The possibilties of education

In an increasingly complex modern world, communities, companies and nations require a different, newer mindset to tackle the challenges and opportunities presented to us. Associate Professor and Course Director for the new Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII), Bem Le Hunte, explains how universities can respond to this need. 

Creative thinking – the beating heart of innovation and discovery – draws us into new realms where our industries and the professions can evolve and thrive. In these new realms, the usual disciplinary boundaries dissolve. Creativity, it seems, doesn’t need a passport and neither does it respect boundaries.

Creative thinking pushes the boundaries of knowledge, and it doesn’t sit comfortably within a single discipline. For those ensconced in silo thinking, it doesn’t sit comfortably within the academy either, and yet it must exist there if we’re going to progress knowledge for the next generation. And it must exist there if we’re going to respond to the diverse, growing needs of industry and the professions for a more versatile, creative workforce – if we’re going to prepare students for jobs that are yet to be invented and careers in industries that are constantly transforming.

I began my intellectual life as an anthropologist, and having used my anthropology throughout my life, I’ve long realised that the minute you start with the human, proliferation of culture and knowledge is guaranteed. 

As a starting point, just examine the diverse ways humans have set up their kinship structures, homes, religions, economic and political systems. Add time to the equation and nothing is permanent. Similarly, our disciplines pursue their divergent notions of knowledge, yet the creative impulse at the core of knowledge-seeking activities is an area of profound common ground that is rarely examined or nurtured.

So my question is this: what if we could refine and teach a series of methods and creative practices students across all disciplines would find useful? 

Needless to say, this type of creative thinking is hard to categorise and challenging to teach. Psychologist and expert on creativity Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi claims that with its dark and mysterious phase of incubation, creativity “defies ordinary analysis”.

So how do we teach creative thinking within the academy, which privileges analysis? How do we teach students to ‘play’, not just ‘work’, at university? And how do we teach students that it’s okay to fail in the academy – which primarily promotes success?

It’s also impossible to take students into every base of disciplinary knowledge at great depth. Yet do we really need to go into the depth of knowledge if we can understand its structure and processes – how to think across disciplines – as so many of us do in the workforce? 

Moreover, knowledge itself is oceanic, and even within disciplines, after three years most students will only touch the sides of their fields. So we begin to see a need to offer students thinking skills that allow them to be more creative in their own fields, as well as tools from a variety of other disciplines so they can take their disciplinary knowledge and use it to tackle challenges beyond the confines of their specialties. 

Wicked problems – or impossibly challenging humanitarian issues such as poverty, sustainability, education or health – are complex precisely because they require interdisciplinary approaches. Australian charity Healthhabitat, for example, recognises that to improve the health of the disadvantaged, you need to work not just with medical experts, but also with agile architectural solutions, because so many health issues are related to being able to wash and manage wastewater. 

Similarly, businesses are recognising that with the ever-growing complexity of global systems, we’re now subject to systems-level failures. So navigating complexity is becoming one of the biggest challenges for businesses today, and the need for creative thinkers is growing exponentially. 

Indeed, according to IBM’s Global CEO Study 2010, creativity is identified as the “single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity”.

To meet these needs and cultivate trans-diciplinary skills, we need to develop learners who can understand the “alert and lively use of knowledge”, as described by David Perkins of the Harvard Graduate School of Education – students who can develop “generative connections that help to make sense of a complicated world”.

Note Perkins refers to the “use of knowledge” rather than knowledge itself. Our first BCII winter school – Problems to Possibilities – is about the possibilities of knowledge, and our second summer school is about some of the patterns and practices the various disciplines and professions use to arrive at new knowledge and insights, or new ways of seeing.

And so we begin to imagine an education that goes beyond knowledge towards being, because creative thinking is essentially a quality of being: an approach to the world that allows us to join the dots, overlay multiple meaning systems, compare a variety of solutions and intelligently suggest original ways to move forward. A challenge, indeed. 

However, I believe if we can prototype a kind of education that meets the goals I’ve articulated above, then we’ll have created a trans-disciplinary education that institutions around the world will aspire to in the future.