“I’ll show you differences”: Skills, creativity and meaning

Article


Siebers, J. and Cobley, P. 2024. “I’ll show you differences”: Skills, creativity and meaning. Social Epistemology. 38 (1), pp. 28-37. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2283845
TypeArticle
Title“I’ll show you differences”: Skills, creativity and meaning
AuthorsSiebers, J. and Cobley, P.
Abstract

This article arises out of critical contemplation of skills in relation to Higher Education pedagogy as it relates to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. As the emphasis on skills dominates more and more of the discourse about pedagogy in Higher Education, the article aims to make some critical comments about the reductionist approach to education that easily becomes part of skills discourse. In addition to criticising instrumentalist deployment of skills in Higher Education policy, the article also considers the supposedly most ‘radical’ perspective on the idea of skill which is implicit in enactivists’ accounts of the embedding of sensorimotor action in cognition. It is argued that such a perspective is undermined by its insistence on a model of direct human-environment which brackets creativity, anticipation and the future. The article suggests that such a perspective would be illumined by dialogue with Ernst Bloch’s concept of the ‘not-yet’.

Keywordsskills; not-yet; higher education; creativity; embodiment
Sustainable Development Goals4 Quality education
Middlesex University ThemeCreativity, Culture & Enterprise
Research GroupEnglish Language and Literature
PublisherTaylor & Francis (Routledge)
JournalSocial Epistemology
ISSN0269-1728
Electronic1464-5297
Publication dates
Online11 Dec 2023
Print04 Jan 2024
Publication process dates
Submitted08 Sep 2023
Accepted12 Nov 2023
Deposited22 Sep 2023
Output statusPublished
Publisher's version
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Open
Copyright Statement

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2283845
Web of Science identifierWOS:001122354100001
LanguageEnglish
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