Experiencing our world as 'visual white noise'

We are daily surrounded by a material world that 'someone' had to create. We daily experience the results of the creativity of others, and much of this in our daily lived experience we take for granted. We pass these things all the time, but pay them no mind at all.

Last night I joined a group of friends and former colleagues for a meal (Quartz Restaurant, Rolleston), and my attention was caught by these quite overt examples of creativity that I suspect, for almost all diners, are simply visual 'background noise', perhaps we could describe these things as the material world equivalent of 'white noise'. (I would add that there is no judgement on the quality of these pieces, merely on their presence).

This morning I sat in the waiting area of my doctor's surgery. I was making an effort NOT to look at my phone but rather to notice the world around me, and my eye was caught by these lovely shapes.

These are all examples of some act of creativity from someone, somewhere, some time. It struck me that these things merge into a world of 'visual white noise' unless we are deliberate and intentional in 'noticing' them, in really looking at the world around us.

Now I was not trained in the visual arts. I was trained into the world of economics, the 'dismal science', a world with which I fell out of love some years ago. 

You may have heard some of the jokes about economists:

"Did you know that economists have successfully predicted 5 of the last 3 recessions?"

or ..

"If you put all of the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion."

It's not a profession with which one normally associates 'noticing', even though it bases its understandings on large volumes of statistical data and creatively imagined theoretical models. It's just a shame that the two don't coincide more often.

In contrast, my very incomplete understanding of the teaching of the creative arts involves cultivating the deliberate and intentional 'noticing', the observation, of the world around us. I believe this to be true of the poetry that I try to write, based as it so often is on the 'noticing' of emotion, or people, or events.

Elwyn Richardson made direct reference to this, when he encouraged the children in his care to observe the world, and to capture what they saw, whether in clay, on paper, or in movement. In his book 'In the early world', he says:

"A great deal of the school work was directed towards establishing attitudes of awareness in the children. Thus in art and poetry we had come to see that accuracy was an important part of the work and that it was closely linked with the individual's awareness of his environment. .... Some were observers of nature and showed a keener observation of scientific detail; others had a feeling for space relationships and noticed, for example, that a bird can fly within the bare branches of a winter tree. I think this awareness is also the basis of learning processes such as those found in arithmetic and spelling." (Richardson, Pge 125)

I think it is one of the benefits of learning in the 'arts' generally that we learn to notice, to observe, to see (or hear, or feel) the detail, or more generally to simply 'see'. I have become an advocate for arts education because it supports the development of such skills which are then transferable to whatever other area of learning we care to name: sciences, mathematics, technology... etc

Perhaps more particularly though, a broader arts education allows us to better appreciate the world in which we live, to appreciate beauty, cleverness, and problem solving, to appreciate creativity, rather than walk 'zombie like' through our lives experiencing our world as 'visual white noise'. Perhaps this is one of the secrets behind the impact of creativity on our wellbeing.

Creative synergies, creative cities, that 'learn, create, share'

I'm a bit of a dreamer, eh. At the mere thought of an idea, my mind's off out into space, to look back at what could be. Does anyone remember when the City Council used the phrase 'a city of possibility' as it's marketing phrase? I love the idea of 'possibility'. And I love the idea of system change. I love Ewan MacIntosh's concept of the BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. (As Steve W would say of me, I have a tendency to try to boil the ocean, and as a consequence I then need around me people who can say 'righto, jolly good Robin, now sit down and have a cup of tea, and let's look at what we can actually achieve').

Over the past seven years I've been involved as Tumuaki of Hornby High School, and in to The Manaiakalani Programme (TMP) boots and all. The programme is a pedagogically driven one, employing the pedagogy 'learn, create, share'. The impact of the pedagogy is 'amplified' through the application of digital technologies and devices. I've written extensively on this blog about the significance of creativity at the heart of the pedagogy, and worked assiduously to make creativity the centre of the kura itself.

I have over that time been a Board member of the Greater Christchurch Schools Network (GCSN) trust board, an organisation committed to bridging the digital divide in Ōtautahi Christchurch. This has amongst other things involved mahi to support the most vulnerable in Ōtautahi with digital connection, and devices, and also to the building of technological skills and capability with young people whānau, and schools.

I have also been involved in a minor capacity with the work of Dr Cheryl Doig and Ako Ōtautahi - Learning City Christchurch (AO-LCC), an organisation that "champions learning as a way to transform lives, communities, organisations and cities". AO-LCC works proactively with other organisations focussed on digital equity - DECA and DEAA for example. My own involvement has just 'ramped up' as I have accepted a role as a Trustee with AO-LCC. 

Having stepped back from Principalship I find myself able to take the time to think about these 'organisations' and their kaupapa in ways that I wanted to do before, but for which I rarely found the mental resources. I tried to capture their relative roles in this diagram. 

 

This doesn't capture the full breadth and complexity of what they each do, just some key points. You can check out their web sites to gather a full and complete view. The intersection of the mahi of all three is the aspiration to improve digital equity for those most vulnerable in our communities.

With the time for some uninterrupted thinking, it occurred to me that there is much much more to this. The heart of the matter for all three organisations is the promotion of better more fulfilling lives created by better learning. I wondered then if the unspoken ingredient of the work of all three organisations is creativity. It may be more or less explicit, maybe more or less overt, for each organisation, but I think it's right in there. I wonder if it looks like this:

There is much that has been written about 'creative cities', a concept that does appear to have progressed from the initial conceptions focussed on cultural creative industries, to the wider focus on creativity and innovation in all that we do. Charles Landry wrote about this in his piece 'Lineages of the Creative City'. 1 

Landy says: 

"The creativity of the creative city is about lateral and horizontal thinking, the capacity to see parts and the whole simultaneously as well as the woods and the trees at once." (Landy, Pge 13). There is a growing literature around this concept. A search in GoogleScholar on 4 May 2023 yielded 4,890,000 hits.... <gulp>

That sounds familiar..  at Hornby High School I wanted to try to take creativity beyond the traditional creative and performing arts, and technologies. We saw it explicitly in maths last year, for example. 

The wellbeing benefits of including creativity in our lives and our learning are also well covered, in particular with the work in Aotearoa New Zealand by Professor Peter O'Connor (University of Auckland). In the 2020 paper 'Replanting creativity in post normal times' 2  (worth quoting at length) he said:

"Increased interest in the relationship between arts, health and well-being has resulted in the emergence of a distinct field of practice over the last 60 years. The term, arts for health and wellbeing, is now used internationally as an umbrella for a diverse, interdisciplinary field of activity which draws from arts, health, psychology, education, community and youth development practices and theories. Growth of the field has been so rapid that when charting the rise of arts in community health practice in the UK, Mike White (2016) described the arts for health movement broadly as a “small-scale global phenomenon” (p. 41)." (O'Connor Page 18)

What ties these ideas together?  I am wondering if it is the 'learn, create, share' pedagogy? Here is a simple explanation of how these three words are interpreted within the school context.

Would these three words, explained in this way, grab more attention, open up more opportunities, increase engagement, across the incredibly diverse communities that are cities? Would this make the AO-LCC message easier to sell? 

Cities generally, and ours specifically, already have many wonderful learning opportunities. We have great pre-schools and schools, multiple universities, Polytechnics and research establishments, a multitude of private training establishments, a vibrant civic library service and a wonderful creative sector. We have many 'creatives' resident in 'our place'. 

Is the key to bring them all together under one banner (AO-LCC, for example), the opportunities unpacked using the Manaiakalani kaupapa?  I don't mean the occasional one page advertisement in the city newspapers (to coin a very old fashioned phrase). I mean something vibrant, ongoing, consistent and coherent, something that is regular, overt, and helpful

Is the issue less about what opportunities there are, than about promoting their coherence for the population at large? If we had more people learning, creating, sharing, would we then be able to shift more overtly to be a 'creative city'? Here's the thing: I genuinely believe we KNOW how to do this stuff, the knowledge, the awareness, the capability, are 'already in the room'. We need to 'own' this fact, we need to network, to magnify our impact. There are quite a number of 'connectors' or networkers already in the city (and I don't mean business networkers whose aim is enhanced private profit). People like Cheryl Doig and Vicki Buck, Steve Wakefield and .. goodness me.. that would be a very long list. You get the idea.

What could it look like if we thought about this across a whole city, a 'learning City', a city where the digital divide has been reduced significantly? Maybe then we would be a city of possibility? Or, as AO-LCC has pitched its 'Learning Days' this year ... a city of curiosity?

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1. 'Lineages of the Creative City', Charles Landry , http://charleslandry.com/panel/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/03/Lineages-of-the-Creative-City.pdf , last accessed 4 May 2023. 

2. 'Replanting creativity in post normal times', Peter O’Connor (Director, Centre for Arts and Social Transformation), Professor Michael Anderson, Associate Professors Kelly Freebody and Paul Ginns, The University of Sydney, October 2020