By Ollie in blog — 05 Mar 2025

Means makes ends

How do critical and creative pedagogies relate to and enhance organisational development processes and objectives? How does this cross pollination serve the broader intentions of social and systems change?

These questions have been ruminating in my mind for a while now, moving more recently from the peripheral towards a more conscious and embodied curiosity, as I test and develop activities with organisations. The goal of these activities is to create a space where new ideas and ways of thinking can be explored and synthesised. To do this, attention towards disrupting habitual thinking to make room for and encourage divergent possibilities is key to success.

In her article for iJade, The Neuroaesthetics of Art and Design Education, Carol Wild presents a compelling critique of the current obsession with neuroscience in education, which promotes a singular pedagogical narrative of memory based learning through the repetition of knowledge retrieval, predominantly in verbal or written form. The commonly used ‘do it now’ tasks that introduce a typical secondary school lesson would be an example. The dominance of summative exams to assess external examinations would be another. Wild highlights a less known strand of neuroscience called Neuroasthenics, that highlights both the complexity and possibility of learning with arts education.

The following 3 points are key to her article:

The Aesthetic Triad: This model identifies three interacting brain circuits—sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge—that underpin aesthetic perception. It highlights that art-related cognition is not singular but emerges from complex neural interactions.
Stopping for Knowledge: Engaging with art disrupts habitual thinking, fostering curiosity and exploration. This process helps learners embrace uncertainty and develop deeper aesthetic appreciation over time.
Art as Social Cognition: Experiencing and interpreting art mirrors social interactions, enhancing empathy, shared understanding, and personal meaning through collaborative engagement.

I’ve made a parallel link from Wild’s dichotomy - a connection between the stifling traditional education system and the corporate hierarchies that dominate the voluntary sector. Both yield power and dominate over alternative ways of knowing and convening; both represent the hegemonic ruling class and both are assessment and data driven. Wild provides evidence that advocates for making art as a process of transforming our ways of thinking and being. By fostering aesthetic experiences with others we invite a suspension of our learnt ideas, behaviours and beliefs, while encouraging the formulation of social, emotional and cognitive connections otherwise untapped through the didactic, paternalistic frameworks that prevail in our institutions and wider society. In the context of organisational development and community organising, this poses significant potential in rethinking how we generally organise and collaborate to create collective change. My personal frustration with traditional methods of organisational development and collective organising (top down instruction over collaborative inquiry) have eventually led me to a broader critique of oppressive structures that ultimately condition our ways of working and restrict the imagination and creativity of individuals and groups, proliferating our complicity with the hierarchical systems that entrench inequity in the communities we set out to serve. This contradiction is upheld by funders, who despite efforts to shift the philanthropic altruism model towards something more participatory, still remains significant in proliferating the hierarchical, cyclical and therefore unstable nature of grant funding.

So, from a neurological point of view, art education helps to create the conditions for changing the way we think and helps us to imagine new possibilities. But is that enough when we have social and political objectives?

Paulo Freire’s critique of the traditional education system articulates the passivity of a ‘banking’ method of knowledge transmission. Instead Critical Pedagogy encourages praxis, the dialogical interplay between theory and practice in a social exchange. One of the things I try to articulate in my bio is my conviction that change is less likely to occur if directed by one to another. This dynamic upholds an 'epistemological power’ imbalance (Foucaut) that classifies and controls individuals. Social change requires everyone in the collective to be open to shifting their individual dreams towards a collective vision. Dreams can be so vivid and meaningful to the dreamer but to an even patient audience, they lose their potency. Much better we find ways to listen to and entangle our dreams. Pedagogically this might be accounted for by the concept of intersubjectivity, the mutual understanding and shared experience between teachers and learners. It involves a dynamic interaction where both parties influence each other's perceptions, intentions, and feelings.

Returning to the principles and practices of Critical Pedagogy, they are as follows:

Critical Consciousness: Encouraging learners to question societal norms, power dynamics, and inequalities to foster awareness and action for social change
Dialogical Learning: Promoting dialogue between teachers and learners as co-learners, moving beyond traditional "banking" models of education
Unlearning, Learning, and Relearning: Challenging existing knowledge, embracing new perspectives, and continuously seeking improvement
Focus on Social Justice: Addressing issues like oppression, racism, sexism, and inequality to create a fairer society
Transformative Action: Inspiring learners to use their knowledge to challenge the status quo and drive community change
Education as Political: Recognising education's role in shaping democratic and equitable societies

So, how do we find a way for our individual dreams to coalesce into shared visions and values. How can these principles help frame that process, when the organisation’s purpose is social justice bound? Change requires people organising around shared goals but the process of getting there can be contentious as individuals navigate the feelings and discomfort of unlearning. This requires leaping into new social, emotional and cognitive territory and often a reconfiguring of what art is in a social and political context. Crucially, the question: what now? looms heavily as the transition between open, creative processes and more tangible concepts or concrete processes can fail, rendering the initial efforts less effective. It strikes me then that unlearning, which is the art bit, necessitates learning and relearning, particularly because it is very unlikely that anything produced in that phase will be a fully formed, static thing that is fit for use.

Systems thinking

I won’t go too deep with this but there are clear links with what I’m saying and Peter Senge’s 5 disciplines of systems thinking, a framework to develop what he called Learning Organisations.

Zooming out slightly, because I’m probably confusingly thinking about organisational development, that is the systematic work with organisations to develop its infrastructure, systems, processes and strategies AND community organising, any organised gathering that seeks to bring about some kind of change. Different contexts but similar application of the ideas I’m exploring. Saul Alinsky was of the opinion that problems facing communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions but from lack of power to implement these solutions. The means, therefore are significant and require moral and critical analysis in order to justify the ends (which in many ways are unknown) - as opposed to reactive (often violent) acts of resistance (eg winning the war justifies the loss of life). Alinsky’s principles of Gradualism; Infiltration and Dialectic process offers a slow but sustainable way towards collectivism. Further to this, what if the means are creative? more specifically, what if the process of manifesting the ’shared vision’ is framed by critical and creative methods that promote multi vocality and pluralism, honouring our difference while galvanising our shared humanity and collective goals? What if we activated all the senses to tap unconscious and unknown knowledge?

In all of this I am curious about how this union, between critical and creative pedagogy and approaches to organisational development; how infiltrating traditional methods of consultancy and training can disrupt and reimagine how we collaboratively build new systems from the ground up. My assumption is that altering how organisations organise their social roles within the organisation has an impact on how they interact with their communities and the broader systems in their ecosystem. Equally, the way leaders convene to address broader geographic or sector wide issues requires an alternative set of principles that avoids the inevitable and unequal distribution of power.

In practice this is all just clicking into place and so far yielding success, albeit on a small level. Below I will try to outline the approach and process of 2 x 2 hour consultancy sessions with Neurodivergent Friends of Thanet and later share reflections on another project I have participated in.

Firstly, I was commissioned by NDFT to guide the development of their core organisational values, while supporting the 3 Directors to analyse and establish the team's relational dynamics and ways of working. I initially suggested the following questions to give us some critical direction:

How do we want to work together?
How does NDFT honour individual’s lived experiences and values, while clarifying and centering the organisational values and purpose?
How will the values be ‘lived’, upheld and accountable?

The sessions aims were...

To explore the individual and collective values of the leadership team
To investigate how values can apply to different parts of the organisation

Overall, I’m loosely applying a process of praxis, where action leads to reflection, which leads to action etc. My role is to initiate and support the group to carry out their actions and to capture the reflections as they emerge through the process.

Sound and breath

I am becoming more and more reliant on some form of sonic or somatic exercise to encourage a group (and 100% myself!) to tune into their bodily experience. Often and understandably, we enter into new spaces carrying a whole range of preoccupations, conscious and unconscious. Our modern world is saturated by visual information and demands a huge amount of energy towards rational and analytical thought. This can be exhausting and shuts down our other senses and cognition. The aim of these short exercises is not necessarily about bringing everyone onto the same plain but to provide space for what is occurring for each individual rather than suppress them. I use various exercises from John Stevens book Search and Reflect because sound is so universally effective but simple visualisations work too.

Thinking and remembering with our bodies

Thanks to recent experiences of Forum Theatre (thank you Matt Lewis!) I was equipped to lead an activity that invited the group to ultimately consider:

One: the world as it is now

Two: how you want the world to be

Most people are anxious when they are asked to ‘act’ but there are no skills required to participate in Forum Theatre and I like how acting is demystified into act-ing or action to describe an idea or event. The main point of this is to embody a memory or experience and therefore provide the opportunity to reflect on something more than thoughts. This embodied method is probably the most direct form of praxis, what Freire would call ‘acting upon the world’ to create change.

Translating knowledge into language

Throughout the process of discussing and acting out their scenarios I am scribbling away trying to capture the key words that come up and when they are done I read it all back and ask them to respond, giving each one value by arranging words into some kind of organised formation of words.

Developing concepts with materials

The preceding stages generated some rich language that spoke to how the Directors wanted themselves and members to experience their organisation. The next stage of this process was about conceptualising these disparate words into a cohesive idea. It feels relevant that we have moved from embodied towards a visual language and this has been a big take away for me. A reminder that one modality or approach to this work isn’t reliable or sufficient in completing the objective. Each part (creative modality) plays an absolutely crucial part in facilitating a broader outcome. I’m sure there will be more to say on this as the practice evolves but for now and for this example it has been significant in realising the intentions. So sound becomes words, words becomes a performance, performance becomes sculpture, sculpture becomes text in a flow of senses activated for the broader purpose of collective change, or to refer back to Carol Wild’s research, to disrupt habitual thoughts and synthesise new imaginations into tangible actions.

Synthesis

Once the concept is formulated it should theoretically be easier to describe the thing that was meant to be conceived. In this case the group spent some time translating the final outcome into a paragraph of prose that represents the organisations values.

Conclusion

Creative and critical pedagogies, which open unexpected, multi vocal possibilities, while applying critical thinking provides a method for enabling groups to think differently and develop meaningful concepts for organisational and social benefit.

What’s next?

I’m really hoping to continue to apply these ideas in practice, from 1:1 coaching work to bigger organisational work and eventually larger scale multi sector engagement.