Abstract
Twenty-first century uncertainties privilege creative action. Creativity is an emergent property of dynamic relationships between individuals and their environment. Adopting a structured uncertainty curriculum design embodying the student qua artist and classroom qua creative recording studio, students experience actionable uncertainty. Such experiences foster intrapersonal insights. Giving expression to emerging self-concepts cultivates students' authentic voices, nurturing investment in care for who they are, who they are endeavouring to become, and to perceive their potentiality as they transition from university.
TopStrange Days Have Found Us: Nurturing Care For An Uncertain World
If there is a dark within and without
And there is a light. Don’t let it go out
“Song for Someone” (U2, 2014, track 4).
The world is increasingly interwoven with uncertainty manifesting in ruptures such as resurgent nationalism, increasing inequality, alienation, environmental foreboding, dissolving trust in institutions and post Covid 19 ambiguities (Beghetto, 2016; 2020). These are postnormal times “…[an] inbetween period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense” (Sardar, 2010, p. 435). To effectively navigate postnormality, uncertainty must be welcomed as an “…animating force, [opening up] new states of awareness, new possibilities for thought and action…” (Beghetto, 2020, p.2). Supporting future change ready graduates requires nurturing students’ care for ideas, others and critically, themselves (Dall’ Alba, 2012). Encouraging students’ authenticity stimulates agency that there is a light to effectively navigate uncertainty. For curricula to support students’ effective transition from university a question arises:
Can Curricula Be Designed So Students Experience Creatively Navigating Uncertainty?
This chapter outlines a curriculum experiment: Graduate Assessment Centre Simulations (GACS hereafter) spanning the Transition to Professional Life module suite (TPL hereafter) in the BA (Hons) Economics (through Transformational Learning) (BAECN hereafter) programme, University College Cork. These classroom activities and assessment (called performances)1 nurture students’ investment in their ability, motivation, and willingness to invite actionable uncertainty (Beghetto, 2020). Encouraging students’ engagement with who they are, concomitantly invites the excavation of ingrained psychological obstacles to who they are becoming. Through intrapersonal insights, Kaufmann & Beghetto’s mini-c creativity (2007), students (individually and collaboratively) may “progress to interpersonally judged novel and meaningful contributions” (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007, p. 59).
This chapter’s prolegomenon highlights salient aspects of U2’s recording process prefacing GACS’s metaphorical frame. The significance of explicitly integrating students’ epistemological and ontological development is outlined. The experiment’s underpinning Structured Uncertainty design and student qua artist/classroom qua creative recording studio as performative metaphors are then considered. Specific GACS designs and students’ reflective expressions unfolding from their experiences are then detailed.
Acrobat: A Musicial Prolegomenon
During a 1989 concert Bono (U2’s singer) announced “…we have to go away and dream it all up again” (cited in Leonard, 2021, section 1, para 2) foreshadowing U2’s creative musical shift first expressed in 1991’s Achtung Baby. Creativity is an emergent property of dynamic relationships between actor(s) and their cultural and material world (Glăveanu, 2013). Employing Glăveanu’s Five A’s Framework of Creativity (2013), the recording (action) of Achtung Baby (artifact) illustrates creativity as a dialogue between actor(s) (U2), perceived affordances and audience (others assisting, contributing, critiquing or using an artifact (including actor(s) as their own audience)).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Actionable Uncertainty: A sense of doubt in human experience motivating new ways of thinking and acting.
Immunity to Change: A psychological system that seeks to avoid engaging with change that is emotionally threatening.
Ethical Conversation: Conversation underpinned by the virtues of humility, modesty, and accountability.
Being: Who you are, expressed through your attitudes, worldviews, how you act, relate to others and the world.
Expression: Representing an experience in a way that seeks to embody the uniqueness and peculiarity of the experience.
Žižekian Event: A change in the way a human perceives and acts in the world.
Creativity: A sociocultural phenomena where the interactions between an actor(s) and their cultural and material environment leads to novel and useful artifacts.
Authenticity: Living life in a way that one becomes all that they can become.
Structured Uncertainty: Intentionally designing uncertainty into a learning experience.
Postnormality: A period categorised by uncertainty caused by environmental complexity, chaos, and contradictions.