Please join Ross this Fall for courses in creativity, culture, and writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University:

Interdisciplinary Expressive Arts 3100
Begins September 10, 2009
Thursdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
See details below.

Mythological Narratives 3301
Begins September 8, 2009
Tuesdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
See details below.

Interdisciplinary Arts 3100

This course is about creativity, about making a claim for the fundamental right of intentional creative action. Within that context, we will explore the ancient and modern practices of creative endeavor (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of creativity (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers, poets, sculptors, dancers, craftspeople of all stripes, musicians, myth-makers, and so on). Throughout this process, our guiding archetype will be that of the trickster.

In this course we stake out the territory of the creative, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Creativity involves the search for truth, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

And, finally, the goal of the course is to have fun: to preserve and nurture the creative and imaginative spirit that is the foundation of all the arts and sciences.

Begins September 10, 2009 (ends December 10)
Thursdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
Prerequisites: 30 undergraduate credits, or permission from Ross.
Website: http://www.kwantlen.ca/calendar/courses/Interdisiciplinary_Expressive_Ar…

Mythological Narratives 3301

Creative writing is a powerful, ancient, and yet delicate practice. We write — quietly, often in isolation, in tentative and mercurial moods. We revise, and turn back upon our own narratives, and wonder about the reception our work might meet in the world. Sometimes we hide manuscripts in drawers, or take deliberate action — as did Franz Kafka and Mahatma Gandhi — to prevent our words from making their way to an audience. Kafka and Gandhi were both unsuccessful in preventing their writings from being destroyed; but their impulse to do so, to keep hooded the hawk of their creativity, is common among writers of all stripes.

We’re not sure that we have, really, anything to say; or we are afraid that if our words are not well met we might ourselves be wounded. Or we believe, as did the ancient Egyptians, that words have their own life, for good or for ill, and that writing is a means of seizing the power of the gods. This course attempts to explore this conversation — between the writer and the wider world — and to find ways of bringing our writing safely out of hiding.

We will be exploring myth, and writing craft, and method, and the strategic practices every writer must learn in wrestling with narrative. Each of us will examine our strengths — the ways in which the natural mood and flavour of our writing makes itself known — and our vulnerabilities as well: how we get stuck, or lazy, how we lost confidence and gain doubt. How we learn to shut down and hope the whole thing will go away.

This course is about writing, and reading, and making a claim for the fundamental right of storytelling. Within that context, we will explore the ancient practices of myth-making (particularly as regards family and culture), the hurdles of writing (as they involve craft and precision and clarity) and the great gifts we might receive from others of our creative kin (that is to say, the long tradition of writers of writers and myth-makers).

The threshold between fact and fiction (which is not the same as that between truth and lie) is one of the territories of myth. In this course we stake out that territory, inspecting the geology of its forms and ideals, finding our own individual places to homestead. Myth involves the search for truth, and fidelity to fact, yet also an awareness that truth and fact are often provisional, and mythological; they are shapeshifters on the wide-open plain of creativity. We will explore what this means, and what to do about it.

Begins September 8, 2009 (ends December 8)
Tuesdays, 11:00am to 1:50pm
Prerequisites: 30 undergraduate credits, or permission from Ross.
Website: http://www.kwantlen.ca/calendar/courses/crwrcrs.html

Anyone who has spent time in a classroom will know that traditional teaching methods -- authorial, minimally interactive, focused on individual effort as opposed to collaborative experience -- are not the best way to learn what we need to know. Accordingly, we forget much of what we learn in school and remember most of what we derive from life experience. This makes sense; after all, life is immersive, and engaging, and consistently packed with challenges that are enormously relevant to our personal and professional development. Shouldn't school be like this?

 Here's my short list for how improve the purposefulness, meaning, and efficiency of education:

Various new and updated items, to wit:

Understanding and Dealing with Technology Addictions

Tips and Suggestions for Parents Worried about Childhood and Adolescent Computer Use

Mentorship: The Core of Leadership and Development

Principles and Practices for Working with Disabilities

The landscape of what we have chosen to call disability changes rapidly, and for many reasons. Parents, educators, social service providers and others who work with the disabled (especially children) should be familiar with the scope of these changes and how they might affect the individuals with whom they work. Here are a few core principles that derive from our current understanding of disability:

• Demonstrate curiosity about the cultures of technology that children and adolescents join. Let them show you the games they play. Participate with them in online activities. Assist them in developing awareness of the risks and benefits of online cultures.
• Educate yourself about the evolving and complex worlds of online cultures. Spend time developing healthy online habits for yourself (this includes paying attention to parental cell phone use and television watching habits, which are both technology cultures).
• Keep all computers and televisions in public, family spaces (no computers in bedrooms except under direct supervision and collaboration).
• Limit recreational screen time (ages 1-5, roughly 5 minutes daily; ages 5-12, roughly 20 minutes daily; ages 13-16, roughly 30 minutes daily).
• Model and encourage physical exercise practices (sports) for kids and physical activity (exercise) for adults. The ideal is one hour daily for everyone.
• Explore the emotional benefits that kids derive from online cultures and find ways of meeting those emotional needs also in the non-online world (through sports, for example, or community involvement, or reading, or any number of healthy activities).
• Recognize that kids will find ways around all types of computer surveillance strategies implemented by parents. Focus on education and awareness of risks.
• Recognize that some type of access control (to prevent viewing inappropriate content, for example) may be required and that kids are not fully capable of self-control (they are kids...). Use access control transparently. Involve kids in developing an access control system and assist them in learning self-management skills.
• Avoid hypocrisy whenever possible. If you view inappropriate content, or involve yourself in online activities that are not healthy, your kids will very likely find out about it. Try to avoid this credibility disaster. Practice good mentorship.
• Recognize that the psychological development of anyone born after 1990 is different from those born prior. Technology cultures are foundational to childhood and adolescent development today. The solution is not to avoid technologies but rather to understand them. Be an informed consumer and parent.

The essential task of a teacher — whether in the school system, the family, or the community — is not to impart information. A teacher’s knowledge of a given subject area is almost incidental. A teacher does not, in fact, teach.

Instead, a good teacher attempts to engage students with their own learning. In the ideal learning environment, students teach themselves. In this context, the role of the teacher is to provide support and mentorship, to offer resources and perspectives, to mediate conversations, and to contribute the odd bit of professional lore. That’s all.

Students learn best through personal engagement, not through the delivery of content by an authority. An authentic teacher facilitates the ground of learning, brings the students together, then gets out of the way.

In the best learning environments, the teacher is invisible.

In the upcoming Spring semester at Kwantlen, I will be teaching two online courses (with some face-to-face contact) in creative non-fiction writing (CRWR 3130 and CRWR 3230). These courses — one basic, one more advanced — are suitable for those who have some experience writing (journals, stories, essays, etc.) and who have an an interest in developing their writing craft. Kwantlen offers several prerequisite courses which work toward these upcoming courses, but if prospective students do not have all the prerequsites, there exists some room for the waiving of prerequisites. If you are interested in these course but not sure if you qualify, please drop me a line and we’ll figure it out.

The course readers are attached to this post (scroll to the bottom), and the following excerpt from the course outlines offers a sense of what these courses are all about:

The oldest artifacts of human endeavor — cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, tools in the Blombos caves, Venus figurines so fantastically old we hardly recognize ourselves — are works of art. Creativity is the imprint of humanity, from the outline of a hand painted with ochre on a cave wall, to the mandalas and sacred paintings of the medieval traditions, to the films and music and poetry of today. Throughout all of human history, creativity has been the means by which we understand the inner and the outer worlds, the crucible in which we store our collected wisdom and our fears. The function of all creative traditions — the arts and the sciences, religion and philosophy, politics and war — is to explore the extent to which we can know ourselves.

In that exploration, which is fraught with conflicts and dead-ends and transformations, we’re always coming back to one question: it’s an old one, old even to the Greeks from whom Freud borrowed it, already old when the Egyptians fashioned a great monument to symbolize it. It is perhaps the oldest riddle of humanity, certainly the favorite riddle of psychology, and it is this: “What goes first on four legs, then on two legs, then on three?” The simple answer, widely known, is human beings (first we crawl on four legs, then we walk on two, then we use a cane — three legs — in old age). But this riddle, asked by a magical animal that is part hunting lion, part thinking woman, is actually about the contradictions of human experience. The sphinx asks about the essence hidden within our diversities; it’s question is about the soul. And creativity, more than any other endeavor, is the study of the soul.

These days we have new ways of asking the riddle of the sphinx, and in our drive to be more scientific and medical, our responses to the riddle have become more complex; but they are no more precise. The answer, after all, is unfathomable. We’re still putting our hands up to the cave wall and inscribing around them with ochre. Only now, our tools are slightly different: computers, research modalities, theories. Our approaches to the riddle are possibly more robust than those of our ancestors, but they are probably more fragile as well. What has not changed, in a hundred thousand years of human psychology, is the fundamental creative impulse to understand ourselves and our world.

This is why we possess myths and stories, why we cherish works of art, why many people return (often grudgingly, as though creative approaches diminish us) to the holistic and creative modalities that have proved reliable for millennia. We like the new, we like to demonstrate that we’re making progress, that we’ve discovered fresh and important truths. And possibly we have. But one of the truths we continue to rediscover is that human nature is consistent, for good and for ill, and that it sometimes requires the simple symbols and stories embedded within its history. The creativity of those stories connects us to something inside ourselves that is strong and strange and elemental; a kind of empowerment, to use a term from modern psychology. This empowerment, which extends beyond the individual, is the reason for the Taliban banning music. It’s the reason that the cellist Vedran Smilovic played in the street during the war in Sarajevo, while snipers fired upon him. It’s the reason that many of us return, again and again, to the stories and images that comprise our identity. When nothing else is left, when the world’s ruthlessness has stripped us of our carefully constructed modernism or intellectualism or rationalism, it’s often to creativity that we turn for our deepest solace.

Perhaps the ancients were right: the arts and sciences beckon the gods, beseech them to intervene in the struggle between humanity and its own nature. Now, as always, that struggle preoccupies us: in Iraq, in Liberia, in Israel; and in our jobs, along the streets of our neighborhoods, in our minds as we lie awake late into the night. We used to tell stories in the night, around fires and under the stars that travelers at sea looked to for direction. We used to find order there, and constancy, and a sense of harmony beyond the world’s duress. We no longer tell those kinds of stories, and we can’t return to a belief in them. Now we find order in the genome, constancy in biochemistry. These are new stories, crafted carefully.

But sometimes the new stories are insufficient to the task of making sense of a world that is routinely nonsensical. Our genome and our biochemistry do not explain why we continue to war against each other, or why we struggle with poverty and environmental degradation. It’s easy, as a citizen of such a world, to become cynical, or to feel helpless, or desperate. Most of us can no longer believe in the old gods, and the new ones seem indifferent.

Creativity is perhaps the only means of resolving this conundrum. Creativity forges a path where none exists. Right now, because people sense this, we’re seeing a tremendous resurgence in the creative spirit. This is the natural response to trauma and insecurity. We make new stories, we challenge the way things are, by means of visions of the way things could be. This is neither denial nor wishful thinking. It is the soul’s affirmation that our world is what we make it; that even as we limp along on three legs, tired and haggard and threadbare, something or someone comes to our aid. All the old tales speak of this.

There are many stories of the crossroads. Monsters and unexpected guides tend to show up there, as do talismans and visions and magic. The gates of the city where Oedipus faced the sphinx are at the crossroads. And the challenge of the crossroads is ever the same: to answer the sphinx’s riddle: who are we?

The sphinx’s riddle is the essence of creative work. We stand at the crossroads, looking the beast in the eye, trying not to be the first one to blink.

A great many people are at the crossroads these days, looking out at the horizon to see which way the road goes. Our society is at the crossroads, too: one of our paths, the one we’re now on, leads away from the creativity and toward determinism. On this road we study the mind but not the soul. The other road, which is indistinct, hazy, which seems not to run straight but instead wanders across the plain, is the soul’s road. It embodies our heritage, as storytellers and witnesses, and the promise of our continuance. Some of us are choosing to sit around the fire of stories, to speak and listen and dream, so that the night sounds from the forest don’t seem so baleful and lonely. It’s an archaic, simple, creative urge, easy to dismiss amid the complexities of today. But it’s how we answer the riddle.

Many of my students, at Kwantlen and elsewhere, are searching for careers without cubicles. These students are interested in careers in the arts, in expressive arts therapies, in culture and multiculturalism, in media and publishing, and in many other interdisciplinary areas. The difficulty for many students is that they are completing programs which are limited to specific fields and disciplines, and such specificity does not reflect their intended career paths. They want interesting and diverse careers, not jobs hidebound by traditional roles and practices. This information session, held at Kwantlen's Surrey campus on November 24th (7:30 pm to 9:30 pm, Room G1205A), will offer students a glimpse of various interdisciplinary career paths and options. For students earlier in their academic development, the session will offer ideas about courses and overall direction. For those nearing completion, the session will offer perspectives about employment and career advancement.

This session is open to the public, not just to Kwantlen students. If you are interested in attending, please use the signup link below (site membership and login are required for this option). Or, simply show up. There is no fee.