Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

The ongoing resistance of higher education to creative initiatives is regrettable but understandable. Creativity taps archetypal forces of creation and destruction, death and re-birth. Creativity demands we open to not-knowing, unlearning, and reframing, living the deep questions (Rilke) before solutions arise. In this state of ‘negative capability’, we stand immersed in ‘uncertainty, mystery, and doubt’ (Keats), musing at the threshold of reason without clear direction or conscious purpose. Ordinary awareness cracks, and we enter a novel space-time. In such ways, creativity concusses our academic training; we fear we’re out-of-control. The ideal professional image of ourselves is threatened. And so, we can understand resistance to creativity.

To face and move through the fear requires what I’ve referred to as an ‘existential intimacy of learning’ with intuitive, non-discursive, and tacit awareness currently overlooked in education due to an assumed need to control learning, so as to claim it has occurred and how. What is immediately called for across the Academy is an onto-existential shift toward embracing noetic modalities qualitatively different from conventional problem-solving approaches, processed at different levels of consciousness, and producing qualitatively unique learning outcomes and states of being.