Researching Creative Learning

Methods and Issues

Pat Thomson, Julian Sefton-Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136881169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

It is a common ambition in society and government to make young people more creative. These aspirations are motivated by two key concerns: to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and to ensure that young people are able and fit to leave education and contribute to the creative economy that will underpin growth in the twenty-first century.

Transforming these common aspirations into informed practice is not easy. It can mean making many changes:

• turning classrooms into more exciting experiences;
• introducing more thoughtful challenges into the curriculum;
• making teachers into different kinds of instructors;
• finding more authentic assessment processes;
• putting young people's voices at the heart of learning.

There are programmes, projects and initiatives that have consistently attempted to offer such change and transformation. The UK programme Creative Partnerships is the largest of these, but there are significant initiatives in many other parts of the world today, including France, Norway, Canada and the United States. This book not only draws on this body of expertise but also consolidates it, making it the first methodological text exploring creativity.

Creative teaching and learning is often used as a site for research and action research, and this volume is intended to act as a textbook for this range of courses and initiatives. The book will be a key text for research in creative teaching and learning and is specifically directed at ITE, CPD, Masters and doctoral students.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Pat Thomson and Julian Sefton-Green

It would appear we live in creative times. As political aspiration, as economic driver, as a manifesto for school reform and curriculum change, the desire for creativity can be found across the developed world in policy pronouncements and academic research. But creativity – in an educational context – can mean many things: turning classrooms into more exciting experiences, curriculum into more thoughtful challenges, teachers into different kinds of instructors, assessment into more authentic processes and putting young people’s voice at the heart of learning. In general, these aspirations are motivated by two key concerns: to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and ensuring that young people are able and fit to leave education able to contribute to the creative economy which will underpin growth in the twenty-first century.

Transforming these common aspirations into informed practice is not easy. Yet there are programmes, projects and initiatives that have consistently attempted to offer change and transformation. We have both been involved with the English programme Creative Partnerships (www.creative-partnerships.com), which is the largest of these projects, but there are significant initiatives in other parts of the world including France, Norway, Canada, Australia and the US.

This geographical eclecticism is matched by the wide range of people who are interested in forms of creative learning, from teachers and other educationalists to policy advisers and politicians. As we will discuss, the ambivalence of the concept of creative learning makes it seem ‘polyvalent’ and thus useful to all of these different constituencies. But what counts as evidence of creative learning, how effective initiatives might be and what difference the concept makes both in practice and in terms of what it makes possible in education are also questions addressed in this book.

All creativity initiatives struggle to understand what they do, and how they might become more informed and effective. Traditionally, creativity has been the domain of psychology, but research in that field builds on its own disciplinary paradigms and methods – some of which do not quite capture how these initiatives have impacted in real schools and classrooms around the world. For this reason, Creative Partnerships has made a significant investment in research and has funded and supported schools, teachers and academics to grapple with the practices of inquiry into creative learning and school change. As a result of this initiative, and smaller programmes with similar aims, there is a growing body of expertise in researching creativity, as well as a significant number of new and experienced educators who wish to investigate it.

Creative teaching and learning is often used as a site for research and action research, and this volume is intended to act as a textbook for a range of courses and initiatives exploring these issues. Additionally, in the current climate, creative learning research often offers itself as a form of advocacy and frequently engages with understanding the new and the innovative or different practices. This book aims to offer researchers with aspirations to work in this field access to both a range of methods and ways of making sense of findings in order to help cement the integrity of creative learning as a research field. This isn’t the same thing as ‘creative research’; it would be hubris to suggest that some methods or theories are in and of themselves more (or less) creative than others. However, we do suggest that the kinds of approaches outlined in this book and the methods they draw on offer a productive, confident and disciplined way of researching creative learning. We also hope that the kinds of findings described here act as a way of drawing a ‘line in the sand’ to enable the field to develop maturity and sophistication, rather than reinventing itself repetitively with each initiative – a common lament around the world.

One peculiarity of our location within developments in the UK means that, unlike our colleagues in some other countries, we do not solely equate creative learning with the arts. While it is the case that creative learning can and does occur in the arts, there can equally be a preponderance of routine and transmission learning in arts ‘subjects’. Our view is that there are aspects of all domains of knowledge that can be constructed creatively.

We therefore begin by canvassing what is meant by the term ‘creative learning’ and then go on to consider what might be distinctive about researching it. We then introduce the chapters in the book, showing how they each build a corpus of knowledge not only about creative learning but also about associated research practices.

What is creative learning?

When educators talk about creative learning, they generally mean teaching that allows students to use their imaginations, have ideas, generate multiple possible solutions to problems, communicate in a variety of media and in general ‘think outside the box’. They may also mean practices in which children and young people show that they have the capacities to assess and improve work, sustain effort on a project for a long period of time, exceed what they thought was possible and work well with others to combine ideas and approaches. Some may extend the notion to include projects and approaches that allow young people to apply their creativity through making choices about what and how they will learn, negotiating about curriculum and involvement in generating possibilities for and making decisions about school priorities and directions.

But while there may be commonalities about what creative learning looks like as, and in, students’ behaviours, there may also be profound differences. The notion of creativity may be associated with particular subjects, such as those that go under the umbrella term of the arts, in which generating new, odd and interesting perspectives on familiar topics is valued and rewarded. Or it may be seen as integral to science, where habits of transforming curiosity into hypotheses have a long history. Or it may be connected to business and the goal of schooling students to have strongly entrepreneurial dispositions and capacities. These interpretations – and many more – are all possible and legitimate understandings of creativity and creative learning.

Generating lists of potential meanings is not merely a rhetorical exercise, and we suggest that it is an essential part of researching creative learning. But before we elaborate on this point, we want to address some of the histories that underpin the various notions of creative learning and the views of the child and the teacher, classroom and school that they imply. As we will argue, although the term ‘creative learning’ may be new and fashionable, it draws on older and more entrenched sets of values that have helped give it legitimacy and that frame its current meaning (see The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning). Here we trace the origins of the concept in progressive education, through a contemporary interest in creativity, ending with a notion of a particular type of learner and learning.

Childhood, progressivism and creativity

At the same time as children in Western nation-states were progressively removed from workplaces and expected instead to be formally educated, a body of theories about children was constructed (Aries, 1962). These ways of understanding children were, up to World War II, predominantly developed through the emergent disciplines of psychology and educational psychology and pedagogy, and in philosophy. Theories of child development posited linear progressions from a totally sensory state of knowing nothing to an adult state of responsibility and complete comprehension. Competing views of learning, notably behaviourist approaches (e.g. Skinner, 1968), vied with play-based approaches as the most effective means of children learning to become mature and educated/learn-ed. Education was variously seen as: (1) needing to be highly child-centred and led by child interests (Dewey, 1897, 1934; Dewey & Dewey, 1915); (2) as a process through which children could construct knowledge under adult guidance (Vygotsky, 1978); or (3) as a system in which children’s capacities and accomplishments could be measured and therefore rationally developed over time through various levels and phases (Roid, 2003; Tyler, 1949).

In Britain, the twentieth century saw the gradual development of a collection of ways of thinking about and doing school. These began as isolated experiments – ‘free’ schools (e.g. Neill, 1918), the introduction of methods influenced by Maria Montessori (www.montessori.edu), the Dalton plan (www.daltoninternational.org/daltoneducation.html), eurhythmics (see www.dalcroze.org.au/eurythmics.html) – but over time these coalesced into a constellation of practices that we now call ‘progressivism’ (Grosvenor & Myers, 2006; Labaree, 2005; Sliwka, 2008). Educational historian Peter Cunningham (1988, p. 13) suggests that this was not so much a theory as a set of

shared common themes; a reduction in the traditional authoritarianism of the teacher, alternatives to the dominant pedagogical forms of the class lesson, removal of harsh punishments and unnecessary drill and discipline, with a preference for self-government by pupils, dissolution of the formal timetable, and a shift in curriculum emphasis from the routine of the 3Rs to more creative and expressive activities.

Progressive early childhood and primary schooling drew on child-centred and constructivist knowledge traditions and focused on the provision of learning environments in which children were able to explore material and imaginative worlds (e.g. de Lissa, 1949); this was, however, accompanied by highly structured instruction such as reading schemes intended to move children through predetermined stages. There was an attempt to ensure ‘balance’ between more open and more structured approaches. Creativity was to be exercised and developed through play-based and investigation-based activities but also through a new emphasis on curriculum that was deemed ‘creative’, most often as the subjects of art, movement, music and creative writing. From the 1920s onwards, children were seen as ‘naïve’ artists in their own right, and their work exhibited (Whit...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part 1 What are the practices of creative learning?
• Part 2 Can researchers ‘see’ creative learning and can their research help others to ‘see’ it?
• Part 3 Can creative learning be measured and evaluated?
• Index