It's a matter of scale, isn't it?

I keep thinking about what it might mean, what it might look like, to have a learning city, and particularly a creative city.  You can probably tell that in my own head these two are inextricably entwined, rightly or wrongly.

This means that I keep looking around me for examples of creativity being developed, displayed, and valued, and there seem to be lots of them.  Here are a few examples.

There's Kim's 'Creative Trust' (an operation that she has scaled back somewhat to take on a different role in education). 

Kim at a recent CPPA meeting, with Nigel Latta

I was walking stridently towards an appointment a week or two ago and happened up this Street art project. I stopped and talked to Graeme, asking him some questions... wow is he an impressive human being. Tino pai to mahi, e hoa!!! The arts making a difference to lives.

There is the Manaiakalani Schools network whose kaupapa is 'learn create share', a kaupapa that tries to build student creative and critical thinking into their learning, all amplified with the affordances of digital technology.

Their vision of create' looks like this:

There's Kane Stewart's 'Egg Academy'

What about the Ōtautahi Christchurch Young Writers' school? Around and growing young writers' talents since1993

Our Ōtautahi Christchurch city libraries network offers plenty of opportunity to develop creative thinking and creative skills with holiday and after school programmes. The Ōtautahi Christchurch central library, Tūranga, and the network of suburban hubs being redeveloped, contain facilities that support creativity.

 Their support for creativity looks impressive. When I see a sign like this, I get kind of excited.

On Level 4 of Tūranga

There are communities of creatives, like the Art Box project in Ōtautahi. In their own words:

"Our exciting art space has its origins in the series of major earthquakes that devastated central and eastern areas of Christchurch. Since 2004 this modern, air conditioned, building has been the studio of well known local artist Beverley Frost. However, seismic events caused thoughts to meander and flow. Various artists began to talk about the need for a place where a creative renaissance could flourish following the loss of so many of the city's artistic outlets. The result was Art Box, a Christchurch Gallery where modern works can be viewed in a relaxed and friendly environment."

There is the Ministry of Education 'Creatives in Schools' programme. As Tumuaki of Hornby High School I had the privilege of working with Dr Claire Hughes on such a programme (well two, actually, over two years). The engagement with rangatahi was phenomenal, Claire a prodigious and inspiring talent.

As I said, there are lots of these activities, and with the exception of a city's library network, they are most often small ventures, often just one or two people, making a difference at that point in time with a small group of their fellow human beings.

My wondering is are they having sufficient impact? If not, is this a matter of scale? OR even if they can be scaled sufficiently to have any significant impact? In fact, are such things scaleable at all, or the idea of scaleable creative activities in itself an oxymoron?? If anyone could scale these, you'd think it would be a city's library network. 

And of course a lot has been written about the impact of the commodification of art.

"Living in a capitalist society, we are forced to pit ourselves against each other in a system we have no choice but to participate in. We are coerced into adapting ourselves and our skills into fitting the role of benefitting capitalist society. And unfortunately, the art world is no exception. While the businessperson and the manufacturer are rewarded, the writer and the artist are suppressed. Unless of course, that art is commodified."

Even Marx had something to say about the role of art in the capitalist society.

Is what we have now 'as good as it gets'? Is the current paradigm of the arts, and creativity more generally, the best we can hope for? Is it pointless to try and grow a whole community as a creative "collective? (Remember that I mean creativity in its broadest sense, not limited to the creative arts only, although definitely incorporating them).

Perhaps the best answer lies in collective action. Maybe it's a bit of the old gestalt psychology - the whole is more than the sum of the parts. If we bring the enormously diverse community ever closer together, we amplify the impact of each organisation. I've quoted Peter Korotkin before. And of course this beautiful whakataukī:

Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi

With your food basket and my food basket the people will thrive

What I do believe is that the mahi of an organisation like Ako Ōtautahi - Learning City Christchurch is essential. Someone needs to bring the diverse community together. 'Learning Days' is one of those things that might just start to make a difference.

Watch out for Learning Days 2024. This is such a promising initiative that might just scale this whole learning city/creative city thing.\

Another tilt at curiosity

I was sitting in a meeting of the trustees for Ako Ōtautahi-Learning City Christchurch, and we were discussing the revised strategic plan. It's a great document, it reflects some fabulous futures thinking that is the bread and butter of Cheryl and the other trustees, and something that I am only slowly learning.

In the course of the discussion I was brought back to a conversation we had a year or more ago where we talked about the place of curiosity. 

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/life-long-learners/12122901886

I was thinking about this 'provocation': what would you have to do to create a city of curiosity, a place where the population is naturally curious about things? Because if you want a learning city, a city in which learning is 'just the way we are', then you need a city where people generally are just naturally curious

We are more naturally inclined to learn about stuff when we are curious about it, aren't we.  People are of course funny things ('eee there's nought so funny as folks'), so not everyone will be curious at all, and then of course people will be curious about as many different things as there are people. I could say that since curiosity is a naturally occurring characteristic, it will be 'normally' distributed across the population. As difficult as I find it to fathom, yes that must mean that there are those who are hardly curious at all.. hmmmm

So ... curiosity, eh? Defined as "a strong desire to know or learn something", I thought 'how did I create a sense of curiosity in a classroom, or across a whole kura'? By asking cool questions - often, creating and sharing a sense of wonderment and awe (a wee tilt to Art Costa's Habits of Mind), connecting connecting connecting and talking talking talking. That meant telling stories, using humour, being well situated in your own humanity, being real, approachable, respectful.. the characteristics of a good teacher, maybe (and suddenly I am also immersed in Dr Kevin Knight's 8People model).

I stumbled upon an interesting article in Forbes titled "Five Ways To Cultivate Curiosity And Tap Into Your Creativity" by Josh Ritchie (Forbes 15.11.22017). Wut? Curiosity AND creativity? Well there's a surprise. Early on Ritchie makes a great statement:

"Curiosity is the core of all creativity -- the drive to do something better, to experiment, to tinker, to create."

And:

"Curiosity is a strong desire to know or learn something, and it’s important for any professional because it’s required to both improve your skills and figure out how to fix things that don’t work. Without curiosity, you get people doing the same things the same way because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”"

Ritchie posits that there are five key things we need to do (no surprises, the clue was in the article's title):

• Read
• Slow down and take your time
• Practice asking “why?” and other good questions
• Practice saying less (i.e. listen more)
• Hang out with a child

Re-read the list. Go on. Got it? How simple is that? How hard could it be?  I wondered if we could add to that:

• Show how connections can be made between seemingly disparate people and things
• Keep our humanity, and our cultural connection and diversity, to the fore so that we support a culturally safe society

The challenge is how we make these things habits across a city?

We could hold out the hope that a city's leadership could and would do that. I well remember the years when we had Vicki Buck as mayor in Ōtautahi. She did many of these things, she challenged orthodoxy and sparked conversations about how we could do things differently (and still does), but if I can generalise, I don't think that's the norm in civic leadership. I read a great piece by Kaila Colbin this morning in which she addressed the issue of engaging civic leaders. The whole piece is worth reading, but here is the essence of the understanding I took from it:

We couldn’t control whether the politicians showed up. That was not our job. Our job was to put on the most extraordinary, the most kick-ass event we possibly could — and let the politicians fight over themselves to get out in front of the parade.

So we stopped bugging them, and focused instead on curation. We got Hugh Nicholson, Christchurch’s Principal Urban Designer. We got Cameron Sinclair, the founder of Architecture for Humanity.

And then — the pièce de résistance — we got Art Agnos, who had been Mayor of San Francisco during the Loma Prieta earthquake.

All of a sudden, the politicians were, in fact, fighting over themselves to get out in front of the parade. They fought over who got to lead the press conference, who got to open the event, who got to introduce Art himself.

My conclusions are these:

1. A city in which curiosity is 'the way we are', the 'way we do things', will be a city in which creativity thrives and permeates everything
2. Feeding creativity gives more positive wellbeing, social, and economic outcomes
3. If we want a 'curious city, and therefore one in which creativity rulz, there's no point in waiting for others to create it, to lead it. There needs to be a guerilla revolution from within
4. Ako Ōtautahi-Learning City Christchurch is just the organisation to feed, connect, fuel the revolution. 'Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini' – my strength is not as an individual, but as a collective. By joining influencers, by nudging, cajoling, talking talking talking, telling stories, by being 'out there', in the faces of the power brokers, we have to make this idea such an attractive proposition that the response would be 'why the hell wouldn't we? Let us in'.

For civic leaders, I often have a sense of a lack of moral imperative. The only outcomes that seem to be valued are those that can be valued directly, in the short term, with dollars. We have a plague, a pandemic, of short term'ism (and have done for a very long time). I sense that there seems often to be an inability to understand that when people experience higher levels of wellbeing, they are generally economically more productive too.

Surely it's a no brainer to do whatever we can to foster curiosity, and therefore creativity? And anyway, what the heck are civic leaders there for?