Keywords

Background

Today, humanity finds itself in a position which has not been held by any species before us (Trinastic, 2015). A growing number of humans feel burdened with the realisation that, for the first time in the history of our planet, the global society to which we belong is playing a central role in the destruction of natural ecosystems, and our atmosphere (Malhi, 2017). Governments are instigating mitigation through our scientific, technological, ethical, environmental, pedagogical and economical capacities to reverse some of the damage done, and to prevent further damage. They are tying those mitigations to research, development and innovation in the above-mentioned disciplines (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2022b).

Global challenges need collaborative, global solutions (Bernstein, 2015). This is true in the field of education as well (Sutoris, 2022; World Economic Forum, 2017). However, Sutoris (2022) claims that the modern-day educational policy-makers’ stated aims regarding humanity’s possibility of schooling ourselves out of several simultaneous planetary-level environmental crises may only be a utopian way of approaching the challenges ahead (p. 103). In this chapter, I do not attempt to prove or disprove that claim. I do, however, provide details of an educational initiative which addresses these complex global challenges. Little literature is available regarding how higher education institutions (HEIs) may accommodate and manage initiatives of this kind. Global Science OperaFootnote 1 (GSO) (Global Science Opera, 2016), however, constitutes an approach to the process and product of creative global inquiry processes across the disciplines of science and the arts in schools. GSO is a ‘global creative educational initiative in which science and arts are explored simultaneously in a transdisciplinary framework’ (Straksiene et al., 2022, p. 5). It is a ‘network of scientists, art institutions, schools, and universities, in all of the inhabited continents’ (Global Science Opera, 2016). Examples of scientific themes which have provided inspiration for the initiative’s productions are the topics of eco-system restoration, the oceans, the universe and the creative human mind (ibid.). GSO operates as a co-created educational structure characterised by a flat hierarchy (Chappell & Craft, 2011). That flat hierarchy is apparent in the educational structure because the exact design and content of each lesson is only partially pre-defined by the GSO organisers and the teachers in each GSO location around the globe. The actual content is emergent, and all participating students and teachers are seen as active co-creators of that content. In GSO, real-world scientific and social challenges are negotiated within an educational environment that draws on practices and philosophies from science and the arts, often referred to as the Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics (STEAM) movement (Colucci-Gray et al., 2017; Ben-Horin, 2021).

There is no single, ultimate definition of creativity in education (Kampylis & Valtanen, 2010). In their recent review of creative pedagogies, Cremin and Chappell (2021) examined evidence regarding creative pedagogical practices and their potential impact on students’ creativity. Their findings revealed seven features which characterise creative pedagogical practice. These were generating and exploring ideas; encouraging autonomy and agency; playfulness; problem-solving; risk-taking; co-constructing and collaborating; and teacher creativity (ibid.). In this chapter, I detail how GSO pedagogy resonates with most of these features, at the same time as I approach the phenomenon of creativity from a posthuman perspective (Chappell, 2021; Chappell et al., 2019) which extends beyond a human-centred approach to what creativity is.

The kind of pedagogy which GSO represents is a creative rupturing of the structure of a traditional schoolFootnote 2 for the following reasons. First, GSO’s structure is implemented as an educational environment which is freely available for the participation of any school, regardless of students’ ages, their country of origin, or each school’s specific pedagogical approaches. Second, this pedagogy avoids pre-defined educational and social structures, and refuses the idea that social structure is solely innate and pre-defined. Third, this approach to a global-level pedagogy acknowledges the environment and other-than-human as part of a creative process which is not human centred (Chappell, 2021; Barad, 2007). Rather, inclusion of the environment in which we live, and the technologies we use to communicate globally during the operas’ creation, as integral parts in this creative process, is a prerequisite for the realisation of that creative process. This also holds true for the scientific phenomena which provide inspiration for inquiry during the operas. They, too, then, become part of the global community’s creative process.Footnote 3 The creative exploration (Chappell, 2018) of any scientific phenomenon must therefore also impact the phenomenon itself (Chappell & Ben-Horin, 2023).

Thus, GSO teachers and students need to explore physical matter and that matter’s meaning, together (Chappell, 2021; Chappell & Ben-Horin, 2023). Matter and its meaning, and, especially, the ethical dimensions of exploring the world around us, are not independent educational processes in GSO. They must be taken hold of simultaneously (Barad, 2007). Matter, though, is dynamic, constantly shifting and emergent. The creative process which explores matter is thus an emergent one too. This chapter takes a step towards describing that creative process, what it requires and what it may enable for management in higher education.

Managing Creative Research and Development Initiatives in Higher Education

European research and development (R&D) funding bodies have consistently invested in creativity in education during the past years. The foundation for this investment was described in European reports, and among them the European Ambassadors to the Year of Creativity (2009) which defines the opportunity to participate in a creative education as a right of all European school pupils, and the report Science Education Now (Rocard et al., 2007) which argued for a more inquiry-based science education (IBSE). A central argument for strengthening IBSE was its capacity to create favourable conditions and attitudes for reaching deep levels of knowledge for the ‘most talented, creative and motivated students’ (ibid., p. 12).Footnote 4 One of the areas prioritised for investment has been arts integration in schools, and specifically STEAM education (Colucci-Gray et al., 2017). The reasoning provided for these investments has largely been economic and market oriented: the need for creative thinking in education in order to generate levels of innovation necessary in a competitive society (Rocard et al., 2007). Beyond the economic, market-focused considerations, the European Commission has also acknowledged the need for sustainable solutions to global challenges (Kvamme, 2021). These are not necessarily related to the competitive dimension of a market-driven economy. Rather, they aim to place nature, the environment and equality between humans in inclusive societies as the focus of attention (Kvamme, 2021).

The granting of the above-mentioned investments to applicant institutions, typically in the form of R&D projects, requires the recipient institutions to take responsibility for all aspects of implementation in accordance with each project’s application to funding bodies, as well as with each funding body’s regulations. Implementation of R&D projects which have creative education as their focal point necessarily includes unexpected elements: creative educational environments empower students to be at least partial initiators of what is being learned and how that learning happens (Ben-Horin et al., 2017; Chappell & Craft, 2011). Handing control of elements of the learning process to students, rather than strictly following pre-defined governmental learning plans and outcomes, will thus often yield unexpected results. Indeed, an understanding of the creative process as one which includes the environment and the other-than-human (Chappell, 2021) implies that much of that process lies beyond the control of humans and is therefore emergent. This is the case for two reasons. First, such a creative process must place at least some of the needs and priorities of other-than-humans before our own. Human dominance will be disrupted, even if only in limited areas of our lives, leading to new hierarchies between humans and our surroundings. New hierarchies will require new solutions with regard to, for example, food production. It is difficult to foresee how those will be resolved, as they will rely on political, market and biological processes. Second, the dominant position held by humans which characterises the Anthropocene is largely a result of an economy of global corporate capitalism which sustains inequalities between humans and other-than-humans as well as between different groups of humans (Kvamme, 2021). A renegotiation of that system is likely to result in social and political unrest of the type which has historically led to emergent, unforeseeable social structures and new political ones.Footnote 5

Institutions implementing R&D in the field of creative education which aim to provide new, innovative solutions to complex global challenges must therefore explore models of governance of that innovation (e.g. European Commission, 2014). Those models need to conceptualise the planning for flexible structures in which risk (Biesta, 2014) is embedded. Specifically, higher education management must provide the legal, economic and scientific frameworks needed to implement R&D, while enabling researchers’ freedom of exploration and their ability to identify and capitalise upon unexpected, emergent opportunities (Scaglione et al., 2019). That freedom, however, is provided against the backdrop of a complex reality in which management is obliged to deliver quality education programmes on one hand (ESG, 2015), and high-level research, development and innovation on the other, as well as synergies between them (The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, 2023).

Global educational environments require simultaneous interaction with different cultures, modes of communication, legal structures, values, curricula and timetables. In order to create these infrastructures, leadership at the higher education level needs to enable spaces for them to flourish within the institution, something which often creates friction and associated risk. In this chapter, therefore, I provide a description of how leadership at higher education institutions may approach the risky (Biesta, 2014) and improvisational (Scaglione et al., 2019) task of participating in such an endeavour. The aesthetic of improvisation relies on improvised content (e.g. music) emerging spontaneously as a result of the simultaneous contributions of all participating musicians: that music would not exist had those musicians not improvised together (Monson, 1996). I, therefore, draw on theories of intra-action in which Barad (2007) distinguishes between interaction and intra-action. Intra-action ‘recognizes that distinct agencies…emerge through their intra-action’ (p. 33). Interacting elements exist prior to their interaction. In intra-action, though, ‘they don’t exist as individual elements’ prior to intra-action (ibid.). Intra-action in global educational environments therefore calls into question the very existence of the independence of several structures central to the current-day educational field. Indeed, GSO represents a transformational rupture which weakens their independence. Examples of these structures are national curricula, distinctions between higher education and school education and the organisation of school activities in distinct disciplines, such as mathematics, art, science and history.

It is also relevant to turn to other work in the area of improvisation in educational contexts (Ben-Horin, 2016; DeZutter, 2011; Holdhus et al., 2016; Sawyer, 2011) in order to contextualise this claim. Much of the work in pedagogical improvisation (Donmoyer, 1983) has relied on frameworks and phenomena related to improvisation in the arts (Maheux & Lajoie, 2011), and especially jazz music (Sawyer, 2011). HEIs’ needs for structures which enable risk-taking (ibid.; Biesta, 2014) on the outside of their defined structures in order to be able to accommodate emergent situations which are unforeseeable in advance could turn to jazz music’s improvisation outside the harmonic progressions of a given composition. In broad terms, this refers to one or more musicians, typically soloists, who, for a limited amount of time, play a melodic or harmonic sequence (or both) which includes notes that do not belong in the musical scale or chord according to a strict, traditional interpretation of music theory.Footnote 6 When performed against the backdrop of an established harmonic framework with which the listener is familiar, the musical phrase improvised outside the harmony belongs to the composition being played while at the same time creating dissonance resulting in musical tension. The length of each excursion outside the harmony, and how far it ventures beyond a composition’s underlying harmonic structure is a function of each improviser’s style, musical interpretation and intra-action with her fellow musicians. This analogy is useful as a way of conceptualising risky R&D ventures which take place outside the organisation’s stated frameworks, yet which still belong to the organisation and signify new potential areas of R&D activity in that organisation.

Achievement of the United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals will require seamless intra-action (Barad, 2007) of all knowledge, societal and industrial sectors (European Commission, 2022). The United Nations (2023) defines higher education institutions (HEI) as follows:

…HEIs…are preparing future professionals, conducting meaningful research, and engaging with the community and stakeholders to tackle local, national, regional, and global challenges. These HEIs are at the forefront of the solutions required to advance the Sustainable Development Goals, which underscores the fundamental role of education in creating healthy and inclusive societies… – (United Nations, 2023)

HEIs’ organisational structures typically include units (departments, faculties, centres) dedicated to educational programmes, research, development and innovation, as well as administrative units. HEIs are evaluated according to their achievements in these fields of activity. In Norway, substantial portions of public HEIs’ budgets depend on documented and quantifiable results with regard to student production of ECTS, number of students who graduated during a given year and the number of research grants approved (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2022a). Workloads of scientific personnel typically include more than one of these fields. Personnel are thus often required to balance multiple teaching duties with duties in the fields of research (internally or externally funded), development (internally focused, e.g. development of new courses or externally focused, e.g. development of new practicum programmes), and innovation. Balancing work between and across boundaries of these fields of knowledge offers several advantages. It allows personnel to experience different perspectives of their HEI’s activity, thereby including multiple organisational and epistemological dimensions in their work. That balancing also poses logistical (scheduling considerations, coordinating numerous deadlines, etc.) as well as epistemological challenges. Balancing these fields of activity and knowledge is crucial, though. Indeed, the seamless integration of R&D in programmes for higher education students is described as a criterion for achieving qualityFootnote 7 in European higher education. Management of R&D has therefore been the focus of both debate (Norwegian Ministry of Education, 2020) and renewal (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2022a) in Norway. Norwegian HEIs must, therefore, continuously develop approaches to integrate R&D in their study programmes (Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education, 2022). The broader context for this is the need to navigate several macro-level challenges relating to relations between the EU’s Research, Development and Innovation programmes, as well as the need to improve systematised implementation of results of funded EU projects in their study programmes. This, in turn, will require that HEIs formulate and take into use specific measures for how knowledge attained in research projects will be implemented after each project’s formal lifetime as it has been defined by the programmes that funded it (typically 2–4 years).

I will now contextualise this background in a case study (Lichtman, 2010; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2014). The real-world context for this study is the Global Science Opera (GSO), which I have coordinated since its inception in 2014. That coordination has overlapped with my role as an HEI middle-leader since 2018. This dual perspective provides an important angle of perception for the qualitative case study: an angle which allows me to base the study’s conclusions on an intensive, detailed acquaintance with the GSO case, including its ideas, implementation and its management.

GSO emerged through, and as a result of, R&D projects funded by the European Commission, the European Economic Area and the Norwegian Research Council,Footnote 8 and those projects’ interactions with the international educational networks Global Hands on Universe (GHOU), Galileo Teacher Training Program (GTTP) and the European Network for Opera and Dance Education (RESEO). GSO was initially proposed to the International Astronomical Union as a cornerstone project of the United Nations–sanctioned International Year of Light 2015 (International Astronomical Union, 2015). GSO’s metaphorical backbone thus materialised as a synergy between several educational frameworks and funding bodies. Such synergies are desirable (European Commission, 2021; The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, 2023), yet complicated to manage.Footnote 9

Middle Leaders’ Handling of the R&D Portfolio

The higher education sector needs to establish clearer, explicit and more visible connections between epistemological and organisational needs for synergies on the international macro level, and those same needs for synergies between research and educational programmes within the HEIs themselves. HEIs must, therefore, place themselves more decisively in relation to, and in the context of, international frameworks such as the EU Missions (European Commission, 2022). To achieve this, individual HEIs need to become more conscious of where they see themselves in relation to the current day’s biggest societal challenges, such as climate change, pollution and equal access to quality education, and what they can uniquely contribute to the solution of these challenges. The connections between the international level and synergies within each unique HEI must be understood and facilitated by the meso-level of middle leaders. It is those middle leaders’ responsibility to ensure that higher education student involvement in staff’s R&D initiatives is contextualised as part of the EU’s need to achieve synergies between its various funding programmes of research, development, innovation and education, which represent different approaches, systems and mechanisms to knowledge creation in the European future. Many middle leaders in European higher education do indeed aim to increase integration of R&D in their institutions’ educational programmes (Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education, 2022). Yet their attention is often focused on the micro level of this issue, such as the single research group, the single Erasmus+ project, or the work-plans of specific personnel. Increased focus on how integration may be planned and implemented on the macro level of the EU, National Research Councils, or OECD tendencies, strategies and plans is needed in order to more specifically clarify how micro levels should operate in a way which contributes to the macro level’s integration goals (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Working in this way will, furthermore, provide middle leaders at universities of applied sciences with clearer understandings of how to provide the national and EU levels with new mechanisms for the application of new knowledge in the local, regional, national and international societies in which those institutions are embedded. In the absence of these more clearly defined frameworks for middle leaders, those leaders may lack capacity to reach their full potential with regard to their contribution to their country’s financial competitiveness and ethical stance. Furthermore, managing and applying externally funded R&D projects, which is a taxing task in terms of time and resources, will become more difficult. Since global challenges require global educational frameworks, lacking a systematic approach to portfolio development also implies an unclear concept of each HEI’s role and profile in the international higher education sector, as these are functions of the specific ways in which that institution conceptualises, theorises, implements and evaluates intra-actions between research, development and innovation, and the courses which its students attend. Thus, a systematic approach to long-term R&D portfolio development is needed at each HEI. That approach must rely on portfolios of R&D projects and those of university courses being developed as a unified whole.

Applying New Knowledge

Universities of Applied Sciences, with their focus on professions which apply new knowledge, are especially well-positioned for the development and implementation of long-term approaches to integrated portfolios. The Norwegian government has specified the need for HEIs to be active in providing good examples and mechanisms for applying sciences, and knowledge more generally, as a prerequisite to achieving solutions to societal challenges which are international and global in nature (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2022b). It does not suffice for HEIs to develop knowledge. New knowledge, whether in the form of research, development or innovation, must be produced with a specific plan for how that knowledge will be applied. That knowledge must also be made available, and taken into use by industry, the public sector and the civil society (ibid.).

The EU has defined its Missions as a ‘new way to bring concrete solutions to some of our greatest challenges’ (European Commission, 2022). The Missions are designed in the way that they are in order to develop and implement concrete results by 2030 (ibid.). This will be achieved by ‘putting research and innovation into a new role, combined with new forms of governance and collaboration…’ (ibid., italics added). These goals are ambitious, and the defined time frame for reaching them is short. The Missions’ design acknowledges that responding to challenges will require collaboration between practitioners of different disciplines. This, and the previously mentioned reasons, imply that it will be necessary to provide flexibility of reaction for researchers contributing to these solutions. The need to engage with society (United Nations, 2023) implies involving the broader society in the formulation and ethical dimensions of research questions and finding optimal ways for informing the broader society of results of research (Ben-Horin et al., 2017; Sotiriou et al., 2017). However, the new roles of research, innovation, governance and collaboration (United Nations, 2023) need to be further developed as a response to Sutori’s (2022) description of current methods of education for sustainability as being merely utopic. To achieve this, the new roles, at least in the case of management of R&D with creativity at its heart, will need to ensure that the intra-action (Barad, 2007) with the world around us is not limited to the creative educational processes taking place within the confines of the single R&D initiative. New world realities, such as the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in education (U.S. Department of Education, 2023) and wicked problems (Bernstein, 2015; Rittel & Webber, 1973), such as recent climate-change induced weather disasters (Roberts, 2022), need to instigate a new phase in higher education. Higher education, then, needs to go through its own ruptures.

Until these ruptures are introduced and implemented, we will continue to see that standards and concepts of the impact of how we apply our sciences are not reconciled with sustainability goals through overarching institutional strategies, with regard to (a) acknowledging specific contexts and conditions within which impact emerges, (b) consistent integration of R&D initiatives in higher education’s study programmes and (c) intra-actions between profession-oriented study programmes in education and the practice field of schools. HEIs, then, and especially universities of applied sciences, could benefit from a clearer concept of their impact on international innovation, practice and industry fields. This can be achieved by developing theoretical and practice-based approaches and analyses of HEIs’ impact as a function of the unique disciplinary, geographical and geo-political placement that they have.Footnote 10

The Improvising Higher Education Institution

GSO provides an appropriate case study for this discussion due to its provision of a framework for creative teaching and for teaching for creativity (Ben-Horin, 2014; Chappell & Ben-Horin, 2023), and for its focus on the practice field. Due to its geographical spread, GSO must provide a flexible framework which can be adapted to the different curricula of various countries, different levels of availability of technical support, as well as different cultural approaches, regulations and pedagogical attitudes, all within a single educational environment which invites schools from different countries to intra-act. Managing a framework of this kind within higher education requires middle leaders to be able to exercise the freedom to step outside established structures in their own institutions when the need arises, and to improvise on behalf of their HEI. This can be likened to the jam session in jazz music (Brunstad, 2023) in the sense that each HEI’s top management provides musical riffs as a foundation, with the aim of enabling middle leaders, educators and researchers to improvise with, and interpret, that foundation in their own ways. Indeed, GSO was enabled through synergies across EU and other R&D funding programmes in both the practice field of schools, science and art institutions, as well as in research. Such synergies require robust measures of flexibility during the planning, implementation and data-harvesting phases of the unique R&D projects which work together as a portfolio. As an example, planning for future synergies requires the authoring of several funding proposals simultaneously. In another example, using didactic training materials created by one R&D project in order to provide the foundation for creative educational activities in another requires formulations which align with both, as well as meticulous post-project reporting of why and how these materials were used in both projects. Consequently, explicit communication from an HEI’s highest leadership needs to be made to middle leaders, ensuring them that improvisation as an organisation is not only tolerated, but encouraged (Scaglione et al., 2019). The concept of taking risks in order to produce robust research results, and to take advantage of opportunities in the international R&D field, thus needs to be anchored in the documents which describe middle leader management approaches, and in training courses of new middle leaders.

Leadership Approaches for Educational Futures

The role of management is to make space for risk-taking, to understand what the researchers are going through, to protect them from bureaucracy and to lead and facilitate integration of research, development and innovation with educational programmes. Such an approach to management must be characterised by abundant trust between middle leaders and the researchers and educators they lead. It is not the leaders’ distinct vision which defines how new knowledge is developed and applied. Rather, staff and students exercise the freedom to pursue their own visions. They feel free to exchange information with their leaders in challenging situations for which no clear solution is available. They dare to discuss differences of opinions with their leaders, who exercise a relational approach to management, and who are willing to transfer control to staff and students for the benefit of risk-taking and an improvisational approach to the creation and application of new, emergent knowledge. An important responsibility, then, lies on the shoulders of staff themselves, as it is crucial that staff involve middle leaders in long-term plans for their research, development and innovation.

HEIs’ middle leaders and, in turn, the highest management levels, must tolerate research, development and educational processes characterised by unknown results. This is no easy feat: annual financial reports tend to highlight monetary results which can be documented as having been achieved within each year’s budget. Likewise, reports about each HEI’s number of courses, number of enrolled students and number of confirmed R&D projects do not typically include mechanisms for reporting risky in-the-making initiatives which may take years to develop and document. Middle leaders are at least partially evaluated according to such numerical results for units they manage. Allowing staff and students the freedom to explore their own visions may therefore be experienced by some middle leaders as unsafe and uncomfortable.

Conclusion

Achieving the UN Strategic Development Goals (United Nations, 2023) will require a rupturing of several mechanisms in higher education’s structures, and its relationships with the practice field of global schools. Higher education should eschew dualisms which conceptualise research, development and educational courses as separate entities, each with their own administrative procedures and economic considerations. Rather, we need a detailed conceptualisation of how and why risk is taken as a desirable (Biesta, 2014) characteristic collectively in the pursuit, dissemination and application of new knowledge in numerous forms and disciplines. It is for this reason that a transdisciplinary approach to working across subject boundaries plays a unique role in educational intra-action (Barad, 2007).

Transdisciplinarity entails understanding disciplines through the eyes of other disciplines. It is, for example, impossible to study science in this transdisciplinary framework without adhering to the methods and philosophies of music. Likewise, separate entities do not pre-exist their intra-action.Footnote 11 The very act of knowing relies on intra-action (Barad, 2007). Science and music, then, cannot exist without each other. The risky, emergent and improvisational reaching across disciplinary boundaries which characterises STEAM education (Colucci-Gray et al., 2017), and other transdisciplinary frameworks, is a necessity in today’s world of education, rather than electives which we may choose to omit from curricula in educational futures. Consequently, teacher education programmes in which pre-service teachers study science education and arts education, but without explicit concepts for how science and the arts intra-act, are not preparing teachers for educational futures in which education for sustainability is more than just utopic.

It is my hope that these mechanisms will be taken further and offer something to higher education more generally, namely, explicit concepts for intra-action between an HEI’s internal units and between its various roles of leadership, scientific personnel, educators and administrators. The rupture which we need to bring about in higher education implies that an HEI cannot engage in innovative research without expecting that research’s results to change something in the way that HEI is managed and structured. New models of innovation which aim to strengthen quality (ESG, 2015) in the form of R&D integration must therefore rely on R&D projects being systematically designed to be embedded within higher education courses. Only in this way will middle leaders be able to ensure direct lines between the micro and the macro levels of the world of education in the Anthropocene.