Ecological Perspectives on Social Care Practice, Education, Learning & Creativity Applying Concepts, Tools & Frameworks

Introduction
This Working Paper (WP) sets out to explore how the idea of ecologies for practice, learning
and creativity (Jackson 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020a & b) might be applied to social care
professional practice, and education and training that prepares learners for practice in the field
of social care. It supports a contribution to the Irish Creativity and Innovation in Social Care
(CISC) Network’s 2021 CPD initiative part of which is focused on creativity in social care work
and education, and it is formed around the proposition that creativity, like learning and
practice, is an ecological phenomenon that emerges as a practitioner with expert knowledge
and skill, interacts with their environment and the things that matter to them in their
environment as they work. The WP is in two parts: Part A introduced some concepts, tools and
frameworks that help us appreciate and make sense of learning and creativity as
experiential/ecological phenomena. Part B is a work in progress. It focuses on the domain of
social care and shows how the tools and frameworks introduced in Part A might be used in the
social care field.
Using a case study developed by Louisa Goss, we examine creativity as an ecological
phenomenon in the educational context of programmes that have been designed to prepare
learners for social care work. Here creativity is embedded and embodied in the signature
pedagogy of a social care educational practitioner as she redesigns a module that has
previously been taught face to face, for on-line deliver