Prologue

In September 2023, I started an internal secondment as the Academic Lead for the institution-wide Discovery initiative. Discovery is an offering operating at the University of Leeds since 2009, with thousands of students benefiting over the years. It broadens students’ university experiences through their engagement in diverse learning experiences that go beyond the boundaries of their programme of study.

At the time of writing this book, the Discovery initiative consists of hundreds of modules offered by Schools and Faculties during timetabled semester time. Discovery modules are available mostly to undergraduate students whose programmes are designed to accommodate Discovery modules.

As part of the Discovery work undertaken between September 2023 and August 2025, and together with many committed colleagues and students from across the institution, including from the School of Education, the School of Design, School of Politics and International Studies, the Lifelong Learning Centre, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Faculty of Business, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Environment, the Sustainability Research Centre as well as Professional Services: Organisational Development and Professional Learning, Digital Education Service, Helix, Learning Design Team and  The Library. We have come together as the Discovery Delivery Group, and have been inquiring into how the current Discovery provision could be complemented to further diversify the offer and extend its reach. We are imagining and co-designing new credit- and non-credit-bearing provision to expand opportunities for flexible, experiential, inclusive and transformative learning that is lifewide and lifelong. Learning that would be attractive for our undergraduate and postgraduate students and beyond, create opportunities for personal and professional growth and create opportunities to bring extra- and co-curricular learning into the curriculum via the new SOUL modules (Structured, Open, Unbounded, Learner-led) developed  during my secondment based on the openly licensed practice-based professional development programme FLEX for those who teach or support learning at Manchester Met and the openly licensed SLICCS modules for students at Edinburgh University. Our aims are to expand our students’ horizons and help them grow as individuals and professionals. We would also like to inspire them to recognise and harness their power as active citizens to contribute positively to communities and society throughout their lives.

We are delighted that at the time of the publication of this book, that specific SOUL modules with input from further colleagues and teams of the institution have been shaped further, embraced and approved and will be trialled within the Lifelong Learning Centre from 2025/26.

Part 1

Part 1 of this book captures many meandering thoughts, wanderings and wonderings I explored with love, care, and attention during my secondment to gain and share insights into how learning can be truly stimulating and transformative. Only when we look deep inside ourselves and critically (self-) reflect on our own habits, views, feelings, actions can we frame and re-frame our assumptions (Mezirow, 1978), can we feel empowered and alive to take on personal and social responsibility and act (Boström et al., 2024).

I decided to include the personal creativity manifesto I wrote in 2019. This provides valuable framing of the collection of articles and my own positionality in relation to creativity, openness, and collaboration in education and life. This is why the book is named meraki.

Meraki or μεράκι in Greek, pronounced me-ra-kee, means doing something with soul, filling the process and/or product with warmth, love, and care, and adding something from yourself to it. This is what happened with Discovery, the prototype versions of the Structured, Open, Unbounded, Learner-led (SOUL) modules we created and all associated work, including the scaffold designs in Jam, Open and Block format. I am delighted that the university embraced these and is preparing for implementation. According to (Babiniotis, 1998, 1079) meraki comes from the Turkish word merak, where it seems to mean curiosity. Reading on, I found that the Turkish word merak may have its roots in the arabic marakk. Meraki has no direct translation into English (and no proper or fully developed Wikipedia entry yet!). I decided that Meraki is a suitable title for this open book and captures the spirit and ethos of its creation.

During the time of my secondment and specifically two months into starting it, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) propelled rapidly into the world of higher education. It was impossible to escape or ignore related ideas, practices, and dilemmas in the articles included in this book (Nerantzi, et al., 2023; Abegglen et al., 2024; Bozkurt et al., 2024). There are 13 articles in this book presented in Part 1, together with a prologue and an epilogue. Some of the articles have been shared in their original format via the Media and Learning Association and the Knowledge Equity Network. The creativity manifesto appeared for the first time in Creative Academic. I am grateful to these networks, organisations, and individuals involved for sharing some of my ideas openly. The articles have been further edited for this collection, some more extensively than others.

Voices

In order to create opportunities for dialogue and harness the affordances of digital technologies, short video vignettes with responses from dear colleagues I worked with during my secondment have been added to each chapter to bring their voices alive. The transcript is available for each of these. I am grateful for their contributions. The vignettes follow loosely the “What? So what? Now what?” model (Rolfe et al., 2001 inspired by Borton, 1970) and pick up a seed from each chapter.

What if?

Reflective triggers using the “what if” format inspired by possibility thinking (Craft, 2008; Craft et al., 2008) have been added to the chapters to feed curiosity, imagination and wonder and create opportunities for you to explore possibilities, questions and connections. Reflection is however incomplete if it doesn’t lead to change, to action. I therefore hope that the triggers will provide you with an anchor for deeper meaningful exploration and questioning of your own approaches and practices… and generate further questions that you are open to discuss with others to uncover new insights and tickle your curiosity to make adventures happen in your teaching and/or learning.

Thank you

I am thankful to all critical scholars, students, and friends who have over the years challenged, stretched and helped me shape my thinking through their and our collective work and lives and in conversation, but also via active and playful experimentation. I am grateful to Professor Kenny McDowall, Dr Margaret Korosec and Professor Anne Tallontire for their trust and the opportunity to lead the design of a complementary provision for the highly successful Discovery initiative at the University of Leeds and everybody I have worked with on this exciting project.

A special thank you to Margy MacMillan a friend and fellow open scholar for her valuable suggestions and peer reviewing the draft Part 1 of this book; Kirstine McDermid from the Library for proofreading with real meraki, all her help and advice in making this an open Pressbook and her valuable advice during the journey; Simon Vallance, Digital Education Service for helping us arrange filming; Robert Jackson, Digital Education Service for creatively putting together the video vignettes; Richard Skowron, Digital Education Service for uploading these to YouTube and creating a special Meraki playlist and Dr Ben Chong for his final critical reading in advance of the release of this book.

Finally, I would like to thank everybody I worked with during my Discovery secondment, all those colleagues who contributed their wisdom to the video vignettes and everybody in the Discovery Working Group for our fruitful collaboration over the last two years.

Part 2, an open invitation

Meraki is made available under an open licence. It is a living book that is intended to grow and evolve if we handle it with care and nurture novel ideas around critical, creative, and open pedagogies and practices.

Contributions by colleagues and students written with meraki are invited to this book in Part 2. These will be openly peer reviewed on a rolling basis.

Consider capturing and sharing your thinking around critical, creative and open pedagogies, learning, teaching and supporting students’ learning in response to any of the articles included or contribute something completely new that excites you and challenges and stretches our collective thinking and practice.

I would love to hear from you. Please email me at c.nerantzi @ leeds.ac.uk without the gaps.

Chrissi Nerantzi

References

Abegglen, S., Nerantzi, C., Martínez-Arboleda, Karatsiori, M., Atenas, J. and Rowell, C. (Eds.) 2024. Towards AI literacy: 101+ creative and critical practices, perspectives and purposes. #creativeHE. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11613520%C2%A0

Babiniotis, G. D./Μπαμπινιώτης, Γ. Δ. 1998. Λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας. Αθήνα: Κέντρο Λεξικολογίας

Borton, T. 1970. Reach, Touch, Teach. Student Concerns and Process Education. New York: McGraw-Hill

Bozkurt, A. Xiao, J., Farrow, R., Bai, J. Y. H., Nerantzi, C., Moore, S., Dron, J., Stracke, C. M., Singh, L., Crompton, H., Koutropoulos, A., Terentev, E., Pazurek, A., Nichols, M., Sidorkin, A. M., Costello, E., Watson, S., Mulligan, S., Honeychurch, S., Hodges, C. B., Sharples, M., Swindell, A., Frumin, I., Tlili, A., Slagter van Tryon, P. J., Bond, M., Bali, M., Leng, J., Zhang, K., Cukurova, M., Chiu, T. K. F., Lee, K., Hrastinski, S., Garcia, M. B., Sharma, R. C., Alexander, B., Zawacki-Richter, O., Huijser, H., Jandrić, P., Zheng, C., Shea, P., Duart, J. M., Themeli, C., Vorochkov, A., Sani-Bozkurt, S., Moore, R., Asino, T. L. (2024) The manifesto for teaching and learning in a time of generative AI: A critical collective stance to better navigate the future. Open Praxis. 16(4), 487–513. https://doi.org/10.55982/openpraxis.16.4.777

Boström, M., Ojala, M. and Öhman, J. 2024. Transformative learning. In Christine Overdevest (Ed.) Elgar encyclopedia of environmental sociology.  Edward Elgar. 550–556..https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803921044.ch97

Craft, A. 2008. Trusteeship, wisdom and the creative future of education? UNESCO Observatory. Journal of Multi-Disciplinary Research in the Arts. 1(3), 1–20. https://oro.open.ac.uk/23314/

Craft, A., Chappell, K. and Twining, P. 2008. Learners reconceptualising education: widening participation through creative engagement? Innovations in Education and Teaching International. 45(3), 235–245. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703290802176089

Mezirow, J. 1978. Education for perspective transformation: Women’s re-entry programs in community colleges. New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

Nerantzi, C., Abegglen, S., Karatsiori, M. and Martinez-Arboleda, A. (Eds.) 2023. 101 creative ideas to use AI in Education. A crowdsourced collection. #creativeHE. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8072949

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D. and Jasper, M. 2001. Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan