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Creative Inquiry: Confronting the challenges of scholarship inthe 21st century

Alfonso Montuori

California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103, United States

1. Introduction

We are coming to know a world that is neither a clock work mechanism wound up ab initio to work out apredeterminate programme; nor a blind meaningless chaos that, by sheer chance, happens to have thrown upcomplex physico-chemical structures with capacity for thought and feeling. It is a world that is through and throughdramatic, and therefore through and through interesting. There can have been few moments on this earth moredramatic and interesting than the offering of Pandora’s gift of Creativity [1].

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is in the throes of a remarkable transformation [2–5]. This may notbe the end of history, but perhaps the end of one age and the intimations of a new one. For the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,‘‘solid modernity’’ has become ‘‘liquid modernity’’: everything is fluid, changing, with no predictability, no certainty, nostability. Human beings have to learn to become flexible, adaptable, capable of living and working under conditions of greatuncertainty [6–8]. Sardar argues that we are in postnormal times, ‘‘an in between period where old orthodoxies are dying,new ones have not yet emerged, and nothing really makes sense’’ [5, p. 435]. The complexity, pluralism, and uncertainty oflife certainly appear overwhelming at times. We are arguably in the middle of the Future Shock discussed by Alvin Toffler [9].Whatever it is we are going through, shocking, postnormal, fluid, or all of the above, the world is changing. And it is clear thatour educational systems do not prepare us for the emerging pluralistic, interconnected, complex world. They certainly do notprepare us for seemingly perpetual change, instability, and above all, uncertainty [10–13].

From the state of the global economy to the environment, to the nature of leadership, immigration, the shift to amultipolar world, the persistence of global poverty, climate change, and international terrorism, it seems there is no end tothe list of global and local problems. The solutions of modernity, its very engines of progress, seem in many cases to havebecome the problems of postnormal times. Creativity and imagination will be essential to envisioning and developingalternatives to the systems, structures, and processes that are presently failing us [5,14,15]. But if the urgency andimportance of creativity are clear, in education creativity is mostly conspicuous by its absence [16,17].

Futures 44 (2012) 64–70

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history:

Available online 11 August 2011

A B S T R A C T

It is becoming increasingly apparent that creativity and imagination are key to envisioning

alternatives to the problems of postnormal times. At the same time, educational

institutions all over the globe are still mired in assumptions from the machine/industrial

age, preparing students for reproduction and conformity rather than creativity. This article

outlines the philosophical foundations of an educational approach in which creativity is

central to scholarship, where learners move from being consumers to creators and from

bystanders to participants in the postnormal dance of knowledge.

� 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Futures

jo u rn al ho m epag e: ww w.els evier .c o m/lo cat e/ fu tu res

0016-3287/$ – see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.futures.2011.08.008


Mainstream education across the globe, which I refer to as Reproductive Education, is still mired in the machineassumptions of the industrial age [10,13,18,19]. Reproductive Education stresses conformity and homogeneity andsuppresses creativity at a time when it is apparent that creativity needs to be mobilized to get beyond the decaying industrialviews of modernity and envision new futures, new possibilities, new economic, environmental, social, and cultural andethical systems [5,13,20]. Reproductive Education may have been appropriate for the industrial assembly line and its orderlybureaucracy, but it is simply unable to confront the fluid, unexpected challenges of postnormal times [17].

Reproductive Education viewed learners as consumers of knowledge. In Reproductive Education learners are spectatorsto knowledge generated by external forces and figures, experts whose work must be ‘‘consumed’’. Given the underlyingReproductive foundation of most education, it should come as no surprise that in the U.S. doctoral students have beenprepared to be good course-takers, not independent scholars capable of doing their own original research [21]. While theymay be able to reproduce information that is already known in order to pass a course, they are often unable to make anoriginal contribution to the field. They are certainly not being prepared to be creative, which is perhaps unsurprisingly whatthe research shows is central to doing original research. Disparaging popular use of terms like ‘‘academic’’ and ‘‘scholarly’’ torefer to something synonymous with ‘‘irrelevant in practice’’ is perhaps indicative of a more serious concern about therelevance of education. This is particularly true at the graduate level, where doctoral degrees have been subjected toenormous criticism [22]. In fact, the Ph.D. is hardly ever framed in a way that reflects its most basic definition (an original

contribution to a field), which is to say by definition a creative process leading to a creative product. Students are beingprepared to be consumers, not creators of knowledge. They remain spectators, not participants, in the adventure ofknowledge in postnormal times.

I draw on my experience of almost 25 years in alternative and mainstream post-secondary institutions, and specificallythe design of a transdisciplinary doctoral degree [23] and a masters degree [24] that have now been in existence for over 6years at a private, non-profit U.S. university, to provide an outline of one approach that makes creativity central in thecurriculum. It should be noted that neither of the degrees is exclusively about or in creativity. Creative Inquiry is an approachto education that places creativity at the heart of scholarship. It stresses the self-creation of the learner in his or her context,the creation of the process of inquiry, and the creative nature of the product. It is a broad frame for a kind of education thatattempts to reflect the complexity of our planetary situation in and through the need for creativity and by recognizing andembracing complexity [23]. Creative Inquiry frames learners as creators, and explicitly works with the premise that allhuman beings can be creative [25–27]. Learners become participants who are actively engaged with ideas in a way that isembodied and embedded. During their course of study they are encouraged to actively participate in the larger discourse anduncover also how they already embody knowledge in their own lives. Knowledge is not out there in an abstract realm, butunderstood to be embodied in our very ability to understand and act in the world [28].

In this essay I explore the need for a change in education in postnormal times, focusing particularly on a shift in theunderstanding and practice of scholarship, understood as the attitudes and skills one brings to academic inquiry. Space doesnot allow for specific pedagogical examples of the applications of Creative Inquiry, which can be found elsewhere [23–26,29].

2. From consumers to creators

Despite the extensive body of creativity research, and the increasing awareness that creativity is an essential competencefor the 21st century in industry in order to survive in a rapidly changing world [13,20,30–37], education has not been able todevelop a new form of scholarship that actively incorporates creativity and makes it central to education [38]. There areseveral reasons for this: the importance placed on education as a means of social control; the fact that increasing creativity inthe classroom means less control and more unpredictability for faculty and administration; and persistentmisunderstandings about the nature of creativity [38–41].

The problems of present educational systems can ultimately be traced to the underlying foundations of ReproductiveEducation, the machine view of the industrial age [16,42]. The Newtonian/Cartesian worldview, central to the industrial ageand at the heart of modernity, saw the Universe, society, and human beings, as machines and mechanical processes[19,43,44]. Reproductive Education reflects educators’ borrowing of concepts from the Newtonian/Cartesian machinemetaphor applied to the Industrial organization of society, coupled with traditional authoritarianism. This was educationdesigned to reproduce the existing social order and educate for conformity, hierarchy, division of labor, hyper-specialization,and the quest for certainty [19,45–47]. The principles of reduction and disjunction could be found in the organization ofknowledge at the level of educational institutions, through disciplinary fragmentation and the separation of academicdisciplines and departments into air-tight compartments [48], while analysis, logical and critical thought became thestandard of ‘‘good thinking’’.

In Reproductive Education, learners are educated to be cogs in an industrial machine. In the machine metaphor, thecreator is by necessity outside the machine, and indeed the Divine Watchmaker was a key image in one theological argumentfor the existence of God [49,50]. Reproductive Education does not account for creativity. In fact it is actively designed to avoidits expression in students, whether in or out of the classroom. Nothing new is expected, required, or wanted from learnersthemselves. They are ‘‘trivial machines’’: the student’s output can be predicted if one knows the input [51]. Being a goodstudent means producing an output that is already known to the instructor, not being creative.

Creative Inquiry reflects a larger shift in worldview from a Newtonian/Cartesian machine metaphor to a metaphor of acreative universe [13,52–55]. It reflects scientific developments outlining the fundamental creativity of the Universe, Nature,

A. Montuori / Futures 44 (2012) 64–70 65


and humanity, and is informed by epistemological perspectives from the sciences of complexity and constructivism [12,56].As such it draws extensively on systems and complexity science, creativity research, and a broad range of multi-disciplinaryscholarship [1,3,4,6–8,11,12,15,18,30,31,33,37,38,40,41,43–47,49,52,56–70].

In the early 21st century our understanding of creativity is itself being transformed [54,60,70,71]. Creativity is nowbeginning to be viewed by some scholars as the very nature of human existence, life, and the Universe [52,55,57,71]. In thisview, the fundamental nature of existence, of human beings, society, and of the Universe itself is creativity, rather thanmatter (materialism) or ideas (idealism). The inquirer is not a machine or an empty vessel requiring to be filled from the‘‘outside’’ by a teacher. In Creative Inquiry, the inquirer is viewed as engaged in a recursive process of exploration andcreation of self and world. Creative Inquiry assumes a creative ontology and epistemology [54,72]. The learner is a creativeprocess (as well as a creative product), rather than a cog in a machine. Both scholar and scholarship are likewise creativeprocesses rather than a passive reception or input of information [73–75].

Creative Inquiry involves the cultivation of a fundamental attitude to the world that actively embraces uncertainty,pluralism, and complexity, and sees them as potential sources of creativity [57,76,77]. It recognizes that making meaning insuch a world is itself a creative act, indeed a co-creative act [59,62,68,78]. Creativity in this broader sense is not simply thecreation of a traditional ‘‘product’’ like a dissertation. It is a way of approaching the world that recognizes the personal andsocial dimensions that go into our particular understanding of the world (and inform any view of the world), the possibility(and likelihood) of other perspectives, as well as a perceptual choice to remain open to experience with all its ambiguity andcomplexity rather than immediately superimposing an interpretive framework [57]. Creative Inquiry sees life as an ongoingprocess of inquiry, creation and exploration. It assumes that understanding is by its very nature hermeneutically circular andindeed recursive, beginning not from a God’s eye view from nowhere, but in the very middle of existence, viewing learners asparticipants, not bystanders.

The emerging views in cosmology and biology are complemented by research in the psychology of creativity, whereincreasingly creativity is not viewed as limited to gifted individuals, to the light bulb of illumination, to a process that leads toa new product, to a revolutionary idea of earth-shaking proportion, or exclusive to specific domains such as the arts andsciences [79–83]. Creativity is now increasingly seen as a distributed, networked, paradoxical, emergent process thatmanifests in all aspects of life [72,78,83–85].

The emerging research on, and practices of, creativity can be summarized as proposing that:

(a) Creativity is the fundamental nature of the Universe, the process of creation itself, rather than the spark of an occasional(C)creator; it is therefore a basic ‘‘everyday, everyone, everywhere’’ human capacity [53–55,57,66,71,72,86,87].

(b) Creativity is a networked, ecological, historical and relational process rather than an isolated phenomenon[13,57,65,83,88,89].

(c) Creativity is paradoxical; in the characteristics of the creative person, process, product, and environment are foundseemingly incompatible terms: for instance creativity requires both order and disorder, rigor and imagination, hard workand play, idea generation and idea selection, times of introspection and solitude and times of interaction and exchange[57,64,72,90,91].

(d) Creativity is an emergent process arising out of interactions of a given system and therefore unpredictable[72,83,84,92].

Creative Inquiry frames education as a larger manifestation of the creative impulse rather than as the fundamentallyinstrumental acquisition, retention, and reproduction of information of Reproductive Education [13,25,26,29,93]. It stressesthe role of ongoing inquiry, and the active creative process of bringing forth meaning, knowledge, self, and engagement withthe world. While recognizing the importance of developing skills, a knowledge base, and immersing oneself in the existingdiscourse, Creative Inquiry frames education as an articulation, illumination, and manifestation of the creative impulserather than Reproductive Education’s fundamentally mechanical, consumptive and instrumental acquisition, retention, andreproduction of information [13,25,26,29,93].

Creative Inquiry involves the exploration of this creative ontology and epistemology in the practice of scholarship.Precisely because this view is not as yet widely accepted, an essential part of the educational process is highlighting thefundamental creativity of the Universe and of the inquirer her/himself. One of the ways that this is done is through a ‘‘radical’’process of exploration of how the underlying assumptions in the two different worldviews, machine and creative, framelearning, individual, society, and Universe. In practice this is done through exploration of how these differences play out ineveryday scholarship, through an investigation of the learners’ implicit assumptions about themselves, their work, andacademia, focusing initially on their understanding of creativity and inquiry.

Reproductive Education privileges analysis, reductionism, disjunction, abstraction and simplicity. Creative Inquiry strivesto illuminate the complexity of the world by fostering the development of transdisciplinary ‘‘complex thought’’ [56,63,69].This complex, systemic perspective1 was itself instrumental in the development of these new cosmological and biologicalperspectives. Physicist Paul Davies summarizes:

1 There are a multiplicity of terms referring to somewhat similar, more systemic, cybernetic, complex, dialectical, ways of thinking; they bear strong

similarities to ‘‘post-formal’’ thinking but as yet there seems to be little general consensus.

A. Montuori / Futures 44 (2012) 64–7066


For three centuries, science has been dominated by the Newtonian and thermodynamic paradigms, which present theuniverse as either a sterile machine, or in a state of degeneration and decay. Now there is the paradigm of the creativeuniverse, which recognizes the progressive, innovative character of physical processes. The new paradigm emphasizesthe collective, cooperative, and organizational aspects of nature; its perspective is synthetic and holistic rather thananalytic and reductionist [11, p. 2].

This new synthetic, holistic, complex approach stresses the importance of connecting and contextualizing, and theinquirer is recognized as an embodied and embedded participant rather than spectator to life and knowledge. Inquiry,learning, knowing and knowledge themselves are viewed as systemic, relational, processual, contextual and creativeprocesses with the inquirer integrated in the inquiry. Learners are invited to apply the principles of systems, chaos, andcomplexity theories to their own scholarship, and to view themselves as connected in a larger context or ‘ecology of ideas.’ Aliterature review in this view involves situating oneself in this larger ecology, and illuminating the contexts, histories,connections, gaps, and other features of the ecosystem [29].

3. Wonder and creativity

Does knowing that knowledge cannot be guaranteed by a foundation not mean that we have already acquired a firstfundamental knowledge? And should this not lead us to abandon the architectural metaphor, in which the term‘‘foundation’’ assumes an indispensable meaning, in favor of a musical metaphor of construction in movement thattransforms in its very movement the constitutive elements that form it? And might we not also consider theknowledge of knowledge as a construction in movement? [46, pp. 21–22].

At the beginning of the 21st century Reproductive Education’s Newtonian/Cartesian assumptions have been shown to bedeeply problematic [19,56]. The dream of certainty is being replaced by the experience of uncertainty. The history of ideas in the20th century has been framed as a movement from certainty to uncertainty [67]. Wallerstein has discussed the ‘‘uncertainties ofknowledge’’ in the 21st century and argued that two key movements in academia can shed light on the irruption of uncertaintyand the dethroning of order and certainty [94]. The culprits in Wallerstein’s formulation are complexity science and culturalstudies. From complexity science, and here Wallerstein draws extensively on the work of Prigogine [76,94–96], he shows thatthe future is not given, and that the Universe is uncertain and unpredictable. This shatters any deterministic view of the world asordered and predictable, and the ‘‘certainty of certainty’’ that drove the Enlightenment Project. Cultural Studies has, at the sametime, challenged the validity and universality of the Western canon, and substantially destabilized views of what is good andtrue and worthy of emulation. What was held to be certain and universal in the sciences and humanities, their ‘‘hubris ofomniscience’’ [49], has been shaken and different voices have been stirred [97]. Can education continue to be founded on anunderlying epistemology that privileges certainty, conformity, and order?

Along with the irruption of uncertainty in the attacks on Newtonian Science and the Humanities [67], there are also thedisastrous realities of the 20th Century, most notably two World Wars (culminating in the horror of the Holocaust), thepersistence of crushing global poverty and environmental destruction. The two wars would rightly bring about a great deal ofskepticism towards metanarratives [98]. The notion of ‘‘progress’’ was subsequently lost in the postmodern melee [99–101].Perhaps one of the most interesting ways to interpret the tremendous complexity we are faced with is to abandon theEnlightenment focus on the certainty of certainty, fully embrace uncertainty, and develop an ignorance-based worldview, assome scholars suggest [102]. What we can learn from our history of mistakes, horrors, wrong turns, environmentaldevastation, and so on, this view argues, is that we are fundamentally ignorant. And following Wallerstein, we can also saythat the sciences of complexity alert us to the inescapable uncertainty and unpredictability of our world and cultural studiesto its incredible cultural richness. The West may have thought it could predict, control, and lead the way, but most if not all ofthe postnormal crises we are facing are the result of precisely this hubris, this obsession with certainty, control, and the oneright way to progress [99].

An ‘‘ignorance-based worldview’’ [102] may appear at first like a dramatic capitulation, an abandonment of all hope, anihilistic throwing out the bathwater of hubris with the baby of Enlightenment ideals. Modernity viewed knowledge as anedifice constructed on certainties that had been achieved and could act as a foundation, stepping stones for further construction[44,49]. This foundation still constitutes the basis for the curriculum of Reproductive Education. Creative Inquiry does notembrace this architectural metaphor: it does not rely on a foundation of certainty. It proposes an attitude of epistemologicalhumility, a starting point of not-knowing and wonder, leading to a path of ongoing (creative) inquiry. It starts with the premisethat despite all the information we have acquired, we are fundamentally ignorant about the Universe and our existence, fromthe Big Questions to the little questions of everyday life. A cursory look at the oddities people have believed in humanity’s briefspan on the planet suggests we should take little if anything for granted, and consequently need to take what we consider to be‘‘given’’ as continuously open to dialogue and re-examination. As Morin states, ‘‘We are condemned to uncertain thought, athought riddled with holes, a thought that has no foundation of absolute certainty’’ [25, p. 46].

Taking wonder as a ‘‘fundamental’’ starting point can lead to an attitude of humility and pragmatic fallibilism [58,103].Fallibilism, writes Bernstein, ‘‘requires a high tolerance for uncertainty, and the courage to revise, modify, and abandon ourmost cherished beliefs when they have been refuted’’ [8, p. 29]. Reproductive Education did not challenge learners toquestion fundamental assumptions, or that which society took for ‘‘certain’’ and ‘‘true’’. In fact, it often does the exactopposite, with nationalistic and scientistic hubris [5,99].



Along with the humility of fallibilism there is also the recognition of humanity’s remarkable creativity, manifested in the(co-)creation of self and relationships, one’s understanding of self and world, and the creativity of action. Drawing onconstructivist epistemologies [51,68,74,75], Creative Inquiry recognizes that our interpretation of the world is itself acreative act, indeed a co-creative act [59,62,68,78]. Creativity in this broader sense is not simply the creation of a product, buta way of approaching the world, an active process of knowing, as well as a perceptual choice to remain open to experiencewith all its ambiguity and complexity [57]. Reproductive Education’s naive realist epistemology led to education beingportrayed as a transmission of information from teachers to students, and if creativity was mentioned it was in the context ofmoments of insights, aha! experiences, and flashes of inspiration. A constructivist or creative epistemology assumes thatevery interpretation of the world is itself already a creative construction, and consequently leads to self-reflection on the waywe already embody and use our creativity. The question is not whether humans are creative, but what are we doing with ourcreativity? What is our understanding of creativity? How does our knowledge of creativity inform our practice of creativity?If our view is that creativity is the province of a lone genius working in the arts and sciences, this will have both personal andsocietal consequences. And individuals not working in the arts or sciences will feel unable to participate in the creativeprocess.

The scholarship of Creative Inquiry integrates the learner and his/her experience, affect, and subjectivity in the learningprocess. It invites the exploration and if necessary unlearning of social and personal habituations that become unchallenged‘‘givens’’ and thereby create implicit interpretive frameworks [25]. Unlearning in fact plays a big role in Creative Inquirybecause of the way in which Reproductive Education has imbued learners with specific assumptions about creativity (thelone genius, where one can be creative, etc.), the nature and process of inquiry, not to mention the role of education. Exploringthe learner’s implicit assumptions in dialogue with the research literature becomes an ongoing process in Creative Inquiry,beginning initially with creativity, inquiry, and education, and then expanding into other areas.

Creative Inquiry does not just involve an observation by a spectator, but a participation by an embodied, embeddedinquirer. One key element of this participative dimension is the application of the very principles being studied to theinquirer’s everyday scholarship. This includes the application of complex thought to inquiry and situating the inquirer in acontext that includes the larger community of inquirers, and also the inquirer’s own work aspirations. The participation alsooccurs in what Morin calls an ecology of action. This concept emphasizes that all action occurs in a context (an ecology) andescapes the actor’s control. It is therefore intrinsically unpredictable. Life’s very messy unpredictability, the result of theinterconnected, networked, increasingly accelerated global processes, suggests the need not only for ongoing inquiry, butalso for a sensitivity to the way we construct our understanding of any situation and our guiding underlying assumptions. Itmeans recognizing that we live in a ‘‘dramatic universe’’ where surprise is the order of the day [1].

Creative Inquiry contextualizes and challenges learning. It situates inquiry in the social, cultural, political, and economicroots and matrices of knowledge, critiques the assumptions of dominant approaches (such as Reproductive Education) andexplores the criteria by which some things are considered knowledge and others not, as well as the creative, constructiveprocess involved in knowledge production [23]. Creative Inquiry therefore requires an exploration of the psychology andsociology of knowledge, as well the philosophy of social science [61,104–107]. Creative Inquiry acknowledges both ourhuman limitations and our profound human creativity, with the aim of developing phronesis [108] in that very interaction ofhumility and creativity. Scholarship today must recognize the illusion of omniscience, the importance of acting in thecontext of uncertainty, and the centrality of creativity in that endeavor [69].

4. Conclusion

I have outlined some of the central premises of an approach to scholarship for postnormal times that takes seriously thechallenge of creativity by making creativity the central organizing principle of scholarship. Basing education on creativityrather than exclusively on the reproduction of existing knowledge is a complex process that is still in its infancy. CreativeInquiry will itself require creativity and extensive inquiry to emerge as a possible alternative for the deeply problematicindustrial/machine paradigm. In this paper I hope to have outlined some of the key issues, and the potential conceptual andpractical problems and potentials in this process.

The exploration and application of Creative Inquiry in education is an invitation to creatively participate in our commondestiny, and in our community of destiny [4]. It is an invitation to learn, to embrace the complexity, difference, pluralism,uncertainty, and to approach life itself with an attitude of inquiry, rather than conform to pre-existing frameworks or recedeinto self-absorption. Creative Inquiry invites us to explore who we are in community, where our beliefs originate, how weengage the process of knowing and of inquiry, and how we may collaboratively envision and create better futures forourselves and those who are to come after us.

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