As I drove to work this morning, I considered the phrase “thinking outside the box.” I wonder, “Is the most apt description for innovative or creative thinking?”
When I am inside the box can I really see outside and look around effectively? I could just be hanging on for dear life. Or, when I am outside the box, can I see inside? When I wrote my candidacy paper, I interviewed the first principal of our unique, alternative school and he provided an appropriate metaphor for innovative and creative organizations-a corral fence. I wrote the following poem and tried to capture what I think he meant.
Innovate
A fence
with railings
see in or out
allow perspective.
Flow and rhythm
information in; information out
nourish
enrich
affirm
recycle
breathe and flex.
Part of a whole
complex, yet simple
reach beyond my world
one piece of a puzzle.
Present
to our self
to the world.
Never box me in.
This fit with a song I heard by Ben Harper called With my Own Two Hands. He used to front a band called the Innocent Criminals and that drew me to his music. Enjoy this creative artist.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
I like the idea of seeing through, having transparency. Maybe that is ‘inter-box’ thinking. You may just have coined something new here! 🙂
That is an interesting word or phrase. I completed a guided or independent study about mindfulness in everyday life. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk, spoke of ‘inter-being.’ When you use the term ‘inter-box thinking,’ it has a similar sound to it. Organizations and people in them are connected in various ways to each other and to the other communities they are part of. Thank you for the contribution to my learning. You took it one step further.