Earth Regenerative Creativities in Higher Educational Design

• In Event: Vibrant Earth: Bioculturally Embedded Educational Encounters Catalyzing Earth Regenerative Creativities

Abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this research was to elucidate the possibilities and meanings of earth regenerative creativity for transdisciplinary higher educational curricular and program design. It addresses the “under-dimensioned, stunted epistemology that characterizes much of sustainability-related education [that] needs to be enriched through emotional, imaginative, and creative entanglement with the world” (Selby & Kagawa, 2015, p. 278).

Grounding Theories. This research was informed by theories of ecological intelligence (Bowers, 2011; Goleman, Bennett, & Barlow, 2012) and imaginative ecological education (Judson, 2012; 2015; McKenzie et al., 2009). A radically ecocentric understanding (Mathews, 2008) focused a Gaian lens (Harding, 2006) and extended the idea of the earth as the first teacher, which is one of the key considerations of sustainability education (Nolet, 2009). The study incorporated emergentist approaches to education (Crowell & Reid-Marr, 2013; Taylor, 2010) for collaborative creativity (Bache, 2008; Sawyer 2010) and fractal creativity (Richards, 2001) for the purpose of developing diversity, biocultural connection, and liberation (Agyeman, Bullard, & Evans, 2003; Williams & Brown, 2012).

Methods. The research used multi-scale mixed methods with triangulation (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2007) and adopted complexity approaches for educational research design (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011; Doll, et al., 2005). Ethnographic interviews (Seidman, 2006), narrative reflections, and Likert ratings of thirty-five educational program designers and college faculty constituted the field of data. Multiple rounds of coding (Saldana, 2013) of qualitative data plus rigorous modeling using ranked means with standard errors on quantitative data during data synthesis ensured vigorous connections across the scales of the data set.

Results. Earth regenerative creativity nurtures polyperspectivality and thereby undermines dogmatism and enhances diversity-collaborations. It results in personal, collaborative, and emergent scale effects. For faculty educational program designers, Earth regenerative creativity was found to (a) be at the heart of the curriculum for wisdom learning; (b) regenerating the self; (c) leading to and involved with complex creative emergence (what Sawyer, 2010, terms collaborative emergence), including with non-human emergents; (d) including across generations and scales connecting the personal and the (eco)social/biocultural; (e) producing and reflecting biocultural embedment. The land is faculty. Data and literature synthesis provided evidence that regenerative creativity produces wisdom and biocultural justice. In particular, the transdisciplinary quality of regenerative creativity is supportive to educators engaging with the terrain of sustainability challenges.

Significance. Higher education design in formal and nonformal contexts, contrary to some approaches, does not require importing technologies of assessment or disruption. The ancient, wise, bioculturally embedded insights of Earth-connected creativities nurture learning diversities to regenerate systemic capacities at multiple scales. Earth regenerative creativity enhances cognitive diversities.

It can be theorized that (human) creativity is evidence of emergent properties of place- and planetary-scale systemic regeneration. In other words, the earth system cognizing or thinking is apparent at the human experiential scale as creativity. Likewise, human creativity can perturb or catalyze earth-scale regeneration/autopoiesis/healing. Figure 1-1 visualizes some possible relationships between major findings and their scale(s). Educational design for earth-wise creativity (Craft, 2008, 2010) can be informed by and nurture this mutual, multiscale interaction.

Author

• Marna Hauk, Ph.D., Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies and Prescott College