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Futures
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Creative Inquiry: Confronting the challenges of scholarship in

the 21st century
Alfonso Montuori
California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history:
Available online 11 August 2011

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.

1. Introduction
We are coming to know a world that is neither a clock work mechanism wound up ab initio to work out a
predeterminate programme; nor a blind meaningless chaos that, by sheer chance, happens to have thrown up
complex physico-chemical structures with capacity for thought and feeling. It is a world that is through and through
dramatic, and therefore through and through interesting. There can have been few moments on this earth more
dramatic and interesting than the offering of Pandoras gift of Creativity [1].
At the beginning of the twenty-rst century, the world is in the throes of a remarkable transformation [25]. This may not
be 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 uid, changing, with no predictability, no certainty, no
stability. Human beings have to learn to become exible, adaptable, capable of living and working under conditions of great
uncertainty [68]. 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 of
life certainly appear overwhelming at times. We are arguably in the middle of the Future Shock discussed by Alvin Tofer [9].
Whatever it is we are going through, shocking, postnormal, uid, or all of the above, the world is changing. And it is clear that
our educational systems do not prepare us for the emerging pluralistic, interconnected, complex world. They certainly do not
prepare us for seemingly perpetual change, instability, and above all, uncertainty [1013].
From the state of the global economy to the environment, to the nature of leadership, immigration, the shift to a
multipolar world, the persistence of global poverty, climate change, and international terrorism, it seems there is no end to
the list of global and local problems. The solutions of modernity, its very engines of progress, seem in many cases to have
become the problems of postnormal times. Creativity and imagination will be essential to envisioning and developing
alternatives to the systems, structures, and processes that are presently failing us [5,14,15]. But if the urgency and
importance of creativity are clear, in education creativity is mostly conspicuous by its absence [16,17].

E-mail address: amontuori@ciis.edu.

0016-3287/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.futures.2011.08.008

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65

Mainstream education across the globe, which I refer to as Reproductive Education, is still mired in the machine
assumptions of the industrial age [10,13,18,19]. Reproductive Education stresses conformity and homogeneity and
suppresses creativity at a time when it is apparent that creativity needs to be mobilized to get beyond the decaying industrial
views of modernity and envision new futures, new possibilities, new economic, environmental, social, and cultural and
ethical systems [5,13,20]. Reproductive Education may have been appropriate for the industrial assembly line and its orderly
bureaucracy, but it is simply unable to confront the uid, unexpected challenges of postnormal times [17].
Reproductive Education viewed learners as consumers of knowledge. In Reproductive Education learners are spectators
to knowledge generated by external forces and gures, experts whose work must be consumed. Given the underlying
Reproductive foundation of most education, it should come as no surprise that in the U.S. doctoral students have been
prepared to be good course-takers, not independent scholars capable of doing their own original research [21]. While they
may be able to reproduce information that is already known in order to pass a course, they are often unable to make an
original contribution to the eld. They are certainly not being prepared to be creative, which is perhaps unsurprisingly what
the research shows is central to doing original research. Disparaging popular use of terms like academic and scholarly to
refer to something synonymous with irrelevant in practice is perhaps indicative of a more serious concern about the
relevance of education. This is particularly true at the graduate level, where doctoral degrees have been subjected to
enormous criticism [22]. In fact, the Ph.D. is hardly ever framed in a way that reects its most basic denition (an original
contribution to a eld), which is to say by denition a creative process leading to a creative product. Students are being
prepared to be consumers, not creators of knowledge. They remain spectators, not participants, in the adventure of
knowledge in postnormal times.
I draw on my experience of almost 25 years in alternative and mainstream post-secondary institutions, and specically
the design of a transdisciplinary doctoral degree [23] and a masters degree [24] that have now been in existence for over 6
years at a private, non-prot U.S. university, to provide an outline of one approach that makes creativity central in the
curriculum. It should be noted that neither of the degrees is exclusively about or in creativity. Creative Inquiry is an approach
to 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 that
attempts to reect the complexity of our planetary situation in and through the need for creativity and by recognizing and
embracing complexity [23]. Creative Inquiry frames learners as creators, and explicitly works with the premise that all
human beings can be creative [2527]. Learners become participants who are actively engaged with ideas in a way that is
embodied and embedded. During their course of study they are encouraged to actively participate in the larger discourse and
uncover also how they already embody knowledge in their own lives. Knowledge is not out there in an abstract realm, but
understood 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 the
understanding and practice of scholarship, understood as the attitudes and skills one brings to academic inquiry. Space does
not allow for specic pedagogical examples of the applications of Creative Inquiry, which can be found elsewhere [2326,29].
2. From consumers to creators
Despite the extensive body of creativity research, and the increasing awareness that creativity is an essential competence
for the 21st century in industry in order to survive in a rapidly changing world [13,20,3037], education has not been able to
develop a new form of scholarship that actively incorporates creativity and makes it central to education [38]. There are
several reasons for this: the importance placed on education as a means of social control; the fact that increasing creativity in
the classroom means less control and more unpredictability for faculty and administration; and persistent
misunderstandings about the nature of creativity [3841].
The problems of present educational systems can ultimately be traced to the underlying foundations of Reproductive
Education, the machine view of the industrial age [16,42]. The Newtonian/Cartesian worldview, central to the industrial age
and at the heart of modernity, saw the Universe, society, and human beings, as machines and mechanical processes
[19,43,44]. Reproductive Education reects educators borrowing of concepts from the Newtonian/Cartesian machine
metaphor applied to the Industrial organization of society, coupled with traditional authoritarianism. This was education
designed to reproduce the existing social order and educate for conformity, hierarchy, division of labor, hyper-specialization,
and the quest for certainty [19,4547]. The principles of reduction and disjunction could be found in the organization of
knowledge at the level of educational institutions, through disciplinary fragmentation and the separation of academic
disciplines and departments into air-tight compartments [48], while analysis, logical and critical thought became the
standard of good thinking.
In Reproductive Education, learners are educated to be cogs in an industrial machine. In the machine metaphor, the
creator is by necessity outside the machine, and indeed the Divine Watchmaker was a key image in one theological argument
for the existence of God [49,50]. Reproductive Education does not account for creativity. In fact it is actively designed to avoid
its expression in students, whether in or out of the classroom. Nothing new is expected, required, or wanted from learners
themselves. They are trivial machines: the students output can be predicted if one knows the input [51]. Being a good
student means producing an output that is already known to the instructor, not being creative.
Creative Inquiry reects a larger shift in worldview from a Newtonian/Cartesian machine metaphor to a metaphor of a
creative universe [13,5255]. It reects scientic developments outlining the fundamental creativity of the Universe, Nature,

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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-disciplinary
scholarship [1,3,4,68,11,12,15,18,30,31,33,37,38,40,41,4347,49,52,5670].
In the early 21st century our understanding of creativity is itself being transformed [54,60,70,71]. Creativity is now
beginning to be viewed by some scholars as the very nature of human existence, life, and the Universe [52,55,57,71]. In this
view, the fundamental nature of existence, of human beings, society, and of the Universe itself is creativity, rather than
matter (materialism) or ideas (idealism). The inquirer is not a machine or an empty vessel requiring to be lled from the
outside by a teacher. In Creative Inquiry, the inquirer is viewed as engaged in a recursive process of exploration and
creation of self and world. Creative Inquiry assumes a creative ontology and epistemology [54,72]. The learner is a creative
process (as well as a creative product), rather than a cog in a machine. Both scholar and scholarship are likewise creative
processes rather than a passive reception or input of information [7375].
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 in
such a world is itself a creative act, indeed a co-creative act [59,62,68,78]. Creativity in this broader sense is not simply the
creation of a traditional product like a dissertation. It is a way of approaching the world that recognizes the personal and
social 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 and
complexity rather than immediately superimposing an interpretive framework [57]. Creative Inquiry sees life as an ongoing
process of inquiry, creation and exploration. It assumes that understanding is by its very nature hermeneutically circular and
indeed recursive, beginning not from a Gods eye view from nowhere, but in the very middle of existence, viewing learners as
participants, not bystanders.
The emerging views in cosmology and biology are complemented by research in the psychology of creativity, where
increasingly creativity is not viewed as limited to gifted individuals, to the light bulb of illumination, to a process that leads to
a new product, to a revolutionary idea of earth-shaking proportion, or exclusive to specic domains such as the arts and
sciences [7983]. Creativity is now increasingly seen as a distributed, networked, paradoxical, emergent process that
manifests in all aspects of life [72,78,8385].
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 [5355,57,66,71,72,86,87].
(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 found
seemingly incompatible terms: for instance creativity requires both order and disorder, rigor and imagination, hard work
and 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 fundamentally
instrumental acquisition, retention, and reproduction of information of Reproductive Education [13,25,26,29,93]. It stresses
the role of ongoing inquiry, and the active creative process of bringing forth meaning, knowledge, self, and engagement with
the world. While recognizing the importance of developing skills, a knowledge base, and immersing oneself in the existing
discourse, Creative Inquiry frames education as an articulation, illumination, and manifestation of the creative impulse
rather than Reproductive Educations fundamentally mechanical, consumptive and instrumental acquisition, retention, and
reproduction 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 the
fundamental 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, frame
learning, individual, society, and Universe. In practice this is done through exploration of how these differences play out in
everyday scholarship, through an investigation of the learners implicit assumptions about themselves, their work, and
academia, focusing initially on their understanding of creativity and inquiry.
Reproductive Education privileges analysis, reductionism, disjunction, abstraction and simplicity. Creative Inquiry strives
to 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 biological
perspectives. 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.

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For three centuries, science has been dominated by the Newtonian and thermodynamic paradigms, which present the
universe as either a sterile machine, or in a state of degeneration and decay. Now there is the paradigm of the creative
universe, which recognizes the progressive, innovative character of physical processes. The new paradigm emphasizes
the collective, cooperative, and organizational aspects of nature; its perspective is synthetic and holistic rather than
analytic and reductionist [11, p. 2].
This new synthetic, holistic, complex approach stresses the importance of connecting and contextualizing, and the
inquirer 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 creative
processes with the inquirer integrated in the inquiry. Learners are invited to apply the principles of systems, chaos, and
complexity theories to their own scholarship, and to view themselves as connected in a larger context or ecology of ideas. A
literature 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 rst
fundamental 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 that
transforms in its very movement the constitutive elements that form it? And might we not also consider the
knowledge of knowledge as a construction in movement? [46, pp. 2122].
At the beginning of the 21st century Reproductive Educations Newtonian/Cartesian assumptions have been shown to be
deeply problematic [19,56]. The dream of certainty is being replaced by the experience of uncertainty. The history of ideas in the
20th century has been framed as a movement from certainty to uncertainty [67]. Wallerstein has discussed the uncertainties of
knowledge in the 21st century and argued that two key movements in academia can shed light on the irruption of uncertainty
and the dethroning of order and certainty [94]. The culprits in Wallersteins formulation are complexity science and cultural
studies. From complexity science, and here Wallerstein draws extensively on the work of Prigogine [76,9496], he shows that
the future is not given, and that the Universe is uncertain and unpredictable. This shatters any deterministic view of the world as
ordered and predictable, and the certainty of certainty that drove the Enlightenment Project. Cultural Studies has, at the same
time, challenged the validity and universality of the Western canon, and substantially destabilized views of what is good and
true and worthy of emulation. What was held to be certain and universal in the sciences and humanities, their hubris of
omniscience [49], has been shaken and different voices have been stirred [97]. Can education continue to be founded on an
underlying 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 the
disastrous realities of the 20th Century, most notably two World Wars (culminating in the horror of the Holocaust), the
persistence of crushing global poverty and environmental destruction. The two wars would rightly bring about a great deal of
skepticism towards metanarratives [98]. The notion of progress was subsequently lost in the postmodern melee [99101].
Perhaps one of the most interesting ways to interpret the tremendous complexity we are faced with is to abandon the
Enlightenment focus on the certainty of certainty, fully embrace uncertainty, and develop an ignorance-based worldview, as
some scholars suggest [102]. What we can learn from our history of mistakes, horrors, wrong turns, environmental
devastation, and so on, this view argues, is that we are fundamentally ignorant. And following Wallerstein, we can also say
that the sciences of complexity alert us to the inescapable uncertainty and unpredictability of our world and cultural studies
to its incredible cultural richness. The West may have thought it could predict, control, and lead the way, but most if not all of
the postnormal crises we are facing are the result of precisely this hubris, this obsession with certainty, control, and the one
right way to progress [99].
An ignorance-based worldview [102] may appear at rst like a dramatic capitulation, an abandonment of all hope, a
nihilistic throwing out the bathwater of hubris with the baby of Enlightenment ideals. Modernity viewed knowledge as an
edice 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 not
embrace this architectural metaphor: it does not rely on a foundation of certainty. It proposes an attitude of epistemological
humility, a starting point of not-knowing and wonder, leading to a path of ongoing (creative) inquiry. It starts with the premise
that despite all the information we have acquired, we are fundamentally ignorant about the Universe and our existence, from
the Big Questions to the little questions of everyday life. A cursory look at the oddities people have believed in humanitys brief
span 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, a
thought 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 our
most cherished beliefs when they have been refuted [8, p. 29]. Reproductive Education did not challenge learners to
question fundamental assumptions, or that which society took for certain and true. In fact, it often does the exact
opposite, with nationalistic and scientistic hubris [5,99].

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Along with the humility of fallibilism there is also the recognition of humanitys remarkable creativity, manifested in the
(co-)creation of self and relationships, ones understanding of self and world, and the creativity of action. Drawing on
constructivist epistemologies [51,68,74,75], Creative Inquiry recognizes that our interpretation of the world is itself a
creative act, indeed a co-creative act [59,62,68,78]. Creativity in this broader sense is not simply the creation of a product, but
a way of approaching the world, an active process of knowing, as well as a perceptual choice to remain open to experience
with all its ambiguity and complexity [57]. Reproductive Educations naive realist epistemology led to education being
portrayed as a transmission of information from teachers to students, and if creativity was mentioned it was in the context of
moments of insights, aha! experiences, and ashes of inspiration. A constructivist or creative epistemology assumes that
every interpretation of the world is itself already a creative construction, and consequently leads to self-reection on the way
we already embody and use our creativity. The question is not whether humans are creative, but what are we doing with our
creativity? 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 and
societal consequences. And individuals not working in the arts or sciences will feel unable to participate in the creative
process.
The scholarship of Creative Inquiry integrates the learner and his/her experience, affect, and subjectivity in the learning
process. 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 Inquiry
because of the way in which Reproductive Education has imbued learners with specic assumptions about creativity (the
lone genius, where one can be creative, etc.), the nature and process of inquiry, not to mention the role of education. Exploring
the learners 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, embedded
inquirer. One key element of this participative dimension is the application of the very principles being studied to the
inquirers everyday scholarship. This includes the application of complex thought to inquiry and situating the inquirer in a
context that includes the larger community of inquirers, and also the inquirers own work aspirations. The participation also
occurs in what Morin calls an ecology of action. This concept emphasizes that all action occurs in a context (an ecology) and
escapes the actors control. It is therefore intrinsically unpredictable. Lifes very messy unpredictability, the result of the
interconnected, networked, increasingly accelerated global processes, suggests the need not only for ongoing inquiry, but
also for a sensitivity to the way we construct our understanding of any situation and our guiding underlying assumptions. It
means 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 economic
roots and matrices of knowledge, critiques the assumptions of dominant approaches (such as Reproductive Education) and
explores the criteria by which some things are considered knowledge and others not, as well as the creative, constructive
process involved in knowledge production [23]. Creative Inquiry therefore requires an exploration of the psychology and
sociology of knowledge, as well the philosophy of social science [61,104107]. Creative Inquiry acknowledges both our
human limitations and our profound human creativity, with the aim of developing phronesis [108] in that very interaction of
humility and creativity. Scholarship today must recognize the illusion of omniscience, the importance of acting in the
context 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 the
challenge of creativity by making creativity the central organizing principle of scholarship. Basing education on creativity
rather than exclusively on the reproduction of existing knowledge is a complex process that is still in its infancy. Creative
Inquiry will itself require creativity and extensive inquiry to emerge as a possible alternative for the deeply problematic
industrial/machine paradigm. In this paper I hope to have outlined some of the key issues, and the potential conceptual and
practical problems and potentials in this process.
The exploration and application of Creative Inquiry in education is an invitation to creatively participate in our common
destiny, 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 recede
into self-absorption. Creative Inquiry invites us to explore who we are in community, where our beliefs originate, how we
engage the process of knowing and of inquiry, and how we may collaboratively envision and create better futures for
ourselves and those who are to come after us.
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