{"data":{"id":1917,"title":"Meraki: Towards transformative learning in higher education","edition_statement":null,"volume":null,"copyright_year":2025,"isbn10":null,"isbn13":null,"license":"Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike","language":"eng","accessibility_statement":null,"accessibility_features":[],"description":"Meraki is a vibrant addition to the world of open educational resources. Created with creativity, openness, and collaboration at its core, this living book reveals the impact education can have when it’s approached with heart, curiosity, and innovation.Across 13 engaging articles, it offers a personal yet widely relatable exploration of critical and creative teaching. It encourages readers to think differently about learning—both inside and outside the classroom—and how these experiences can be meaningfully connected.What makes Meraki stand out is its blend of reflective writing, practical ideas, and interdisciplinary thinking. Contributions from a wide range of voices—students, educators, and scholars—transform the book into an ongoing conversation about learning, growth, and change.Because it’s openly licensed, anyone can contribute. That means the book continues to grow and evolve as a collaborative project shaped by its readers.Meraki isn’t just a collection of articles—it’s an invitation to reimagine what education can be when we embrace creativity, inclusion, and shared ownership.","contributors":[{"id":7705,"contribution":"Editor","primary":true,"corporate":false,"title":null,"first_name":"Chrissi","middle_name":null,"last_name":"Nerantzi","location":"University of Leeds","background_text":"Dr Chrissi Nerantzi (NTF, CATE, PFHEA) is a Professor in Creative and Open Education in the School of Education, the Academic Lead for Discovery and a Senior Lead of the Knowledge Equity Network. Her innovative contributions, such as cross-boundary learning and open professional development, foster collaborative, creative and inclusive education. A National Teaching Fellow, multi-award-winning educator, and prolific researcher, Chrissi integrates creativity, playfulness, and openness to inspire transformative learning experiences across disciplines and communities. She is an internationally recognised leader in creative and open education, with a career spanning roles as a teacher, programmer, translator, academic developer, and education innovator in Greece, Slovenia, Germany, and the UK. Chrissi is a GO-GN alumna, the co-chair of the ICDE Open Education Network, the founder of the international open #creativeHE community and has co-created many OER and initiated a range of further open professional development courses, networks and communities that have been sustained over the years. Chrissi is the author of Part 1 of the book and the editor of Meraki. The invitation to submit thought-provoking contributions that align to Meraki is open to all."}],"subjects":[{"id":5,"name":"Education","parent_subject_id":null,"call_number":"L7","visible_textbooks_count":144,"url":"https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/education"}],"publishers":[{"id":1890,"url":"https://leeds.pressbooks.pub/","year":2025,"created_at":"2025-10-09T20:26:14.000-05:00","updated_at":"2025-10-09T20:26:14.000-05:00","name":"University of Leeds Open Books"}],"formats":[{"id":4981,"type":"Online","url":"https://leeds.pressbooks.pub/meraki/","price":{"cents":0,"currency_iso":"USD"},"isbn":null},{"id":4982,"type":"PDF","url":"https://leeds.pressbooks.pub/meraki/","price":{"cents":0,"currency_iso":"USD"},"isbn":null},{"id":4983,"type":"eBook","url":"https://leeds.pressbooks.pub/meraki/","price":{"cents":0,"currency_iso":"USD"},"isbn":null}],"rating":"4.5","textbook_reviews_count":1,"reviews":[{"id":35851,"first_name":"Kathryn","last_name":"Ananda-Owens","position":"Professor","institution_name":"St. Olaf College","comprehensiveness_rating":4,"comprehensiveness_review":"Meraki superbly captures the present moment of higher education, in which educators simultaneously have access to a wealth of prior scholarship and reflection on education itself while bearing witness to the disruption AI brings into the 21st-century learning environment. Is it comprehensive? In the spirit of playfulness, openness, creativity, and storytelling with which Nerantzi thinks and writes, yes, absolutely. In the conventional sense of a graduate education text, no. If you approach this text wanting A + B to equal C, you will be disappointed. If you are searching for metacognitive leaps that may jar your brain into new ways of thinking and teaching, Meraki is for you. At the time of this review, the text has no index.","accuracy_rating":4,"accuracy_review":"Since the subheading of Chapter 1 is \"Towards a Creativity Manifesto,\" I would like to set the question of authorial bias aside. Nerantzi impeccably cites sources throughout, and I did not encounter any content errors. That said, this text comes across in its current form as deeply personal, even perhaps as a glimpse into stream-of-consciousness journal writing by an expert on creative, inspiring, inclusive teaching. The content is consistently thought-provoking.","relevance_rating":5,"relevance_review":"The content is up-to-date for certain, far more so than many educational resources available to faculty and staff today. The text offers the reader multiple frameworks for considering genAI as a tool for educators and students rather than as a crutch. I look forward to seeing how Part 2 develops.","clarity_rating":5,"clarity_review":"Nerantzi's authorial voice is accessible, personable, and engaging. Occasionally I encountered vocabulary foreign to me as an academic based in the USA, but this was no bar to comprehension.","consistency_rating":5,"consistency_review":"Great consistency overall.","modularity_rating":4,"modularity_review":"The text is highly modular. For the most part, any single chapter could be read much like a stand-alone article. Chapter 6 is best understood in the immediate context of Chapter 5, in order to understand Nerantzi's usage of \"uncreative\" writing.","organization_rating":4,"organization_review":"Within each chapter, topics generally flow readily from one to the next. From chapter to chapter, flow is less evident. If you are familiar with theories of the wave-particle duality of light, you will have no trouble tracking from one section or chapter to the next. Sometimes Nerantzi's writing behaves like a wave, and sometimes it behaves like a particle. Sometimes, concepts flow in a linear manner from one to the next, and sometimes Nerantzi takes us on a quantum leap.","interface_rating":4,"interface_review":"Meraki includes video clips, titled \"Voices,\" that appear designed to complement material in individual chapters  As currently formatted, each individual \"Voice\" clip segues directly into the next one, which leads to presentation of multiple \"Voice\" clips out of sync with the chapters they are intended to accompany. In one sense, this reflects the spirit of Meraki: readers could be open to happenstance and allow a \"Voice\" clip encountered prematurely to seed their thoughts when they read the accompanying chapter later on. In another sense, the segues may sow confusion. I as a reader experienced a temporary sense of chaos whenever I forgot to pause a chapter's \"Voices\" video(s). Display features are otherwise very good.","grammatical_rating":4,"grammatical_review":"The text contains few grammatical errors. Readers open to both creative writing and professional writing will be most comfortable with periodic fluctuations in style and voice.","cultural_rating":4,"cultural_review":"The book's embrace of transformative learning renders it highly relevant. It would be great to see greater inclusion of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds in the \"Voices\" clips.","overall_rating":9,"overall_review":"In Chapter 6, Nerantzi writes about a process of amalgamating \"to organise my own thinking, keep some of my memories alive, and share with you today with the hope that this output will make you reflect.\" This is in many respects an excellent distillation of Meraki as a whole. It is not a book I can imagine using as a textbook per se. It is absolutely a book I will be recommending to colleagues for summer reading and reflection. I will be returning to it myself, a chapter at a time, over cups of tea and with my journal at my side. This is an extraordinary book.","created_at":"2026-04-06T14:17:30.000-05:00","updated_at":"2026-04-06T14:17:30.000-05:00"}],"url":"https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/meraki-towards-transformative-learning-in-higher-education","updated_at":"2026-05-18T12:03:56.000-05:00"}}