Creative Economy Pedagogy: Teaching & Learning with Complexity
Part 1: The Opening Salvo

“If you want to learn something, read about it. If you want to understand something, write about it. If you want to master something, teach it.”

The Learners
During the spring semester of 2012, I taught “Introduction to the...

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Recently, Ithaca College Theatre announced the season of plays we will be producing in the next academic year (2013-14). We will be staging both “Fires in the Mirror” by Anna Deveare Smith and “Gone Missing” by The Civilians. These documentary theatre works got me thinking about the relationship between community development and community-based artistic creation and the...

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Recently, I came across a staff listing for Arena Stage and was shocked by how many of the salaried positions were on the management side, and how few were on the production/creative side of the organization. It made me do some soul-searching about whether the professionalization of the back offices of theatres has cannibalized the creative side of the house, the side that we managers think we...

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Unsurprisingly, every year, a group of students graduates and cycles out of our academic program and a group of new students cycles in. These students self organize, as McDaniel suggests when he describes “emergence” in “Management strategies for complex adaptive systems: Sensemaking, learning, and improvisation”. I am able to observe as patterns emerge and alliances...

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Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are discussed in Stacey’s “Organizations are complex adaptive systems” and McDaniel’s “Management strategies for complex adaptive systems: Sensemaking, learning, and improvisation.” McDaniel posits that if we accept that organizations are CAS than we must move away from organizational learning models that focus on command,...

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