At our STEP meeting on Creativity, we did a movement exercise involving “passing energy” around and across a circle, receiving and playing and passing it along. When I asked students about it the following week, one of them described it as “juvenile.” I didn’t have the presence of mind to say, “that’s not a bad thing,” so lost an opportunity to challenge a dismissive attitude.
On reflection, though–and partly because of the next session on leadership–I started wondering whether movement and play shouldn’t be a regular part of the STEP meetings. Not because everything has to be “fun,” but as a way to ground learning in the body, and to provide room for integrating thought. The idea that being playful and receptive is undignified indicates a will to maturity and self-possession that can raise a barrier to understanding.
In the movement exercise, energy is empathy, and creativity becomes collective: it’s a practice of attunement. It’s a way of getting a group to work together, in preparation for a collective task. Because we had framed creativity largely in individual terms (and maybe because the circle was too big, and there was no debrief). ), we weren’t able to process the effects of the exercise fully–in terms of the larger whole being created out of individual parts. But having that experience of coming together in a group adds an important dimension to learning, giving permission to make a contribution, to see oneself as adding something. This can be especially valuable for those who feel themselves eccentric, or have unusual interests.
Being in the “supportive” quadrant–Blue, in Color theory–my overriding concern is connecting with individuals, and trying to ensure an authentic experience in the group. Not all the students recognize or value that quality, so can hold back and remain skeptical. Keeping that difference in mind, I want to create a space that allows them to acknowledge and value that quality, in others and themselves, so they can access and work with it. This fits with my notion of “flexibility” in the face of challenge, increasing capacity. The challenge for me is finding ways to integrate other qualities and values.
At the core of the STEP experiment is the notion of “experience”–the basis of autonomous learning. Yet the capacity to have experiences (and to learn from them) needs to be cultivated. Just as you can’t order someone to “think independently,” so you have to develop the space of experience, and the habits of thought that support it: it is a practice of self-formation, now seen as a container for classroom-based/academic learning, rather than a spontaneous product of it.
So just as we’ve encouraged everyone to experiment with thinking of themselves as creative–translated as flexibility and responsiveness–so we’ve suggested that everyone is potentially a leader–translating that as value and initiative. Everyone, too, can be a researcher: what’s needed is curiosity and discipline (a passion and a practice). It’s easy to label these virtues; the trick is to find ways they can be experienced and embodied.