SoC's Founder
Jane Macdonald, Creatologist
Creativity’s ability to generate (r)evolution is awe-inspiring to me.
I love to learn about it, practice it, and share it.
I’m a Creatologist, which means I spend most of my time researching creativity, experimenting with it, and documenting the patterns I find in its phenomenal nature and power.
The main reason I do this is because I want:
- to learn how to help the world to heal its need for taking,
- to see increasing social and ecological justice for the sake of all living things, including our children, and
- to CREATE a little more heaven on earth before I leave it.
My qualifications include:
- Master of Sustainability and Social Change (Inquiry: power of Creativity. Project: a creative primary school)
- Post-Graduate Diploma in Educational Studies (curriculum development and design)
- Graduate Diploma of Integrative and Transformative Studies
- Graduate Diploma of Education (vision impairment)
- Graduate Certificate of Integrative and Transformative Studies
- Diploma of Professional Photography
- Diploma of Primary Teaching (Arts), and
- Certificate IV Small Business Management.
My professional experience includes:
- founder of the School of Creatology
- creator of “Creatology, the Subject of the power and nature of Creativity”
- founder of the School of Creative Education and its primary school
- founder of the School of Cultural Creativity, and its preschool program “Farm School”, and home-school program “The Tribe”
- early co-creator of the Insight Education Centre for children with blindness and low vision, and
- 15 years classroom teaching, visiting teaching, and educational consultancy for children with blindness and low vision, cognitive and physical disabilities, and neurodiversity.
I am a red-haired and sun-loved freckled, middle-aged, neuro-divergent nerd and creative,
and a:
- creativity researcher
- community builder
- creative educator
- house designer
- social activist
- upcycler
- writer
- painter
- photographer
- space designer
- village dreamer
- creative schools developer
- bohemian forest fairy and skirt-loving Celt
- adorer of family and community, and
- hermit, hermiting amongst second-hand furniture all rich in story, in a self-designed, hand-made, church-like home on a mountaintop.
I love seeing people shining from the inside out and working with others to co-create ideas, and
My BIG personal dream is to live in village with nature-loving creatives and (r)evolutionaries.
Four of my goals are:
School of Creatology
To establish the School of Creatology as a trail-blazing institute, where Creatologists graduate in mastery of their creativity and the capacity to create significant, grassroots change.
The Creatology Curriculum
To ensure “Creatology, the subject of the power and nature of Creativity” is incorporated into mainstream-school curricula for our Year 9 and 10 teens (15 and 16 year olds) within 5 years.
Innovative primary and secondary schools
To assist with creating innovative primary & secondary schools around the world as the heart of their towns, so our children can shine as the stars they are.
Creatopia Village
To create a physical Creatopia Village (arts-eco style), living self-sufficiently with others, and where up-coming stars can experience, learn about, and expand their creative natures and power.
My experience as a self-doubting Creative:
As a child and a teen, I daydreamed, a lot!
I was told that I am, “airy-fairy, unrealistic, idealistic, naive, inexperienced, too esoteric, wear rose-coloured glasses, and
live in the clouds of la-la land”.
I love Lala Land.
The last time someone said to me, “You know what your problem is? You’re a dreamer. I’m a realist”, was in 2008.
I was 39.
I had not stood up for myself until this day. I was a very socially-anxious wall-flower.
Anyway, I said, “Realists are ignorant”.
I’m not sure I meant that exactly, it was very judgemental of me. I needed a quick way of saying that maybe realists ignored an aspect of life that holds a great deal of value, and it came out abruptly.
Rather than feeling the shame that I think all of these remarks were designed to create,
I was proud to be these things!
We need more dreamers in the world. Just ask John Lennon.
As a child, my daydreaming time was musically-inspired contemplative time, Zen time, zone-out time, ‘not-thinking-about-someone-else’s-thinking-other-than-my-own-thinking’ time.
It was space to imagine and temporarily return to somewhere I came from or am yet to go to, that felt much more like home…
of village, of tribe, of music around the fire pit, earthen homes and hand-made jewellery, dancing, playing, stone pathways, no money, wilderness around us, and a love that seemed to transcend our society’s expression of it.
As a teen, lots of rebellion was going on within me.
I was suffocating with unexpressed argument, self-consciousness and self-doubt, and was always socially shying away, untrusting because I saw injustices, large and small, everywhere!
I wanted to change society for the better… it was all I could think about.
Not understanding myself and my place, I searched in book shops for the book that would give me answers to my questions (when bookstores were sacred zones back in the 80’s and 90’s)…
who am I, why do I feel like I don’t belong, how can I avoid coming back to Earth, what use am I, why are there issues like poverty and extinctions, why don’t people care enough and create (something) better?
Shelves of religious texts, art books, and self-help books never had that one book I was looking for.
During my late 30’s, I decided to re-write my life and leapt into a Masters of Social Change.
Being an action-research Masters, I chose to pursue my question about the role creativity plays in ‘creating a better world’.
50,000 words later, I’m living a wonder-fully creative life and writing the book I was looking for!
But, it needs to be shared so, I’ve combined my teaching experience and studies with my reseach and creative nature, and
transformed my book into a curriculum, because we don’t increase and expand our creativity by reading about it!
The curriculum is called, “SHiNE; Creatology, the Subject of the power and nature of Creativity”, or “SHiNE” or “The Creatology Curriculum” for short. It’s all about creativity, what it is, how it works, what it does, why it does it, how it does it through us,
and most importantly, it shows without a shadow of a doubt,
that creativity itself… our human creativity… has every single element needed to ‘create a better world’.
Creativity itself IS a pathway to something better.
A Love Letter
You’ve got mail 🙂
Click on the table to read your letter…
