Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures

This open access book aims to show how creative ruptions – disturbances or commotions - can lead to the emergence of ethical, care-ful educational futures. Grounded in empirical and theoretical research undertaken from posthuman, decolonial, new materialist and feminist perspectives, this edited volume questions historical and current assumptions as to how education is structured and enacted, and provides examples and tools illustrating how to create and work with creative ruptions. Under the guidance of an experienced editorial team, the authors demonstrate how creative ruptions can respond to various wicked problems through the design and enactment of transformative pedagogies and accompanying research. Including consideration of how we can grow our emotional repertoires from anxiety to include hope and courage, the book explores how creativity might expand the horizons of personal, social and political possibility that take shape within – and ultimately determine – education and its futures.
Offering theoretically driven and practically grounded transdisciplinary examples of alternative educational futures, this volume is an ideal reading for those interested in the intersecting fields of Possibilities Studies in Education, Creativity in Education, Educational Futures, Pedagogy, and related disciplines.

“This timely and thought-provoking book shows how creative ‘ruptions’ can challenge existing orthodoxies in education and lead to more ethical educational futures that are full of care and creativity. Each chapter invites the reader to engage in a transdisciplinary space to explore alternative visions of education, as an entangled space of relationality. International authors draw on a range of different perspectives including posthuman, decolonial, new materialist and feminist approaches to place into question key assumptions about education and related injustices. Core themes include creating spaces for ruptions, dialoguing and resistance. There are practical examples of how to work with meaningful creative ruptions through enacting research-informed, embodied and transformative pedagogies. The book explores how creativity might expand the horizons of possibility for alternative educational futures in the more than human world. I would recommend this book to anyone involved in thinking through the potential for educational and systemic change.” (Penny Hay, Professor of Imagination, Bath Spa University, UK)

“This book provides hope for those of us despairing of the narrow view of education that pervades both policy and practice. Grounded in diverse contexts from around the world, the authors present viable alternatives that will challenge every reader’s thinking. Read it, not just for yourself, but for all your future students – they deserve it.” (Justin Dillon, Professor of Science and Environmental Education, Centre for Climate Change & Sustainability Education, UCL, UK)

“This collection entices readers to participate in innovative, creative and accessible ways for imagining and doing education theory and practice differently. The authors work with and, most importantly, demonstrate how to enact the novel concept-practice of ‘ruption’, which envisages change as a processual breaking and bursting forth which promises more change in its wake. There are many exciting things in this book: from its multimedia invitations which move readers off the page and into sensory-embodied modes of listening, walking and learning; to its inventive art practices and its transdisciplinary thinking which draws in posthumanism, decolonial theory, and feminist new materialism. Emerging from a wide range of original empirical work, this timely book urges us to acknowledge our capacities for enacting educational change and the relational ethics of response-ability to nonhumans and humans this necessarily entails.” (Carol A. Taylor, Professor of Higher Education and Gender, University of Bath, UK)

“In an increasingly destabilized world we are faced with uncertainties and inequities on all fronts – socio-culturally, environmentally, economically and politically; there is an urgent need for scholarship that provides alternatives to the certainties of current westernized educational systems. This book is an ethical, relational project that sets out to challenge the bounded, fixed, linear forms of progression towards pre-determined ends that dominate current neoliberal/colonial education systems. The authors’ praxis is at the heart of each chapter and shines like a beacon inviting readers to engage with the ideas through the text and the clever use of QR codes which link to other creative forms of expression. The book is an invitation for readers to turn up, be open to the unexpected, to journey with the authors and to begin to understand what it might mean to create ruptions in their own educational settings.” (Fran Martin, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Education, University of Exeter, UK)

“The stunning ambition of this bold and daring edited volume is that it brings together expert voices who provide a set of innovative insights into a critical arena for action. It is an impressive example of how creative ruptions can open new possibilities for co-authoring real change. This book is a gift to generating original ways of future-making in education. Each chapter invites the reader into a possible journey with lines of flight, intra-connected through themed relationalities that move at their own rhythm. Readers will be inspired by the insights  into educational futures and future-making. This book sheds light on how how we can transcend the limitations of traditional modalities of educational thinking and grow our emotional and professional repertoires as a process that never stops relating and/or mattering for real change. It is an essential read for anyone interested in change.” (Pamela Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, University of Cambridge, UK)

Kerry Chappell is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Exeter, UK, where she leads the Creativity and Emergent Educational futures Network and the MA Education Creative Arts Programme. She is also Adjunct Associate Professor at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on creativity in education, specifically in the arts (dance) and transdisciplinary settings, and how creativity contributes ethically to educational futures.  

Chris Turner is an independent writer and researcher, and an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK. An expert in the field of education, his research and writing interests are in the aesthetics and ecology of education, from which he has developed the theoretical concepts of aesthoecology. A member of the Creativity and Emergent Educational futures Network at the University of Exeter, he has lectured widely on educational leadership and community education.  

Heather Wren is a Graduate Research Assistant and PhD student at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research explores environmental empathy using a New Materialist lens in an effort to understand how this type of empathy emerges in education. She is also a member of the Creativity and Emergent Educational futures Network at the University of Exeter.