance that facilitates the emergence of creative strategies leading to the expansion of knowledge.
8.3.2 Collisions of Incompatible Codes: The Jester, Sage and Artist
In continuing to adapt and, to a necessary degree, tailor Koestler’s concepts of creativity to the Ripples pedagogy, it is emphasised that in the process of creating, codesmatrices circularity is considered as one, inseparable ripple. The concept is adjusted to suit the Ripples model in a manner where the matrices are seen as unified clusters of variable aspects, such as individual inclinations and abilities, affordances of the means of production and given particular circumstances. Codes are the facts, concepts and convergent symbolic systems that are fixed rules of the game to which individual variable matrices are applied. Here, the conceptualisation of the Ripples model takes a turn from Koestler’s concept. For the production of novelty, Koestler suggests considering collisions of incompatible matrices, but the Ripples model looks at the collisions of incompatible codes. This is because the collisions between the variables is a natural process and does not produce results as dramatic as the collisions between solidly fixed systems. At the same time, the collisions can be triggered only if the variables are integrated into the fixed norms. In other words, separating the variables from the fixed systems results in cancelling the possibilities for collisions.
Rather, the Ripples model considers collisions of incompatible codes triggered by variable matrices within codesmatrices circularity. Drawing on Koestler’s theory, we can say that the collisions of incompatible fixed codes triggered by variable matrices result in either laughter, a new intellectual synthesis or a new aesthetic experience (p. 45). This depends on whom and for what reason the clash was triggered. According to Koestler, there are three forces that may be at play in orchestrating the collision of incompatible codes. Koestler suggests viewing them as personalised entities. They are the Jester, Sage and the Artist. I found this triad concept immensely helpful in facilitating the assessment of the quality of creative development framed within the feedback loops. Gauging creativity is undoubtedly one of the most challenging tasks in educational practice. While the students engaged in learning through the Ripples approach are required to continuously evaluate their peers’ creative endeavours, Koestler’s Jester-Sage-Artist triad offers an easily accessible yardstick.
The Jester acts upon his/her critical/satirical approach, exercising wit, creating riddles, debunking established concepts, using impersonations, and looking for coincidences and surprises—like a court Jester, he/she is privileged to produce the most preposterous outcomes. The response to a Jester’s results can be expressed with a ‘Ha-ha’ interjection.
The Sage learns by careful observation from natural/sociocultural environments. The Sage analyses collected data, produces categorisations and schematisations, sets him/herself discovery quests, works with puzzle-solving
algorithms, and examines the issue at hand by applying critical/analytical thinking and striving for logic and coherence. The response to a Sage’s work is expressed with an ‘Ah ha!’ interjection.
The Artist’s practices are built on intuition, empathy, and imagination. Applying aesthetical criticality, the Artist seeks elegance in forms and solutions. Artist’s response is an ‘Aahh’ interjection.
The characters of this triad give the students engaged in the Ripples learning an idea of the values and components that can be used for strategic moves to trigger disparate dimensions into collisions. The collisions should lead to a result that is new, surprising, elegant, coherent and valuable. Monitoring of the quality of the creative production is assisted by observing the presence and vigour of responsive interjections—‘Ha-ha’, ‘Ah-ha!’ and ‘Aahh’.
Considering this approach to creativity, Koestler (p. 656) coined the term bisociation. Adjusting Koestler’s definition of bisociation to the codematrix circularity in the Ripples model, we can say that bisociation points to the independent disciplinary codes, as well as the codes governing diverse fields of practice, trends, subcultures, lifestyles and societies. In the creative process, bisociation denotes bridging together symbols, concepts or rules from fields that are regarded as unrelated according to the individual matrices. For example, joining a rotating potter’s wheel with a motionless platform led to the creation of a carriage. Connecting tree bark with writing gave rise to the invention of paper. Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, in which he interpreted the trajectories of planets and comets in the manner of a falling apple; James C. Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic waves, where he bridged domains of optics and electromagnetism that were considered unrelated; or Einstein’s linking time with space and energy with matter can also serve as examples of bisociative insights. In other words, establishing patterns of cross-connections or, as Koestler refers to them mentalcross-fertilisations between components of multiple disparate domains, may lie at the core of creative production.
Jacob Bronowski (1964) argues that the progress of science is sustained by a continuous search for a hidden likeness in the things that appear unlike and discovery of unity and order ‘in the wild variety of nature’ and ‘our experience’ (loc. 222). Nicholas Negroponte’s famous quote declares: ‘While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they are all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximise differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines’ (Retrieved from: https://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/6771-nicholas-negroponte/page:2).
To summarise, in the use of creativity, i.e., the production of new, surprising, elegant, coherent and valuable concepts or products in the quest for knowing, the following strategies can be used: bisociation, cross-fertilisations,unexpected likeness and unusual juxtapositions. Interjective responses such as ‘Ha-ha’, ‘Ah-ha!’ and ‘Aahh’ can serve as qualitative indicators of the value of the creative process and outcome.
8.3.3 Combinational, Exploratory and Transformational Creativity
Three types of creativity—combinational, exploratory and transformational (CET)—have been distinguished by Margaret Boden (2013, p. 5). If bisociation, cross-fertilisation, unexpected likeness and unusual juxtapositions are suggested for the Ripples model’s strategic orientations, CET categories are seen as the levels of creative progress.
The combinational level is the most widely used type of everyday creativity and best recognised in the studies. Combinational creativity(CC) is directed to the ‘generation of unfamiliar combinations from familiar ideas’ (p. 6). In framing CC in the Ripples model, it is associated with the culture of remix, which is made possible by the shift of production tools into the hands of the learner, whereby the opportunities for remix are extended to the level of remixing previously unremixable aspects—for example, images, sounds and text. The CC level is diving into a divergent sea of digital, natural, social, cultural and semiotic resources
. Given the reconnective philosophy of the Ripples model, it is recommended to look for unexpected likenesses and possibilities for cross-fertilisations and unusual juxtapositions across diverse domains of action. The CC level is not characterised by conscious contemplations or in-depth analysis; it is ignited by personal interests and abilities, built on emotional responses to what is observed, inspired by imitations of what already exists, and driven by reassembling and achieving superficial effects. CC creativity means establishing authorship of the learning task and generating both the individual and the group’s creative enthusiasm. The DIY trend is essential at this stage as it sets the tone of being in control of the knowing process, rather than being controlled by already established knowledge. There may be a variety of questions asked at this stage, but their common denominator is, what if?
Exploratory creativity(EC) goes beyond gathering and remixing in order to experience exciting moments, create appealing effects and kindle fascination with the topic. As identified by Boden (p. 6), EC is distinguished by generating novel structures from the existing rules and conventions. In the Ripples learning, this level relates to the practices of bricolage. This is a methodology of working with what one has at hand, the heterogeneous repertoire that is generated during the EC stage. Students narrow down the preliminary manipulated data, distilling it to a more specific topic of their interest and aligning it more closely to the objectives of the learning task in which they are engaged. Their exploratory cross-fertilisations and unusual juxtaposition
s are directed by the parameters defined by the gathered material. The divergenceconvergence ripple is a strategic principle of EC creativity underlying the dynamics of the discovery of unusual likenesses between the unrelated (divergent) domains linking them with the symbolic (convergent) systems of an academic discipline(s).
This implies: (a) an ability to extract from an avalanche of divergent resources according to personal interests; (b) the capacity to adjust and expand knowledge and skills according with a consciously constrained situation; and (c) produce smart, new, surprising, elegant, coherent and valuable bisociations across a heterogeneous but nevertheless limited repertoire. Students learn, analyse, present and discuss their findings with their peers and friends on social media. By doing so, they engage in a new ripples of knowledge expansion and then condense it by connecting relevant dots in striving to make sense of the emerged patterns. The expandingcontracting circularity is important because the two segments regulate each other. Their rippling dynamic is the pulse of the Ripples learning. The more distanced the elements are, the more striking is the outcome of their cross-fertilisation. However, the fusion can be considered creative only if its novelty, elegancy, coherency and value are aligned with its usefulness. The what if? question becomes more definitive in terms of relational interdependence between the cross-fertilised elements, and the integration of a specific symbolic domain(s).
According to Boden, transformational creativity(TC) ‘is the most arresting of the three. Indeed, it leads to “impossibilist” surprise, wherein the novel idea appears to be not merely new, not even merely strange, but impossible’ (Boden 2013, p. 6). In Ripples learning, the semantics of transformation are oriented not to revolutionary achievements in the domains of knowledge, but transformational cognitive, emotional and interpersonal changes happening in an individual student. The level of transformation in students’ knowledge and skills, their awareness of themselves being within the world around them, and finally their re-designing of themselves causing positive alterations in their surroundings, are the indicators of their learning. Transformational creativity emerges from exploratory creativity. It is in striving for impossibility within personal capacities that students reach transformational states in themselves and thereby change their surroundings. Their self-reflections carried out with cinematic writing in the digital developmental folios, as well as their peers’ written feedback, become students’ accurate and authentic recordings of their transformational processes.
8.3.4 Metaphor as a Psychological Tool
In mediating the self-reflective activity of mind by means of cinematic writing, one of the ‘psychological tools
’ (term borrowed from Vygotsky 1934) proposed by the Ripples approach is a metaphor, which works by explaining ‘one thing in terms of another’ (Geary 2011, loc. 83). The metaphor is a cognitive mechanism that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) argue ‘we live by’. They write: ‘[…] the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor’ (p. 3).
As a psychological tool, metaphoric mapping allows the creation of bisociations across domains of experiences. Its instrumentality is indispensable in the application of cinematic writing (CW). By the nature of its multimodality, CW functions as a cross-fertilisation and spatial/temporal juxtaposition system to embody meaning. In this sense, the composition of metaphoric mapping and multimodality of CW renders it as a congruent technology in the use of combinational, exploratory and transformational creativity. In responding to the metaphoric comprehension of the world, CW facilitates the disorganisation of established concepts and ways of delivering meaning. It remixes ‘the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike—and reorganises it into uncommon combinations’ (Geary 2011, loc. 70).
Metaphoric logic assists in the identification of unexpected likenesses across disparate fields of knowledge. It is ‘an instrument that ‘can play … an exciting role in both poetry and science. The notion of ‘creating similarity’ constitutes such a momentous insight that it is worth dwelling on at greater length …’ (Forceville 1998, loc. 540). ‘Once the metaphor is accessed, all kinds of elaboration become possible …—the concept provides an enormous number of elements potentially mappable upon the implicative complex, or domain of life’ (loc. 552).
Expressed in metaphoric logic, the integrated awareness of one single present moment is a constellation that draws particles from a universe of previous experiences. Here, (a) the mediation by means of multimodality, (b) DIY character of production, and (c) metaphoric mapping all intersect, giving rise to a cinematic writinggenre. Capturing mental grasps—the unity of experience—and framing them through metaphoric logic in the frames of writing with images, sounds and movements, the cinematic bricoleur observes and analyses the responses of their own mind to the representations of the gathered data. Borrowing from Liane Gabora and Apara Ranjan (2013), it can be said that the cinematic bricoleur
constructs his/her knowledge ‘by shifting back and forth along the spectrum from associative to analytic as needed, the fruits of associative thoughts become ingredients for analytic thought, and vice versa’ (p. 23). In the language of the Ripples learning, this can be described as associativeanalytical circularity.
It is essential once again to place a strong emphasis on the DIY culture of cinematic writing (CW). Each page of the self-reflective digital folio is a space to examine and represent unified mind-grasps, not a production of well-refined individual art pieces. When drawings, photos, audios, videos, animations and annotations are used with the body of alphabetic text, they are incorporated within a spatial/temporary field in a rule of associativeanalytical circularity. The multimodal aspects of CW are the knower’s operators. Working on the pages of the developmental digital folio can be compared to a digitally augmented detective’s wall. The detective attaches photos, shifts them around, cuts out relevant snippets and pieces them together with newspaper clippings, embeds recorded voices and related sounds into his ‘bricolage’, writes notes over the photos, constructs diagrams and sketches, links audios with images, colour-codes certain aspects, posts written facts, learns about some aspects of the associated symbolic systems, inserts security camera videos and implants snippets of his/her own video-recordings, animates the objects to fall or move around and so on. In this way, the bricoleur-knower, page by page, uses her bricolages as personal psychological tools, engaging him/herself in a high-level cognitive activity. Hunting for unexpected likenesses, the bricoleur-knower constructs improvised relationships, interrogates them and decodes new messages that prompt still more ways of reconstruction.
8.4 The Ripple Model Example
8.4.1 The Spider Web
This section is an example of a learning task that demonstrates how Ripples creativity can be integrated in the learning model. Let us use a spider web as an example of an attractor
for the learning task. The attractor is the springboard for initiating the generation of data relevant to the topic. The outer radial of the ripple signifies the divergence of digital, natural, social, and cultural resources employed in the generation of data. An attractor is a constant reminder that the gathering of useful material revolves around a certain aspect. It is an anchor attached to the knower’s activity with ‘an elastic rope’ that can stretch as far as possible but forces a contraction back to the set topic. It does not mean that it restricts divergence; it means that it adjusts the data generation in relation to a specified task.
In traditional education, the common methodology is to first deliver the prescribed material that answers closed-ended questions, such as: ‘what?’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘who?’ ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ The ‘correct’ answers to these questions come from an established paradigmatic puzzle-solving
system. The next stage in the educational evolution after didactic learning, as identified by Kalantzis and Cope (2012), is authentic learning, where learners are given ‘a more active path’ (p. 38). The students are encouraged to ‘exercise their curiosity’ by repeating the procedures and practising the learned puzzle-solving skills, applying them to real-life situations and posing open-ended questions.
This is a rather hypocritical arrangement because the students’ positions as passive recipients of the prescribed material from the outset of the task disregard their intrinsic motivation and therefore do not leave room for exercising their curiosity. So-called child-centred education stumbles over standardised testing, by which one of the most fundamental features of the human being—individual curiosity—is rendered superfluous.
In the Ripples model, diversive curiosity is given a central role in learning. It is especially essential at the beginning, when students map connections between their psychological inclinations and a given learning topic.
8.4.2 Combinational Creativity—Deep Remixability
The questions that guide the generation of data at the stage of Combinational Creativity (CC) are guided by open-ended ‘what if?’ considerations. Questions such as ‘what?’, ‘where’, ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ will be asked at the Exploratory stage as responses to ‘what if?’
In this particular task, students can commence the project by watching YouTube videos about interesting facts and the construction of spider webs that attract their individual attention. As their curiosity is kindled by watching the videos, they can start asking ‘what if’ questions: (Fig. 8.2)
Fig. 8.2
Visualisation of the creative process stages in the ripples model
What if humans had a device that could shoot strong silk threads across distances to create bridges or scaffolds to get across the spaces or climb different heights?
What if we organised a spider webbing observatory in the school yard or home garden?
What if, because of its strength, elasticity and breathability, spider silk could be used to make clothes?
What if a spider web symbol carried coded messages across generations?
What if a spider was represented as a social creature, would it be an evil social outcast?
What if spider silk threads could be used to make parachutes?
What if humans had an outfit that sensed the vibration of the surrounding objects, much as spiders sense the vibration in their webs?
What if there was an electronic light music instrument based on the architecture and vibration of the spider web?
The questions can be as simple as those concerning the general construction of webs or as sophisticated as considering a spider web’s properties through the principles of molecular biomechanics and nanotechnology. It depends on the year level, disciplinary orientation of the task, the teacher’s professional specialty, the affordances of the environment and the means of knowledge production, as well as students’ individual predispositions. Consequently, the final outcomes of the project will also be guided by the same conditions, that is, the specifics of age, discipline, the teacher’s strengths, learning environment, availability of equipment and tools and students’ individual interests and abilities. The final outcomes can vary from a spider web drama production to computer-simulated processes or construction of robotic pieces. The value of the generated knowledge is found and assessed not in the technical professionalism, but in the scope and quality of the generated knowledge gained through the process of the DIY production. The quality of the knowledge is recorded in the self-reflective digital developmental folios with cinematic writing (CW), continuous peer feedback and groups, classes, and the evaluation of virtual and local community presentations.
There may be some students in a class who have arachnophobia. The teacher, in this case, must exercise a high level of sensitivity in negotiating the topic with these students. Perhaps they can study the birds that feed on spiders, or, if it is possible, examine why people develop this kind of phobia. If there are a few of them in the class, it could be helpful for them to be in the same group.
Deep remixability culture manifests itself here through remixing the elements derived from the knowledge accumulated by others—facts and information, photos, videos and so on—on the one hand, with observational self-sketching done in museums, zoos, gardens, photos and videos taken in nature on the other. Students copy, imitate, share their observations, thoughts and suggestions by presenting their developmental digital folios (DDF) to other members of their groups. They post the images and comments on their social media sites, engaging in discussions in a virtual community.
8.4.3 Exploratory Creativity—Bricolage
At this stage, the focus of the study converges on one particular aspect of the topic. The Ripples pedagogy advocates self-reflectivecollaborative circularity in the process of knowing. This means that at this stage, based on the individual presentations of their cinematic writing (CW) to the groups as well as peers’ feedback, the students negotiate and decide on one integrated group project. The roles within the project are distributed according to the maximisation of group members’ individual agency, that is, providing an opportunity for each member to act upon his/her individual psychological needs in his/her collaborative progression with the other group members. Therefore, the transition to the exploratory stage of the learning task is marked by composing a principle question for the group that governs collective activities, as well as by the formation of a few sub-questions that inform individual engagement.
The students continue working with their self-reflective cinematic writing, but with the intention of incorporating their developments into a collective project. The dynamics of the developmental process continue to be activated through the individual presentations of CW and group discussions that now move towards negotiating collective developmental possibilities. The divergenceconvergence as well as conventional wisdomindividual curiosity circularities continue to provide the infrastructure for exploratory activities and knowledge generation, with the difference from the previous stage being in the work adjusted to the specifics of the collective intentionality.
The work of the knower-bricoleur at the exploratory stage is characterised by employing a heterogeneous repertoire composed of the bricoles—psychological tools
(facts, information, images, videos and so on)—related to the group’s principal question and gathered by the group members into a collective ‘detective’s wall’. The activities at this stage are influenced by epistemic curiosity and defined by more intent observations and focused group discussions. The activities become better coordinated with the disciplinary symbolic system(s) and involve more rigorous commitment of the group members to the individual roles to which they were assigned.
The collective detective’s wall is converged into a category associated with the group’s question. To facilitate the arrays of bisociations, cross-fertilisations, unusual juxtaposition
s and unexpected likenesses, the detective’s wall must be enriched by additional data that allows students to delve into the depth of the issue. For example, if the group decided to work on the question: What if because of its strength, elasticity and breathability, spider silk could be used for making clothes? the students must obtain additional data to answer such questions as:
What has already been done in this area of knowledge?
What properties should fabric possess to be ideal for protecting the human body from sun, cold, wind and so on?
Is it possible to produce synthetic spider web silk? and so forth.
Students add new bricoles and engage themselves in higher-order thinking by mapping unusual intersections within the data placed on ‘the detective’s wall’. The students must be resourceful in making smart decisions that may appear completely nonsensical at first glance, or as Lévi-Strauss (1962) asserts, ‘architectural follies like the villa of Cheval the postman’ (p. 17). It is in the space between the codes—the sets of the established rules of the game and the matrices of individual idiosyncrasies stretched to the point of near absurdity—where the group may find the most exciting intersections that will lead to the next stage of the process, transformational creativity.
8.4.4 Transformational Creativity—Self-Design
Transformational creativity cannot be achieved without the two previous stages: combinational and exploratory creativity. It is the result of the hard work done before. In the Ripples approach, the scope and quality of the learning outcome is assessed not by matching of the level of gained knowledge with the assigned key criteria of a certain academic discipline, but according to the extent of the transformational effect it has on the individual. The transformational result of the learning task can be described as a ripple effect. It is a consequence of the multi-level rippling activities that:
a.
are built on the maximisation of the student’s individual potential;
b.
develop an ability to integrate this potential into a positive collaboration
with others through the expansion of disciplinary and individual competencies and skills.
‘Meeting expectations’ as a golden rule of traditional pedagogy shifts from expecting the students to be able to recite prescribed facts, recognise and operate with symbols and repeat puzzle-solving
algorithms in the given domains to expecting students to discover and expand the array of their personal interests and skills in their application towards achieving the collective need. Thus, it is not in scoring points by providing correct answers to the prescribed questions, but in discovering, observing, expanding, making connections, communicating with others—in other words, ‘in coming to know’ (Kalantzis and Cope 2012)—where the learning results meet the expectations of the quest for knowledge.
Students therefore become designers of themselves. Enmeshed in the web of their own personal existence (being ‘at home’ in their element), they ‘ripple’ and ‘expand’, self-design
ing themselves according with their personal psychological needs and in symbiosis with the evolving environment.
8.5 Convergence Points
This chapter advocated for the acquisition of knowledge by means of engagement with self-discovery and self-realisation emerging through the practice of creating. As the self is seen as an aspect of a systemic model of the world, its discovery and realisation proceed from the interaction with natural, cultural and social surroundings. Ripples learning is built on the principle that by responding to the set task, students self-design their individual learning activities according to their personal interests and capabilities and learn how to integrate them into collective endeavours in a productive way. The Ripples approach assumes that in acting upon their creative agency and addressing the pressure of seeking the solution to a self-imposed problem, students assimilate new knowledge from the environment and their peers and construct individually conducive puzzle-solving algorithms. Thus, they develop adaptive life-savvy repertoire.
This chapter suggested creative strategies that can serve as an infrastructure for the rippling dynamics of this pedagogical model. In activating and maintaining the kinetics of the model, the circularities, divergenceconvergence, as well as conventional wisdomindividual curiosity, are now overlapping with a circularity of codesmatrices. The codes represent fixed abstract patterns of a given academic discipline and matrices are clusters of variables comprised of individual predispositions (milieu interieur) and contextual specifics.
Set in motion, these circularities are sustained by creative operations that are aimed at generating bisociations, cross-fertilisations, unusual juxtapositions and mapping unexpected likenesses. The Jester-Sage-Artist triad with the correlated interjections—‘Ha-ha’, ‘Ah-ha!’ and ‘Aahh’—are suggested as testing agents in the progress of new, surprising, coherent, valuable and elegant attainments.
In the employment of cinematic writing, metaphoric mapping is recommended as an effective method for embodying ideas by means of modalities that have unusual but coherent associations with the object or concept under representation.
Three developmental stages of the Ripples learning are associated with combinational—deep remixability, exploratory—cinematic bricolage and transformational—self-designcreativity. The project-based learning task commences with the generation of the multimodal data relevant to the assigned topic. These data play the role of psychological tools. By mapping unusual intersections within the divergent scope of the generated data, students identify the aspects that stimulate their individual curiosity. Working within an associativeanalytical circularity assists students in adjusting the focus to a particular self-defined problem and to negotiate further development as a collective project. The next stage leads to the assimilation of more specific knowledge and the development of skills in investigating, learning, negotiating and creating with others. The transformational stage of the process is the ultimate convergence of the divergenceconvergence ripple. It is the distillation of a wide scope of the divergent material into a pure essence of intellectual and social individual growth that is evident through the cinematic writing in the digital folio, and the responses of peers, the class and local community to the final outcome.
Key Terms
AssociativeAnalytical
–Circularity that regulates divergenceconvergence processes
Bisociation
–Coherent concept constructed at the intersection of two different contexts
CodesMatrices
–Circularity of creative production that involves rotations between the fixed rules-of-the-game and variable lay-of-the-land specifics
Combinational Creativity
–Generation of unfamiliar combinations from diverse ideas. In the Ripples model, it is associated with deep remixability practices
Cross-fertilisation
–Meaningful fusion of two disparate aspects
Exploratory Creativity
–Generation of novel structures from existing rules and conventions. In Ripples learning, it relates to the practices of cinematic bricolage
Jester-Sage-Artist
triad
Three creative archetypes signifying three aspects of the creative endeavour that assist in the production of a new, surprising, elegant, coherent and valuable outcome
Corresponding interjective responses such as: ‘Ha-ha’, ‘Ah-ha!’ and ‘Aahh’ can be used as qualitative indicators of the value of the creative process and outcome
LearningCreating
–Self-discovery and self-realisation as well as the assimilation of new knowledge by means of an engagement in the project-based learning task
Milieu Interieur
–Internal environment that makes us different from each other, so in mingling with each other and the environment, we are not dissolving into it but rather maintaining our pre-determined structure
Psychological tools
–Bricoles: facts, pieces of information, photos, audio/video recordings, objects and so on, collected for the process of knowing
Ripples Pedagogy
–A teaching approach motivated by the shift in the ownership of the means of knowledge production from centralised institutions to an individual knower. The acquisition of knowledge is viewed as a process of self-discovery and self-realisation through continuous interaction with natural, cultural and social media of existence, resulting in self-design
and changes in the environments
Transformational Creativity
–Leads to an ‘impossibilist’ surprise. In transformational creativity refers to self-design
that occurs in the individual throughout the process of knowing
Unusual juxtaposition
–Placing two contrasting concepts or objects side by side
Unexpected likeness
–Seeing likeness in incompatible concepts or objects
8.6 Doing
Knowing: The Ripples Pedagogy in Practice
8.6.1 Learning Task Seven: The Jester, Sage and Artist
The Do It Yourself (DIY) ethics seeks to overthrow the idea that we will be provided for. We will provide for ourselves, through educating each other, through collective decision making. It fits into this larger concept of an ideal society. (Carlsson, p. 46—Interview with Ben Gillock, Retrieved from: http://www.permanentculturenow.com/introduction-to-diy-counterculture/)
Read the Carlsson’s quote above. In the following exercise, let us test the idea of sharing knowledge through DIY ‘tinkering’.
1.
Based on Carlsson’s quote,
construct a critical question that you will try to answer by undertaking this task.
2.
Start your project by watching YouTube DIY videos from different themes: science lessons, cooking tips, decorations, gardening, home improvement, school supply, inventions, beauty, fun, reuse and so on.
3.
Choose three videos from different fields of practice that in some ways relate to the subject area of your teaching or general interest.
4.
With your mobile phone or a tablet, video-record (from the computer screen) some snippets (30–60 seconds) of the moments that attracted you most. Place them in your digital folio—Power Point is an accessible and efficient software and a truly DIY digital platform. Use the presentation slides as detective’s walls. If you do not know how to do certain things in Power Point, for example, how to install and manipulate videos, you can easily learn it from online YouTube instructions.
5.
Adjust the size of the videos in such a way that you can bricolage other factual, visual or audio data (bricoles) around them.
6.
In looking for bisociations—meaningful intersections between disparate contexts—ask yourself the question: What if? Draw connecting lines. Create text boxes and type in your thoughts, questions, doubts and explanations. Look for some additional information related to a particular connection. Take mobile photos and place them in such a way that they support your thinking. You can record and add audio explanations or audio fragments that back your ideas.
7.
In constructing cross-fertilisations—fusions of disparate objects or concepts—ask yourself the question: What if? Generate additional bricoles to assemble a heterogeneous repertoire of psychological tools.
8.
Assemble unusual juxtapositions by asking the same question again: What if? Here is an illustration for understanding the difference between cross-fertilisation and unusual juxtaposition. A lump of clay placed on the plate on a dinner table is an unusual juxtaposition. The adjacency of contrasting fields, dirt and dinner, can serve as a shock-value element for some surprising message. In contrast, a piece of clay used to make a dinner plate is a valuable cross-fertilisation between the same contrasting fields: dirt and dinner.
9.
Identify unexpected likenesses in the new concepts.
10.
Compose a metaphor that explains the most interesting concept that emerged from your tinkering. Make this metaphor an attractor for a potential project-based learning task.
11.
Can this metaphor be described as new, surprising, coherent, valuable and elegant?
Examine this through the application of the Jester-Sage-Artist triad.
12.
What conclusion do you draw in relation to the question you posed in the beginning of this exercise?
creating
. Given the centrality of the individuals in the construction of their knowledge, the prefix self- becomes a common denominator for both segments of the circularity, self-learning
