New Short Course – Discover OCA Creative Education

Over the Easter break, I was lucky to get away for the holiday with my partner and our son, Robin, spending a week in Faro, Portugal. Ahead of going away, I’d accepted the request to write a short blog for the OCA website to introduce the new Creative Education short course that will be running from June 2025. As I was away on holiday, I wasn’t going to write anything, though I was going to think about what I might write.

One of the daytrips that we took on a whim was the boat to Ilha da Barreta or Ilha Deserta (Deserted Island), a small, uninhabited island off the coast of the city. Ilha Deserta lives up to its name and certainly doesn’t disappoint if desertedness is what you are looking for. Save for the ferry port and single cafe – there is nothing there – apart from 7km of sand and sea. Without knowing exactly how deserted Ilha Deserta was, we booked the return ferry at 5:00pm, meaning we would spend a good seven hours here. Having arrived at the beach, we dumped our bags under one of the static sunshades and sat staring out at the natural emptiness. Initially the prospect of a whole day with only sand and sea was daunting, in particular for a teenager symbiotically paired to their smart phone. But straight away Robin put his own device into a bag and began to collect shells. We were soon tasked with helping gather these too and brought those we liked the look of back to our temporary base. Not all shells were approved by Robin: any that weren’t completely intact (including an enormous piece of a clamshell) were rejected and thrown into the sea. We didn’t do anything with the shells, we just collected as many as we could.

As we sat taking a break, we noticed some other children who were also gathering material on the beach, though the scale and pace was different. They would head off to distances out-of-view and then re-emerge, dragging enormous pieces of driftwood back to a den that they were building over near the dunes. This activity was continuous, and they showed no signs of tiring. It’s clear that when presented with a new environment, children and young people respond creatively. They instinctively explore, gather, combine, construct, and look for possibilities in the space around them. Curiously as we sat on the beach, a passer-by (seeing the activity of Robin and the other children) picked up the discarded clamshell and used this as a make-shift visor to look out to sea. He then turned to his friends to proudly show them what he had made.

Watching this activity, I was reminded of some course material for an Open University unit from the 1970s called Art and Environment. Art and Environment was chaired by Simon Nicholson who is perhaps better known for his Theory of Loose Parts, a play philosophy focussed on discovering the creative possibility within one’s environment. Having Ideas by Handling Materials was an unscripted film designed to support students’ learning which followed a group of children who had gathered at a beach. Without instruction they identified and interacted with all the material that was available to them: they lifted rocks, gathered shells and seaweed, wobbled flotsam, tested surfaces, and exhausted what could be done in these surroundings. The intention with this particular course material was to demonstrate to adult learners that by looking to children who intuitively and effortlessly respond in this way, we might be encouraged to follow their lead. Play is an invitation, and a constant reminder that we were all once similarly curious, resourceful, and creative, yet as we grow older, we have just been conditioned to think that we are not.

Despite our initial worries, the day went quickly, and it was soon approaching 5:00pm and time to catch the ferry back to Faro. As we departed Ilha Deserta, we passed the same sign that greets visitors as they disembark the boat asking them to take only photos and leave just footprints. The advisory notice exists in order to preserve the island’s natural ecosystem and retain its ‘deserted’ status. I was mindful of Robin’s collection of shells, the other children’s camp, and the passer’s-by cap that would be returned to the sea when the tide came back in. Fortunately, we did take photos (Robin pictured above, vetting shells), but what if we hadn’t taken any? What would we come away with? And how does any of this relate to the Creative Education short course? Well… one of the central themes of Creative Education is the concept of experiential learning – an educational approach that places value not on the results of learning, but on the process: the doing, the making, and, most importantly, how we experience the activity. Often conventional education is anchored to the products of learning, set by predefined parameters and learning outcomes, and continuously assesses whether these have been met or not. Within experiential learning our experience of an interaction is the knowledge that we carry forward in our minds and bodies, and something that we might bring to the next encounter of our lives. Similarly play doesn’t yield a product and the materials we might have played with either return to where they came from or are left for the next person to discover. Within education play can often dismissed as unimportant and becomes relegated to play time (or break time as children get older), but educator Carla Rinaldi asks us to see play as a ‘search for meaning’:

“Play is the way that children deal with their reality and make sense of their world.” (Rinaldi’s words paraphrased here by Brenda Fyfe (Fyfe in Swartz, 2025))

Coming away from the beach I questioned whether as adults we feel more able – or more permitted – to play when we are at leisure or on holiday? And what if we were to follow the approaches of children and identify opportunities to be playful in other areas of everyday life, at home, at school, or at work? These are the questions that we can ask of our respective contexts, through talking, thinking, making and doing, in order to better understand whether we can respond more creatively here. If these are questions that interest you too, and you would like to explore the relationships between creativity and education, join us in June 2025 for the Creative Education short course.

Swartz, M. (2024) Play Is a Child’s Search for Meaning: Q&A with Brenda Fyfe [ONLINE] Available online here. 

Creative Education