Creative Learning in the Primary School

Bob Jeffrey, Peter Woods

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134039869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Creative Learning in the Primary School uses ethnographic research to consider the main features of creative teaching and learning within the context of contemporary policy reforms. In particular, the authors are interested in the clash between two oppositional discourses - creativity and performativity - and how they are resolved in creative teacher practice. The book complements previous work by these authors on creative teaching by giving more consideration to creative learning.

The first section of the book explores the nature of creative teaching and learning by examining four key features: relevance, control, ownership and innovation. The authors devote a chapter to each of these aspects, outlining their properties and illustrating them with a wide range of examples, mainly from recent practice in primary schools.

The second section presents some instructive examples of schools promoting creative learning, and how creative primary schools have responded to the policy reforms of recent years. The chapters focus specifically on:

how pupils act as a powerful resource for creative learning for each other and for their teachers;

how teachers have appropriated the reforms to enhance their creativity;

and how one school has moved over a period of ten years from heavy constraint to high creativity.

The blend of analysis, case-study material and implications for practice will make this book attractive to primary teachers, school managers, policy makers, teacher educators and researchers.

Part I
The nature of creative learning

Creative learning has the same characteristics as creative teaching – relevance, control, ownership and innovation:

• Relevance. This is learning that is ‘operating within a broad range of accepted social values while being attuned to pupils’ identities and cultures’ (Jeffrey and Woods 1997, p. 15).
• Control of learning processes. The pupil is self-motivated, not governed by extrinsic factors or purely task-oriented exercises.
• Ownership of knowledge. The pupil learns for herself – not for the teacher, examiner or society. Creative learning is internalised, and makes a difference to the pupil’s self.
• Innovation. Something new is created. A change has taken place: a new skill mastered, new insight gained, new understanding realised, new, meaningful knowledge acquired.

Considering the relationship among these criteria, we have concluded that

the higher the relevance of teaching to children’s lives, worlds, cultures and interests, the more likelihood there is that pupils will have control of their own learning processes. Relevance aids identification, motivation, excitement and enthusiasm. Control, in turn, leads to ownership of the knowledge that results. If relevance, control and ownership apply, the greater the chance of creative learning resulting – something new is created, there is significant change or ‘transformation’ in the pupil – i.e. innovation.

(Woods 2002, p. 7)

1 The relevance of creative teaching

Chris Woodhead (1995), ex-HM Chief Inspector of Schools in England, criticised the belief that ‘education must be relevant to the immediate needs and interests of pupils’, and argued that ‘Our school curriculum must provide young people with the knowledge and skills they need to function effectively in adult working life’ – a kind of relevance to society and to their own later life-chances. We would not disagree with the second point but see the first as a means towards its achievement. Without it, Morrison (1989, p.6), for example, feels that the ‘art of teaching is lost to a series of narrow skills’, becoming ‘the casualty in a bureaucratized view of education in which education is called into the service of wider political ends and ideologies’. We have seen in more recent years how that art has been marginalised in the pursuit of performance in standardised tests. Yet the debate has not been one-sided; Wragg (1995), for example, urging the continuation of topic work and local projects, and space and time for teacher and pupil choice (see also Armstrong 1992; Webb 1993; Dadds 1994; Jeffrey and Woods 2003).

Pupils themselves have a great deal to contribute to this debate. Pupil perspectives are important because pupils are not just receivers or consumers of knowledge, but constructors of shared meanings in a combined exercise with teachers (Rudduck et al. 2004; Fielding 2007). Quicke (1992) has pointed out that these meanings are an aspect of ‘metacognition’ – knowledge about learning processes, about strategies of learning, and about people who are involved with them, like teachers. We might include in this a host of factors, notably the emotional, which affect the whole character of the learning enterprise and pupil’s disposition towards it (Elbaz 1992). If we are concerned to produce autonomous, critical and reflective learners, and to improve learning, we need to know what sense pupils are making of what is offered to them, and how they view and feel about the circumstances in which it is being offered. It might then be possible to improve the pupils’ metacognitive knowledge, and the context in which it is constructed. Without doubt, the teacher is one of the keys, if not the key elements in the development of metacognition.

Consequently, there has been a growing level of research into pupils’ perceptions of teachers and teaching (Lord and Jones 2006; MacBeath 2006; Rudduck 2006). For pupils in general, in other countries as well as the UK, the most important attributes of ‘good’ teachers appear to be that they should be ‘human’, should be able to ‘teach’ and make you ‘work’, keep control and be ‘fair’ (see Woods 1990 for a summary of this work). However, even if a teacher successfully establishes all these conditions to the approval of pupils, it cannot be assumed that they make the same sense of lessons as the teachers. It is not always realised how recondite the teacher’s lessons sometimes are, or what pupils understand by ‘work’ and ‘learning’. Also, while pupil responses have been organised into categories, as above, there are issues with all of the categories, such as sensitivity, feelings and trust, which may be more important since they are generic. These issues may be related to creative teaching and learning.

Our concern, therefore, in this chapter is to expand on the notion of ‘relevance’. In broad terms, this involves teaching that is relevant to pupils’ interests and concerns. It also includes pupil recognition of and identification with such teaching, with a sense of togetherness with the teacher and an empathy with her methods. Teaching and learning is a joint project. Relevance also has an emotional component, reflected in the nature of the pupils’ engagement with such teaching. All this might be contrasted with the public, commodity, alienated knowledge so often associated with ‘traditional’ institutionalised learning. So much of the National Curriculum, especially in its earlier formulations, despite some benefits, was of this kind with its problems of overload, restriction of local adaptations, and formal, instrumental assessment (Campbell 1993a, 1993b; Pollard et al. 1994).

We have identified three areas of teacher pedagogy that are especially significant for relevant learning: ensuring positive social relations, engaging interest and valuing contributions.

Ensuring positive social relations

Positive teacher–learner relationships are central to the development of creative learning. The quality of social interaction determines how individuals act in situations and how their identities are created. Interpretations of language utterances and gestures determine responses. People imagine that they share each other’s responses, sharing and mutually imbuing them with meaning, their manifestations make behaviour social (Mead 1934). The way learners are treated by their teachers determines their reaction to learning itself and to any engagement with teachers and schools in the learning process.

Our research in the early 1990s exemplified the commitment of creative teachers to social relations:

I feel that children as human beings – their holistic development, their relationships with me and with each other – is, for me, the first and most crucial thing because their attitude to learning and their own development will be affected by it. If they don’t trust any adults or are unable to relate to each other when you sit them down to work together, the whole way that they are treated will show in the atmosphere. You know what kind of citizens you are helping to encourage, to develop. So that is very crucial to me and very crucial to really what you can achieve, educationally, in the standard of the reading, the writing, all of it. How they are able to work, how inventive they are able to be. Whether it’s going really against the grain of growth or with it, limiting or expanding.

(Erica, T-C)

Learners feel that such teachers have their interests at heart and value them as individuals:

Well, when she’s not here, we miss her, because then we have to get all different teachers, we have to go to other classes and things get mucked up in the class and the day seems a bit longer when she’s away. People don’t behave properly when she’s away. We enjoy ourselves when she’s here because she makes things easier for us.

(Angela, Yr4-I)

The relationship with their teachers also needs to be an honest one in which learners are not patronised but taken seriously:

I think that if you do something wrong she never really lies. Some teachers lie. If they don’t think it’s very nice they say, ‘Oh! That’s brilliant!’ And they just say that will have to do. But Theresa [their teacher], if you do something wrong, just says, ‘OK, that’s not very good, go and do it again.’ She doesn’t say it horribly, ‘Oh, that’s really stupid, go and do it again!’

(Madeline, Yr5-SL)

A teacher’s commitment to her profession enhances the relationship, for it shows learners that they are being taken seriously:

Theresa, my teacher, likes doing time machines, maps and Tudor gardens; she does a lot of imaginative work like the Tudor gardens, a lot of finding out about different times, science and experimenting. She also tries out new things from books.

(Hera, Yr5-I)

Being ‘good at organising school trips and involving people from outside the school, like puppeteers and sculptors’ (Sam, Yr4-I), shows a teacher’s commitment to engaging the interests of learners. They can do what is officially required of them, but can also act under their own initiative, which earns pupils’ respect:

She can do serious projects which are part of the National Curriculum, but she also likes to set up her things which she’d do at the weekend which we were grateful for and you have a laugh with, like doing little paintings or little origami lessons or something like that which is really good, which she’s not really supposed to do … But she’s got her own side. She doesn’t follow like a dog on a lead. She’s not forced to do anything. She’s not forced to get special lessons from outside the school. She puts herself out for us.

(Carla, Yr4-I)

Developing social relations is also seen as a positive teaching attribute:

She [the teacher] talks to the whole group together and then we just tell her our ideas, and other people comment on them and suggest this and that and then we put it all together. She lets us talk about it more than other teachers. She lets us have our own conversations and arguments and then gets us back to the point. She lets us speak, she lets us vote although we’re not eighteen … She lets us breathe more. Most of all she listens, unlike other teachers who jump to conclusions.

(Georgina, Yr6-G)

Such teachers often model behaviour:

When we argue, people join in and everyone puts in an idea. Other people have ideas and different cultures. We learnt this from Marilyn [their teacher] because she made us sit with different people and we had to get on with them. It wasn’t that we didn’t like them, it was because we didn’t know them. When we had arguments she talked to us and showed us we aren’t the only ones in the class. She taught us how to do what she was doing, like talk to us and sort out our problems. Now when we break up we sit down and talk to each other. She also talks to the whole group together. We tell her our ideas and other people comment upon them. We discuss things. She gets her board out and says, ‘Let’s sort this out.’

(Katy, Yr5-G)

Berger and Luckmann (1976) argue that the child passes through two phases of socialisation – primary and secondary. Primary socialisation is an induction into society through the subjectivity of others, and internalisation in this general sense is the basis, first, for an understanding of one’s fellow man and, second, for the apprehension of the world as a meaningful and social reality (ibid., p. 150). They claim that this primary socialisation takes place under circumstances that are highly charged emotionally and they suggest that there is good reason to believe that without such emotional attachment to significant others the learning process would be difficult if not impossible (ibid., p. 151). Emotional connections between teacher and learner are important in developing common knowledge, that contextual framework for educational activities where the business of ‘scaffolding’ can take place (Edwards and Mercer 1987, p. 161) (see Chapter 2).

Teaching thus has an emotional heart for both teachers and learners. It is

imbued with ‘creative unpredictability’ and ‘flows of energy’ … In desire is to be found the creativity and spontaneity that connects teachers emotionally … to their children, their colleagues and their work. Such desires among particularly creative teachers are for fulfilment, intense achievement, senses of breakthrough, closeness to fellow humans, even love for them … Without desire, teaching becomes arid and empty. It loses its meaning.

(Hargreaves 1994, p. 22)

This does not mean that the use of emotion is completely undisciplined and unchannelled. It can enervate teachers and students alike, but is also a subject of development as well as a means of motivation and contextualisation. Students’ emotional development through drama, through narrative and story, and through relationships, and the general ethos of classroom and school, is a matter of prime concern. Teachers consciously attend to children’s feelings in relation to learning situations and recognise emotional reactions as signals to be interpreted through the use of strategies such as a ‘non-fault syndrome’ and ‘unblocking’ (Woods and Jeffrey 1996, pp. 61–62) which act to involve learners rather than alienating them.

Many of these teachers are excellent performers and they create a variety of atmospheres which are related to the emotions (Woods and Jeffrey 1996). Humour ‘brings more atmosphere to the class because if it was really strict it’d be a totally different atmosphere’ (Carla, Yr6-I) but an abiding interest in learner welfare is also highly prized as relevant by learners:

She gets excited when someone with a bad attitude problem comes on very well. When he’s on report or something she comes along and supports him. She listens to people and their problems … She’s good at dealing with depressed people. She’ll say ‘excuse me, are you depressed about something?’, then she’d relax you and talk to you personally. She’d just comfort you really … She enjoys people sitting down in circles and people talking about this and that and the other, about different feelings they have.

(Carla, Yr4-I)

Primary pupils are concerned about how to create and maintain feelings of confidence and they recognise many ways in which these teachers managed to do this. ‘I would not shout at them for that would make them angry and would make it worse. I would help them with spellings for when I have to correct my work I feel scared that I’ll get it wrong. I would whisper answers like Grace does … She compliments us’ (Tosin, Yr3-I).

Empathising is appreciated: ‘When we’re angry, she knows how it feels and she makes us feel better and solves the problem, helps us. She takes it easy on us. She has told us stories of her being angry when she was young’ (Ishea, Yr3-SL). Pupils are keen to develop the relationship: ‘We want to make Grace [their teacher] happy’ (Toxs, Yr3-SL).

Getting things wrong is a worry for pupils and a supportive approach is also much appreciated:

When you get a piece of work wrong she doesn’t say, ‘No, that’s horrible, go and do it again.’ She kind of explains it in a silly way that will make you go and do it again. She’s quite funny when she speaks in a silly way. She puts her hands on her hips and kind of pretends to be angry but she really is joking. She does make us do it again, but she is not furious.

(Tom, Yr5-SL)

Respecting pupils and valuing their opinions is important:

Lee said, ‘Why don’t we let Georgina or Milton read the poem because they know Jamaica and they’re black.’ I said, ‘Why? Because white people can read black poems too, just as I can read white poems.’ Marilyn said, ‘All right let’s discuss it’, and I read it and Lee read it. We all had a go. Some teachers might have said to me, ‘Don’t be rude.’ She tells us calmly, she’s always calm in our discussions.

(Georgina, Yr5-G)

Engaging interest

The term ‘fun’ is often...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The nature of creative learning
• 1 The relevance of creative teaching
• 2 Control of learning
• 3 Ownership of knowledge
• 4 Innovation
• PART II Creating opportunities for creative learning
• 5 Achieving breakthroughs in learning: students as critical others
• 6 Countering learner ‘instrumentalism’ through creative mediation
• 7 Recovering creative teaching and learning: using critical events
• 8 Reintroducing creativity: becoming a ‘Particularly Successful School’
• 9 The future of creative learning
• References