Editorial: Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal

Spark Journal: Editorial

There is a story by Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (1959), where a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth-century rebels against his parents by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. After he has lived in the trees for a while, they become, ‘… hung all over with scrawled pieces of paper and bits of cardboard … with various objects; clusters of feathers, church candles, crowns of leaves… pistols, scales, tied to each other in certain order… served to jog his memory and make him realize that even the most uncommon ideas could be right.’ (Calvino, 1959, p.255).

This issue of Spark brings together an assemblage of provocative articles that have been a delight to read. Encountering these texts has led to me think about how we can come become even more thoughtful learners and teachers at UAL. What they all have in common is that they are uncommon. They are imaginative and creative thought experiments that deterritorialise our pedagogic practices (Nadler, 2015), and open up more spaces to help us become critical designers of our curricula and pedagogies. They help enliven the methods by which we can co-produce the ways and means our courses can be delivered.