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.

Jane Macdonald, Creatologist, Founder of the School of Creatology and creator of the Creatology, the Subject of Creativity

Personal stuff:

I am a red-haired and sun-loved freckled, middle-aged, neuro-divergent nerd and creative, 

and a:

  • creativity researcher
  • creative educator
  • house designer
  • social activist
  • upcycler
  • community builder
  • transcender
  • writer
  • space designer
  • creative schools developer
  • photographer
  • graphic artist, and
  • a “bohemian forest fairy” and skirt-loving Celt who adores her family and community, and who hermits amongst second-hand furniture that’s rich in story in a self-designed, hand-made, church-like home in a forest on a mountaintop.

I love seeing people shining from the inside out, working with others to co-create ideas, and I would love to live in village with nature-loving creatives and (r)evolutionaries.

My qualifications include:

  • Master of Sustainability and Social Change (inquiry: nature and power of Creativity)
  • 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 (creative arts)
  • Certificate IV Small Business Management.

My professional experience includes:

  • foundation of the School of Creatology
  • creation of “Creatology, the Subject of Creativity”
  • foundation of the School of Creative Education’s not-for-profit company and creative primary school
  • foundation of the School of Cultural Creativity and its creative pre-school program “Farm School” and home-school program “The Tribe”
  • co-creation of a primary school for children with blindness and low vision
  • photographic biz, portraiture of children with disabilities, and 
  • 15 years teaching and educational consultancy for children with blindness and low vision, and neurodiversity.

Four of my goals are:

  1. for the School of Creatology to be a trail-blazing institute where Creatologists graduate with mastery of their creativity and the capacity to create significant, grassroots change,
  2. for Creatology to be incorporated into mainstream-school curricula for our Year 9 and 10 teens (15 and 16 year olds) within 5 years,
  3. to build more, elevated, creative primary and secondary schools, and 
  4. to create a physical Creatopia Village (arts-eco style) where I can live with other Creatives, and people from school groups to organisations can experience, learn about, and expand their creative natures and power. I’ve designed villages since I was a kid, “playing villages” it was called, so this goal is a loooooooong term dream project!

A little about me 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 nature and power of Creativity”, 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 Letter

You’ve got mail 🙂

Click on the table to read your letter…

Love letter to creators
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