Different ways of knowing
“We use a lot of arts based or creative methods that also depart from, I would say, different ways of knowing.” – Anke de Vrieze
The Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) is based in The Netherlands, funded by an alliance of Dutch universities and works with interdisciplinary teams of academic researchers, so an understanding of “different ways of knowing” is central to their work.
I first stumbled across on CUCo on Twitter and then via a Zoom meetup and was drawn to their work, which is to address wicked problems by organizing and supporting interdisciplinary teams of researchers to think outside of the box:
“We are convinced that the next big innovations for societal impact are to be found through unusual collaborations in research: through the interactions that push us outside our disciplinary comfort zones, and encourage us to think differently about problems and possibly solutions.
CUCo’s mission is to facilitate these unusual collaborations.” – From CUCo website.
Later, when CUCo Director Corinne Lamain asked me to conduct a workshop on collaboration skills for their participants it was easy to say yes.
Apart from their laudable aims, what stands out for me about the way that CUCo works is their highly creative approach to training and supporting the participants in their programs. This approach is literally artful, using visual, craft-based, embodied, or creative writing exercises to get the researchers in their programs to tap into the innovative parts of their brains.
I recently interviewed CUCo’s Knowledge and Learning Advisor Anke de Vrieze for a writing project I am working on this year. (I still don’t have a name for it but) It is about how the arts and other creative disciplines can be used as transversal mindsets and skillsets in collaborations.
During our talk, Anke explained that while some of CUCo’s research team members came from design fields most of them were from STEM backgrounds. Prior to our conversation, I had read an interview with Anke on the CUCo website in which she talked about the importance of unlearning and I was interested to hear more about this. Hence the quote at the top of this article: CUCo’s strength is that the researchers it works with bring deep expertise from various fields along with many “different ways of knowing.” CUCo’s challenge is to support these researchers to co-create new and combined ways of knowing in which they can pool this expertise and generate insights into the societal issues they have been assigned to work on.
Through using arts and creative based facilitation methods and collaborative approaches, CUCo has found that its participants are able to shift into differently creative ways of thinking, communicating, and problem solving.
“So, this use of metaphors and metaphorical thinking is already something that we find really useful in this working across disciplines, because language is also something that confuses.” – Anke de Vrieze
Particularly interesting for me was to hear Anke talk of her explorations into the impact of movement in order to shift perceptions and experience. I loved hearing about how the etymology of the word ‘learn’ is related to an Old English word meaning the sole of the foot.
“So, for me, that's maybe what the unlearning is about. We need to learn to, to engage the body again and then to place the mind in the body rather than on top of it.”
I look forward to unpacking this in more detail in a longer article later in the year. At the end of our conversation I said that I believed that everyone is creative and that it is just a matter of understanding how easy it is to tap into – relax into - that innate creativity. Anke’s response was:
“But, easy and difficult as well, right? So that relaxing into (your creativity) - that's the unlearning part.”
Absolutely.
Curious? Then come along to the free online event I am facilitating to talk about what I heard during my research. It’s on at 6pm, 28 February 2024 AEDT. I’d love to see you there.
And, of course, I would also love it if you bought the book! You can do so HERE!
