Higher education currently finds itself in a malaise of discourses that celebrate creativity as a catch-all solution to the world’s “wicked problems,” while simultaneously encouraging the ready exploitation of “innovation.” However, such narratives often flatten the conceptual richness of creativity, reducing it to a set of commodified skills aimed at employability, for-profit ventures, economic growth, or other low-hanging fruits of managerial targets. This commodification diminishes the potential of universities as unique institutions – intergenerational meeting points for ideas, perspectives, and higher learning. It belittles their life – and planet-altering capacity for transformation, their role as guardians of tradition, and the essence of what makes the ‘higher’ in higher education. Such a low-brow approach squanders this potential, as creativity becomes a commodified end goal rather than a deeply rooted practice tied to place, culture, identity, aspiration, and context.
One problem that emerges within such a hypercomplex landscape is that of coherence – how one makes sense of multiple, often competing, expert perspectives. This is not an abstract concern. For instance, within the Swedish high school geography curriculum, one of the teaching objectives is: “How ecological, social, economic, and ethical perspectives are integrated with each other in issues related to sustainable development in different places and at different scales. The importance of equality and gender equality in the work for sustainable development”. This is just one of fourteen bullet points designed to prepare students for life in a hypercomplex world. Didactically, this presents enormous challenges for both high school teachers and, by extension, their university-level educators. The creativity (alongside competence) necessary to navigate this complexity lies in the ability to simplify knowledge without betraying the underlying intricacy. In other words, it requires a reduction in complexity that retains the depth of the original issue – an educational challenge that touches upon notions of complexity, causality, and values.
Within this presentation, we propose geography as a discursive champion capable of creatively re-imagining the university – from a geo-ontological perspective – to both protect and nurture the institution’s unique creative potential as a place of higher learning. To this end, we draw on the work of Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand [4] to reinvigorate his concept of tillvaroväven [Engl. translation “tapestry of existence”], within which the modern university is enmeshed. This allows us to explore the full potential of the university’s impact. We argue that such geographical reasoning can deepen our understanding of the modern university’s purpose and illustrate what creativity – as a life-giving force – might mean on a planetary scale.
Among other things, we aim to re-value and re-imagine the roles of educators across all levels - particularly those in primary and secondary education, who in recent years have often been perceived as having lower societal value. In the age of increasingly pervasive AI technologies, we argue that teaching must be creatively re-evaluated. From the university's standpoint, the essay as a primary mode of assessment has become trivial for evaluating critical thinking and reasoning. Similarly, for high school and primary teachers, their role is far more than merely presenting or regurgitating information that can be retrieved in seconds via a Google search or a ChatGPT prompt. To recognize the value of these didactical skills and the creativity they demand, we require a different ontological and epistemological framework – one that can genuinely appreciate what is too often normalized or trivialized. Without this, we risk overlooking the societal significance of these forms of didactical expertise.
Put differently, geographical reasoning provides a robust conceptual repertoire for navigating and interrogating the layered complexity of contemporary life – factual, technological, logistical, managerial, psychological, and administrative. Its potential lies in re-thinking conflict, promoting holistic perspectives, and recognizing planetary-local interconnectivity as vectors for innovation, resolution, and growth – rather than as sources of division, silencing, or violence. By systematically addressing and reframing conflict while embedding universities in both lived and planetary contexts, we argue for a model that reclaims creativity. This model allows for a renewed appreciation of what it means to be an educator in a post-postmodern world. It also encourages the cultivation of GeoCapabilities, helping individuals engage meaningfully with a world that is too complex for simple understanding, and too interconnected to be reduced without consequence.
Empirically, we have explored these ideas in seminars with future geography teachers. Teaching geography at the university level for prospective educators differs significantly from teaching the subject to 'regular' geography students. The key distinction lies in the expectation that advanced knowledge must be adapted to contexts requiring a much greater degree of simplification – such as in primary or secondary education. However, university instructors are not necessarily trained to perform such extensive pedagogical translations, nor can we expect future teachers – who are themselves still novices in the discipline – to immediately grasp this responsibility. We use this context and the dilemmas it presents to offer a concrete example of the type of creativity we advocate for.
The central dilemma is this: future teachers may feel that the advanced knowledge provided by university instructors lacks relevance to the content they will need to teach. Conversely, university instructors may fear that aligning their content too closely with national curriculum standards trivializes their academic role and undermines the complexity inherent to university-level education. This creates a didactical tension – one that cannot be resolved by technical fixes but instead demands a re-evaluation of what creativity means within the teaching context. It calls for educators to embody and model the values that enable critical thinking in the first place.
In conclusion, to both appreciate the impact educators have on students’ futures and to understand creativity as more than a commodified problem-solving tool, we must ontologically recognize the Earth as a dynamic, non-static system. We must become conscious of the influence we ourselves have on the knowledge we produce and utilize. We must bring to light and directly engage with the contradictions and tensions that arise when differing areas of expertise intersect. Otherwise, we not only devalue the role of educators in our hypercomplex world but also rob future generations of the ability to become responsible global citizens. If we fail to adequately educate ourselves – as teachers, evaluators, and even parents – we fall short of the responsibilities that the modern ecological university is meant to fulfill. The geographical-linguistic repertoire we propose – such as the “tapestry of existence” – may be a first step toward humbly advocating for the creativity and expertise inherent in educators, which is desperately needed in a world that is conceptually, ecologically, politically, economically and socially unstable.