Creative primary schools: developing and maintaining pedagogy for creativity (original) (raw)
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Creative Primary Schools article Ethnog and Education 2013 PUBLISHED
This micro-ethnographic study investigated pedagogy in two English primary schools, following a change of government and challenges posed by economic austerity. Unlike the previous decade's emphasis on children's curiosity and agency and valuing arts and partnership, emphasis on knowledge and attainment was now foregrounded. A two-stage National Curriculum government review (2011Á2012) brought primary schools little clarity. During the review period, the authors researched two purposively chosen schools, recognised nationally for their creative approaches. This paper discusses their creative teaching and learning pedagogic practices. Three shared characteristics emerged through triangulated qualitative analysis: co-construction, high value placed on children's control/ agency/ownership and high expectations in skilful creative engagement, evident through the arts, use of integrated themes and topics, flexible time, children's immersive involvement and attending closely to children. Thematic findings are discussed alongside unique qualities of each school's pedagogy and implications for primary education considered. This paper reports findings from an interpretive study of two primary schools in England, researching how they were maintaining pedagogy for creativity. It was undertaken during a period of change in English primary education, bringing a sharp shift in emphasis with respect to creativity, in comparison with the preceding decade in policy and practice. To set the context, characteristics of the creative decade are first discussed, the new direction articulated and then the focus of the study introduced.
Creativity and cross-curriculum strategies in England: Tales of doing, forgetting and not knowing
International Journal of Educational Research, 2012
School change is always local and dependent on the kinds of resources that are available. In this paper we explore the notion that knowledge is an important resources for vernacular educational reform. In order to explore this contention, we use the lens of cross-curricular changes undertaken by English schools in receipt of funding from Creative Partnerships. Our research identified three dominant change patterns -themes and topics in primary and secondary schools and skills-based subjects in secondary. Our study also showed that in making these changes schools had little recourse to their own collective histories or to international examples. We argue that, while policy was a significant delimiting factor on innovation, the problem posing and solution generating activities undertaken by schools may well have developed differently if a wider range of intellectual resources was available to them.
Creativity and creative pedagogies exploring challenges, possibilities and potential .docx
Internationally, the first decade of the 21st century was characterised by considerable growth in creativity research (e.g. Einarsdottir, 2003; Cremin, Burnard and Craft, 2006; Beghetto and Kaufman 2007; Mirzaie, Hamidi and Anaraki, 2009; Chappell, 2007; Sawyer, 2010). While some researchers focused upon conceptual challenges (e.g. Beghetto and Kaufman, 2007; Lin, 2011; Megalakaki, Craft and Cremin, 2012), others documented and examined classroom practices; both those of teachers (e.g. Jeffrey and Woods, 2009; Craft, Cremin, Hay and Clack, 2014) and of visiting subject specialists, often artists (e.g. Galton, 2010; Hall and Thomson, 2005). Empirical studies in this area, with an observational eye on classroom practices, have tended to pay attention to both teacher and learner orientations, to ‘creative teaching’ and ‘teaching for creativity’, thus encompassing Dezuanni and Jetnikoff‘s (2011:265) assertion that creative pedagogies involve ‘imaginative and innovative arrangement of curricula and teaching strategies in school classrooms’ to develop the creativity of the young. However whilst recognition of the role and nature of creativity, and interest in creative pedagogical practice has grown, tensions persist at several levels, particularly in accountability cultures where international comparisons such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) frame and shape policy, practice and curricula. These ongoing large scale surveys are seen as key reference points for policy makers across the world; students’ performance in them (in reading, mathematics and science in PISA for example) is increasingly seen as a measure of individual country’s comparative success on a worldwide scale. Yet neither encompasses attention to children’s lived experience of learning or creativity within or beyond school. A focus on learners and their creative potential, and on teachers and their innovative pedagogic practice, is absent. A focus on arguably narrow notions of attainment dominates. This book, based on a Special Issue of Education 3-13 which was planned with Anna Craft before her untimely death, responds to this performative context (Ball, 1998) and draws together the work of a number of eminent scholars of creativity and creative pedagogies. It offers diverse perspectives from Colombia, Denmark, England, France, Poland, Hong Kong, and the USA and highlights differences as well as similarities across cultural contexts. Individually and collectively, the authors, framed by their own stances on creativity, reveal both the complexities and the possibilities of creativity and creative pedagogies.
Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 2019
In Inspiring school change: Transforming education through the creative arts, Christine Hall and Pat Thomson summarize their substantial body of research into school reform through the arts. In arguing that the creative arts disrupt the status quo, their nuanced discussion(s) of several investigations, in a variety of schools in the United Kingdom, draws a clear picture of the impact of Creative Partnerships, which is the largest and longest running initiative of its kind in the world (from 2002 to 2011). In a contemporary context, where creativity is highlighted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as essential for 21 st century learners, such findings are of particular importance for educational leaders both because of the exemplary standard of Hall and Thomson's research and because few school reform projects work through the arts. Creative Partnerships was part of a "cultural turn" in UK national policy-making after the second election of the New Labour government in 2001. Education policy responded to "a rising tide of criticism about the sterility and joylessness of the standards curriculum: parents were complaining, and significant numbers of teachers were feeling de-professionalized, dispirited and concerned about the impact of school on children" (Hall & Thomson, 2017, p.20). In this context, Creative Partnerships was tasked with building sustainable partnerships between schools, artists, and cultural organizations. It was crucial to demonstrate the benefits of collaboration and find ways around systemic obstacles. Practical projects gave thousands of students and teachers opportunities to explore creativity through assigned work with creative professionals. A second mandate of the initiative was to increase the numbers of cultural and creative practitioners and organizations involved in education and to build the capacity of this sector to work effectively with schools. The authors offer a brief historical overview of arts education policy in which they trace a move from arts education to creativity. The latter concept helps to inform educational debates about the inclusion of elite versus popular culture in the school curriculum, and connected the arts to the economy and employment. From Raymond Williams, the authors understand culture as "being both what is known and collectively experienced and what is remade through the creative capacities of the individual" (Hall & Thomson, 2017, p. 12). The authors also note Anna Craft's (2001) point that cultural (arts) learning differs from creativity in that the former is about exploring continuity, while the latter is about change. Early on, Hall and Thomson define creativity as "a capacity that is shared, routinely manifested and susceptible to being nourished" (Hall & Thomson, 2017, p. 12). While this definition seems somewhat inadequate, given the title and aspirations of the text, their review of the literature reveals that the concept of creativity is elastic, slippery, and hard to define. Indeed, there is no universal meaning of the term creativity. The authors survey research into both (1) creativity in teaching (may involve innovative and interactive pedagogies with corresponding changes to curriculum and assessment), and (2) the promotion of creativity in learners. While these two foci are likely interdependent, a further area of interest is whether creative teaching relates predominantly to the arts.
The history of research into creativity reveals several robust and persistent trends and oppositions. Depending on the tradition to which the researcher belongs, these oppositions are associated with a series of political and philosophical presuppositions about human beings and society that are seldom traced back to their historical roots. Recent trends see creative activity as both a cure for the ills of an increasingly troubled society, and as a charm to unlock the potential and boost the morale of demotivated and excluded sections of children and youth, the populace, the community or the work-force. Research suggests, however, that in quite specific ways creative teaching and learning are neither understood properly, nor given more than superficial significance in the criteria by which students and teachers in many settings are now judged. Via an exploration of a number of contemporary and persistent political and philosophical traditions in the theorising of creativity, this chapter asks: to what extent are any of these claims a reflection of actual events, trends and practices? Whose interests do some of these conceptualisations serve? And are there any ways in which the insights about creativity emerging from different traditions may be made to work on behalf of children and teachers?