ROSS A. LAIRD

I spend a great deal of time with two kinds of people: teachers and students. In some ways, these two groups are at opposite ends of the continuum of learning. Sure, teachers and students co-create and share the environment of learning; but what I hear from each group is different. Students (of all ages) talk about the many ways in which the learning environment fails to meet their needs. Teachers, on the other hand, tend to talk more about how to preserve and nurture that learning environment. In this sense, both groups are working toward the same goal: to make the learning environment useful and purposeful. But I find that they have radically different notions about how to accomplish this goal.…›

In January I will once again be offering several courses in creativity at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. These courses, which are all interconnected around the theme of purposeful play, are designed to help learners discover, or rediscover, the authentic joy of intentional, self-directed learning. The courses are developed as collaborative spaces, as environments of exploration, as opportunities for each of us to claim the fundamental right of creative action. …›

That horizon stretches out. You know the one. It lies on the far side of a vast, unknowable plain punctuated by our dreams and fears and fantasies of what might be. The horizon retreats as we tread upon that plain, as we encounter the figures and actions of our passage. We watch the horizon, we wonder about it, we follow our footsteps along an indistinct line that meanders in that direction. Call this line destiny, or fate, or the labyrinth, or whatever you like. It is the path that we take.

The oldest extant works of human creativity are close to 100,000 years old (yes, I know, not everyone agrees about this — but just go with it). The artifacts of creativity can be remarkably persistent. Yet the past is littered with silent evidence, fragments and snatches of the stuff that was destroyed or misplaced: lost books, paintings, sculptures, cities. (Cities? Yes: the ancient city of Akhetaten was deconstructed brick by brick, during a religious squabble, and scattered across the desert.) Today we know a vanishingly small amount about what has been lost. Sure, we have some texts that describe or refer to lost items (say, Plato describing Atlantis); but we will never know anything about almost all of the creative artifacts of human culture. They are gone.

Stop whatever else you are doing. Close your email application and Facebook, turn off the background music, silence your cell phone. Put it all away. Do it now. I’ll wait.

In many ways, creativity is a mythological journey. Its patterns and paths are known and mapped — this is the function of art. Creativity offers the way forward, if we choose to follow it. And, as creativity has the potential to be an aspect of every human endeavor, we can follow the creative process in everything we do. Creativity can bring us into closer relationship with ourselves, our loved ones, one peers; it can guide us through our travail and our turmoil. It is a source of great solace in a world of uncertainty. It is a wide path, and it begins with:

There is a crossroads, and a gate, in all the old tales. On one side lies the known, the practiced, the familiar. And on the far side, unseen and unimagined, lies the Other: the one we left behind, who has been waiting all this time. That threshold is a holy place; it does not decay, nor can it be thwarted, nor can it be lost within the tangle of grooved and meandering ways. The crossroads remains, and is protected. The air is still, and warm. Drops of morning moisture lie upon the tips of slender grasses. A sound comes from the far side of the gate; the soft warbling, perhaps, of a stream in the near distance. You reach for that gate -- we all do. It might be opened with a small and gentle push.