The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning

Julian Sefton-Green, Pat Thomson, Ken Jones, Liora Bresler, Julian Sefton-Green, Pat Thomson, Ken Jones, Liora Bresler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136730030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

The concept of creative learning extends far beyond Arts-based learning or the development of individual creativity. It covers a range of processes and initiatives throughout the world that share common values, systems and practices aimed at making learning more creative. This applies at individual, classroom, or whole school level, always with the aim of fully realising young people's potential.

Until now there has been no single text bringing together the significant literature that explores the dimensions of creative learning, despite the work of artists in schools and the development of a cadre of creative teaching and learning specialists. Containing a mixture of newly commissioned chapters, reprints and updated versions of previous publications, this book brings together major theorists and current research.

Comprising of key readings in creative education, it will stand as a uniquely authoritative text that will appeal to those involved in initial and continuing teacher education, as well as research academics and policy specialists.

Sections include:

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• a general introduction to the field of creative learning

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• arts learning traditions, with sub sections on discrete art forms such as drama and visual art

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• accounts of practice from artist-teacher partnerships

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• whole school change and reforms

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• curriculum change

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• assessment

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• evaluative case studies of impact and effect

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• global studies of policy change around creative learning.

Part I Theories and histories

Creative learning and its contexts

Julian Sefton-Green and Liora Bresler

DOI: 10.4324/9780203817568-2

This section consists of a collection of writings exploring definitions of creativity and creative learning. This introduction will locate these contributions in a broader discussion of key themes and tensions which criss-cross individual chapters. These include questions about:

• the relationship of creativity to originality (are all creative acts original and if so for whom?);
• the role of discipline-specific fields of knowledge and skillsets in theories of generic creativities (is there such a thing as a non-discipline-specific mode of creativity or is creativity always rooted in specific practices, be they art or science?);
• tensions in creativity theory between the social and individual (is creativity something that only occurs within individuals or is it a property of broader social groups and practices?);
• the relationship of the politics of creativity to discourses of modernity (how much is creativity a Modern Western concept not found in other outlooks around the world?);
• ways of approaching questions of definition (is creativity a question of mental or embodied characteristics? Is it measurable or transferable?);
• and a consideration of the banality of creativity in current incarnations (how much is the tem over-used in contemporary political discourse?).

Approaching the field

The authors in this section were invited to explore the contexts for ‘creative learning’. As several contributors note, this means investigating the question ‘What is creativity?’ as well as the question ‘What is learning?’ Much of the section is concerned with a history of ideas as contributors (Abbs (Chapter 11), Belfiore (Chapter 3), Darras (Chapter 10) and Jones (Chapters 2 and 9)) explore some of the philosophical and theoretical paradigms underpinning notions of creativity. This is because most authors argue that such intellectual formations are present today, albeit in unacknowledged or fossilised forms, and that they continue to act as benchmarks and norms in discussion about the field. Excavating these norms is even more imperative today as some claims about the desirability of creative learning – about which there is little controversy – benefit from being tempered by an understanding of expectations which come from this wider appreciation.

Perhaps as a consequence of this, the contributors to this section tend to operate with two senses of time. On the one hand, a number of authors (like Drotner (Chapter 8) or Darras) pay attention to the policy here and now: they explore how contemporary governments are trying to fit education to the specific challenges of a changing economic order. Yet, they are also interested in how deep-seated assumptions about creativity, its traditions, processes and meanings derive from older intellectual ideas extending back, in Belfiore’s case, to fifth century Athens or, as Jones (Chapter 2) shows, rooted in the Enlightenment and taking flight in visions of Modernity. Of course scholars enjoy nothing more than pointing out that there is nothing new under the sun and that politicians are always making up new dawns – that there is always a tension between the claims of policy and the lessons of history. Banaji (Chapter 4) and Pope (Chapter 12) turn this problem on its head by framing a history of creativity studies as a series of discourses each rooted in a distinctive set of power relations. Abbs attempts to find ways of bringing older structures of understanding creativity into a contemporary focus.

Criticism of the contemporary resurgence of interest in creativity is all the more strange when we consider how on one level there is no dispute about the value of creative learning or creativity in general. It seems to be a universal good. Indeed the only writing about creativity which might address negative features concerns the personal psychological burden of being creative and the cost that has exacted on creative people and their relationships – a common feature in many biographical studies of artists (Miller, 2000) – and traced by Runco and Pagnani here (Chapter 7). Yet this ‘optimistic’ assumption itself about the value of creativity may be fundamentally misplaced. The contemporary fascination with creativity and its role in the economy as a generator of wealth creation as described by Drotner, for example in conjunction with idealistic and almost problematic aspirations for personal self-fulfilment, have led to an almost impossible set of expectations, as Darras argues later in this section (Chapter 10).

Elite/democratic: individual/social

One common thread across many chapters has been how ideas about creativity have moved away from the study of elites and exceptions towards the normal and the everyday: see the arguments pursued in Boden (1994) and exemplified by the examples in Abbs here (Chapter 11). Elsewhere this has been characterised as big and little ‘C’ creativity (Craft, 2005; and see also Runco and Pagnani, Chapter 7). This is a change in academic focus about both what creativity is and also what its significance might be for learning. For if mass education is to take up the challenge of creativity it has to be premised on wider and more accessible notions than the more old-fashioned belief in the qualities of special individuals. Whist there are many disinterested reasons why academic research may have changed its focus, and much interest in the topic from an education perspective is of course elitist in character, it is also true that State education policy finds it hard to accommodate concerns that cannot be justified on equity grounds. Jones (Chapter 9) refers to the democratisation of creativity, introducing a more popular concept of ‘common culture’ into the debate and opening up theorists who have explored everyday creativity (Willis, 1990). A broader acceptance of more general and widely distributed creativity helps change an agenda which, in the past, may have been overly concerned with special individuals or ‘genius’.

The idea that creativity may be more broadly distributed and more common than is often assumed can now be found across a wide range of different academic disciplines. Indeed it is a feature of change in disparate studies from Psychology to Sociology, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies that creativity resides as much in the wider social context as it does within individual psyches. Thus Abbs (from Aesthetics) talks about vertical and horizontal axes, where the individual intersects with traditions, conventions and artistic form, and Csikszentmihalyi (from Psychology) argues that creativity needs to be acknowledged as such by the wider society before any creations or acts can be defined as creative in the first place (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Sociologists of cultural production like Bourdieu (1986, 1993) have developed notions of fields and practice to explain the interplay of the individual, their formation and their actions.

All of these models or theories may derive from different conceptions of the human subject and even rest upon differing notions of the relationship of human agency to social structure but they all try to address the same conundrum: how to account for change, newness or difference. Different interpretative traditions give different weight to the determining influence of form (how the new creation is expressed) and how the reception of the newness is regulated and accepted. It is here that Kuhn’s well-known ideas about ‘paradigm shifts’ and the work of Bruno Latour, with his anthropological studies of the work of scientists, come into play, as we strive for theories to explain how new ideas are imagined, conceived, implemented and received (Latour, 1986). What unifies all of these diverse disciplines is the idea of a complex social process, in some theories involving more of an attention to intra-personal cognitive processes and in other models to inter-personal and social negotiations and how they play out in specific domains.

Clearly there is a connection between studies of field/domain and the more democratic accounts of creativity because the weight attributed to the individual is, as it were more, distributed in these field/domain accounts. Even in studies of creative persons, more attention is now paid to groups and collaboration (Miell and Littleton, 2004).

Art, the Arts and originality

A second common interest in this section is the origins of studies about creativity within broader discussion of the Arts. This theme is more directly addressed in Part II but it is also discussed here. Not only are the Arts usually taken as the paradigmatic site for creation but aesthetic studies actually contain some of the most developed analysis of how creativity might work in practice: the effects of form, the role of tools and the place of reception. Some scholars, like Abbs, move across Science and Arts domains extrapolating principles about creativity from a focus on common ‘new’ or ‘original’ works (be they painting or theories about cell structure).

There are two key themes across contributions to this section. The first relates to the question of originality. Leong (Chapter 6) and Matsunobu (Chapter 5) outline how the question of originality in Art is a very particular historical cultural construct and indeed antithetical to traditions of Art across various parts of the world. Western obsession with originality relates strongly to the demands of the market and the incorporation of Art in capitalism (see subsection below or Becker, 1984), and have no place in the ritualistic, folk, religious and other originality narratives about Art in society. There are of course whole swathes of art forms and traditions that are ideologically opposed to change, and whether or in what ways they are conceptualised as creative (as distinct from being new) is a generative enquiry.

Whether Art can offer itself as a paradigmatic case for creativity is also a moot point. First of all, whether it is productive to sustain what C. P. Snow called two cultures, describing a dualistic split between arts and sciences, is even more tendentious in an era of technological flux. Nevertheless, the yoking of creativity and the Arts is a kind of common sense – despite the analyses provided in many of these chapters – and certainly it is where many education initiatives begin in practice across the school systems of the developed world. This theme is pursed in more detail in Part II of this volume.

Despite any or all of these qualifications, the Arts occupy a privileged place in our conceptualisations of creativity. Whether they can be mined instrumentally, as Belfiore (Chapter 3) or Banaji (Chapter 4) enquire, to provide templates for other kinds of creative production is open to question, but they offer the values and processes most amenable for use in many kinds of learning. In education this also has something to do with the position that the Arts occupy in the overall discursive field of schooling as the privileged site of cultural values and with a special role in the formation of individual growth; this is pursued by Jones (Chapter 9), Drotner, Darras and Pope. Part II develops and explores this theme in more detail.

Progress, identity and transformation

Drotner, Darras, Jones (Chapter 2) and Pope also engage with the question ‘Why creativity now?’ Why is the current era seemingly so intrigued by a quality which, irrespective of any definition, is assumed to have existed in equal quantity in previous generations. An important theme here is the alleged shift to a different and new kind of economy, one underpinned by knowledge and network structures (Castells, 2000). Creativity, especially that contributing to innovation, has driven an interest in developing creative people, most explicitly expressed, as Darras argues, in the idea of a creative class (Florida, 2003). The imperative for creativity is allied to the neo-liberal restructuring of capital in terms of both the need for new products for new markets to ensure continuous growth through the turnover of novelties and shifts to a knowledge economy where especially the exploitation of intellectual property is another engine for wealth cr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustratgions
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Theories and histories: creative learning and its contexts
• Part II Creativity, the arts and schools
• Part III Creative curriculum and pedagogy
• Part IV Creative school and system change
• Index