From Learning Ecologies to Ecologies for Creative Practice

Abstract

To perform any role requiring complex thinking and action involves being able to assess a situation, decide what action needs to be taken, and then pursue it using appropriate behaviours, tools, and methodologies; monitoring the effects and results of one’s actions; and responding to the feedback received (Eraut and Hirsh, 2007, p. 18). This process is at the core of what I am calling an ecology of practice that enables a person to create and achieve something of value within particular fields of knowledge and skill, contexts, situations, and circumstances. The core proposition underlying this chapter is that performing a complex role involves the creation of an ecology of practice that enables people to engage and interact with their environment and the things in it that matter to them and to solve domain-specific problems and communicate their learning through making and sharing new disciplinary artefacts. Their ecology of practice connects and immerses them—as whole sensing, thinking, and dynamic organisms—with their environment, and through skilled interactions, they take in the reaction of the environment and they are then changed (Dewey, 1916). I am using Ingold’s concept of environment, namely ‘the world as it exists and takes on meaning in relation to [the person], and in that sense it came into existence and undergoes development with [the person]’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 20). A second and related proposition is that creativity emerges while an ecology of practice is being enacted, through the ongoing purposeful interactions of a unique person with his or her unique environment as he or she strives to create value. When viewed from this perspective, our ecologies for achieving something of value constitute one of our most significant and fundamental acts of creativity. 12