In late summer of 1978, I made a pilgrimage to the Marshall McLuhan, Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto in Canada. The purpose of this visit was to get a critique on a project I was working on that was later to become the Minds Alive exploratory approach to learning. I had begun in the late 60’s to write down my thoughts and ideas in a quest to seek answers to questions about the changing directions that were developing in our culture. I would write down my ideas and thoughts and then go back over them, again and again. I would, thus, write and rewrite these words and phrases repeatedly until I was able to make sense of them. These writings were eventually to form the basis of this Minds Alive approach. This discovery process is still going on and I am constantly uncovering new facets in this approach. The breakthroughs I experienced in this discovery of new facets of creating and of exploratory learning have made this quest for answers and relevance a unique journey that has been especially rewarding for me and I hope will be to others.

In any case, this media centre was in a two story carriage house behind an older residence that was part of the University of Toronto campus. The people at this centre were very friendly and quite helpful. A short while after I arrived at this center, McLuhan came in and I was introduced to him. His staff told him why I was there. He turned to me and said directly that “if the project upon which I am working isn’t about perceptual development, that he would be wasting his time and mine by talking about it.” I was quite taken back by this statement because I was not sure exactly what my project was really about. I was very confused at that time and wasn’t quite sure where this project was going nor what the principal focus was. It was a blind search in the dark to find relevance in a world that was undergoing massive changes that were altering the basic direction of our culture. The work of Marshall McLuhan is one the few sources of information that made sense to me in this search for relevance. One of the reasons I was on this pilgrimage was to get information related to this quest. So he ask his son Eric who was there at the time to go over the written material I brought with me, and to help me out while I was in town. They even invited me to sit in on one of their brain storming sessions in the main classroom of the media centre. This brainstorming technique was how many of McLuhan’s insights and discoveries were made. At the end of the day, I was ask if I would like to ride home with McLuhan and his secretary who did the driving, as McLuhan didn’t drive. When we arrived at his home Professor McLuhan ask me if I would like to walk with him around the small neighborhood park in front of his house. This gave us a chance for some informal discussion and it gave me a chance me to tell him how much his work helped me in putting my ideas and thoughts together.

To make long story short, the Minds Alive endeavor has always been about perceptual development, but I wasn’t as aware of this in the beginning as I should have been. I even mentioned perceptual development in many instances in my earliest writings. However, it wasn’t until 25 years later after this pilgrimage that the full force of the perceptual development focus really came through to me. At this time it finally became an integral part of me. It became my knowledge, not just a repeat of someone else’s. And about eight months after this late blooming breakthrough, I was doing some writing in which I was using the words “learning” and “exploratory” quite often. Some how I thought to myself, why not try putting these two words together into a singular phrase to see what happens. And voila, the phrase “exploratory learning” was born for me. It was the breakthrough of some magnitude that I had been searching for from the beginning of my quest years earlier. I knew instantly when I saw these two words together that something of great importance to me had happened at that moment. I had never used these words paired together in this way. So this is how the Minds alive approach to exploratory learning was born, one small step at a time, over a period 35 or so years. I was, by the way, later to discover that exploratory learning is a process by which perceptual skills are developed. It is thus the process by which most all creative people and artists produce their works, products and services. It appears to me that all innovative, creative developments are products of exploratory learning whether, the creators are aware of this fact or not. In fact, exploratory learning could very well be a kind of definition of art and creative, innovative achieve- ment. With the development of comprehensive exploratory learning programs, the gap between creative and non-creative people will begin to close as we become more enabled to tap into the greater potential of our minds and bodies.