Creative Learning for Inclusion

Creative approaches to meet special needs in the classroom

Edward Sellman, Edward Sellman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136734090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Introducing creativity to the classroom is a concern for teachers, governments and future employers around the world, and there has been a drive to make experiences at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic for all young people, ensuring they leave education able to contribute to the global creative economy.

Creative Learning to Meet Special Needs shows teachers how to use creativity in the curriculum for key stages 2 and 3 to support the learning of pupils with special educational needs in a way which effectively engages them and leaves a lasting impact on their school experiences and later lives. Describing the different ways in which a creative approach can help pupils with SEN access the curriculum, with activities and practical materials for teachers, this book will explain:

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• why creativity is central to making the curriculum accessible
• how to use personalised learning with pupils with SEN
• how to promote achievements and motivation through creative experiences
• how the curriculum can be extended and represented in innovative ways for pupils with SEN
• how to use interactive methods of teaching and alternative methods of communication.

Providing case studies and examples of the ways in which teachers have delivered the curriculum creatively to pupils with special educational needs, this book is an invaluable guide for all those involved in teaching and engaging young people with special needs.

Chapter 1

Series Introduction

Pat Thomson and Julian Sefton-Green

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 schools 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 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 which have consistently attempted to offer change and transformation. There are significant creativity programmes in many parts of the world, including France, Norway, Canada, South Korea, Australia and the United States of America. The English programme, Creative Partnerships (http://www.creative-partnerships.com) is the largest of these and this series of books draws on its experience and expertise.

This book, Creative Learning for Inclusion, is one of a series of books, Creative Teaching/Creative Schools. The series is written for headteachers, curriculum co-coordinators and classroom practitioners who are interested in creative learning and teaching. Each book offers principles for changing classroom and school practice and stimulus material for CPD sessions. The emphasis is on practical, accessible studies from real schools, framed by jargon-free understandings of key issues and the principles found in more academic studies. Each volume contains six detailed ‘case studies’ written by practising teachers and other creative practitioners each describing a project they have introduced in their schools.

What is Creative Learning?

When educators talk about creative learning they generally mean teaching which 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 which 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 regarding 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.

Although the term ‘creative learning’ may be new and fashionable, it draws on older knowledge and values which have helped give it legitimacy and which frame its current meaning (see Sefton-Green et al. 2011 and Sefton-Green and Thomson 2010). We have expressed our understanding of Creative Learning as a series of ‘manifesto’ principles. They underpin all the volumes in this series. Students’ creative learning depends on a quality of education where:

• all young people from every kind of background are equally recognised as being creative
• learning engages young people in serious, meaningful, relevant, imaginative and challenging activities and tasks
• young people are respected for their knowledge, experience and capabilities
• young people have an individual and collective right to actively shape their education
• teachers have the power to support, adapt and evaluate learning experiences for students exercising their professional judgement
• schools invest in teacher learning
• schools build partnerships with creative individuals and organisations
• schools enable young people to participate fully in social and cultural worlds
• families and local communities can play an inspiring and purposeful role in young people’s learning.

Creative Learning for Inclusion

This book explores the role of creative learning in meeting special needs in the classroom. Edward Sellman outlines the practical challenges teachers working in both mainstream and special schools face in their classrooms and the conceptual issues which frame successful learning for young people with special needs. This book has collected together six accounts of creative approaches to inclusion, interspersed with questions to provoke discussion and debate. The case studies are written by teachers and creative practitioners, each one exploring a different theme: the importance of location and context, early years, sustainability of practice, the assessment of learning, creative uses of technology, and student participation.

References

Sefton-Green, J. and Thomson, P. (2010) Researching Creative Learning: Methods and Issues, London: Routledge.

Sefton-Green, J., Thomson, P., Jones, K. and Bresler, L. (eds) (2011) The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning, London: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Creative Approaches to Inclusion

Edward Sellman

This book is about two areas of creativity. It concerns the role creative learning can play in meeting a range of special needs but it also looks at how children with special needs can experience being creative. Whilst good practice doubtlessly exists in many places, there has been little written on this topic and this book aims to collate some exciting examples of how creativity has been applied to innovative and inclusive practice, which should help the reader begin to identify opportunities for development within their own setting. Given this aim, this book has a practical focus and is equally appropriate for mainstream and special school teachers, school leaders, professionals from children’s services as well as researchers. The book contains examples of practice in mainstream and special schools but each chapter is written with professionals working in both contexts in mind.

It is necessary at the outset to stress the diverse and contested nature of what is commonly referred to as special needs. The concept spans everything from a minor problem with reading to profound and multiple learning difficulties, sometimes with an accompanying physical disability. There is also a category of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties that may or may not be present with other conditions, as well as a gifted and talented group. As a result of this breadth it is not possible for this book to adequately capture the diversity of everybody with special needs. Instead, you will read an exploration of special needs issues in the form of six case studies, all of which have been involved in one way or another in some form of creative partnership and school change project.

As the ‘special needs’ population is not a homogenous group, no single strategy exists, creative or not, that will meet the needs of every learner with special needs. Even a group from within the spectrum, attracting a label such as being deaf, is unlikely to possess identical needs and characteristics (see Figure 7.1 (page 69) as an illustration). Take the debated term of dyslexia as another example; it is likely this term actually captures three distinct subgroups, those who have difficulty deciphering text, those with a phonological difficulty and those with more general organisational difficulties, and any mix of these three groups. Hence, if I were to introduce you to a student with dyslexia and ask you to support their needs, I’d expect you to be confused and quite rightly ask for more detailed information. The purpose of this book is not to dispense different strategies that work well with different groups. Instead, the six case study schools will share their accounts of steps they’ve taken to respond to various challenges from which others can learn. Each chapter includes reflective questions and further staff development ideas to aid this process.

Nonetheless, this book does seek to identify a number of themes that may help schools develop both more creative and inclusive practice. I present a review of literature, identifying and introducing matters to consider. These themes have much in common with those cutting across the series of books of which this text is just one volume. Issues of leadership, curriculum design and assessment, amongst others, are also relevant here and are incorporated into the issues covered by the six case study chapters. Seven themes transcending the chapters of this book and discussed within this introduction are:

• the issue of location, context and physical environment
• characteristics of creative teachers and inclusive classrooms
• a developmental view of the child with special needs and personalised learning
• creativity and the curriculum
• making learning visible
• the centrality of communication
• voice and empowerment.

The introduction will then conclude with some guidance on how to use this book.

The Issue of Location, Context and Physical Environment

The place in which a child is to be educated and how that physical space is going to be organised are key issues for meeting special needs. Readers may well be familiar with the difference between the concepts of integration (physical inclusion of children with special needs in the same building) and the more ambitious notion of inclusion (all children participating together in shared activities with common objectives). The merits and limitations of full inclusion against special education have been debated for well over 30 years and they continue to be so (see Hodkinson and Vickerman 2009). Thomas and Loxley (2001) and Rogers (2007) emphasise policy tensions affecting government legislation witnessed since the 1988 Education Act, which have championed integration on one hand but thwarted inclusive experiences on the other due to a curriculum designed to fit ‘all’ and little room for creative teaching due to rigid teaching and testing. A recent report by Ofsted (2006b) that posed the question ‘Does it matter where pupils are taught?’ concluded that although resourced provision fared most favourably, the issue of location is less important than other key variables such as the professionals working with young people, their skills and the types of relationships they build with their students. It also emphasised the lack of progress made over recent decades to identify and support students with special needs adequately, hence the dire need for creative approaches.

Aside from the issue of integration/inclusion, the nature of the environment also concerns how the needs of children with special needs are met. Many students with special needs benefit from safe, structured and predictable environments. This is common in schools applying such models as TEACCH (Mesibov, Shea and Schopler 2005) to meet the needs of learners on the autistic spectrum, which visually orders the physical space and timeline of the day, privatises workspace and sequences tasks to be completed. The needs of such learners, as framed by such learning environments, challenge teachers wanting to develop creative practice, which can flirt with risk and unpredictability (Chapter 5 explores these and similar issues). Other less structured contexts can be seemingly more conducive to creativity, allowing children to learn through free play and exploration and thus control the direction and pace of learning much more themselves.

Both issues of location and physical environment are examined in innovative and creative ways by several cases in this book. Chapter 3 shares its experience of a federated approach to education, where students from both special and mainstream schools have the opportunity for some co-education. In Chapters 4 and 6, the physical environment is utilised as a creative resource and both chapters capture how children with special needs interact differently with open and multi-sensory spaces respectively, alongside less structured activities. The CPD activities contained at the end of these chapters are also pertinent to schools and other contexts wishing to explore these issues.

Characteristics of Creative Teachers and Inclusive Classrooms

Given the challenges faced by those working with special needs individuals and groups, creative approaches and solutions often have to be found in order to meet students’ everyday needs and/or to translate conventional curriculum and teaching methods into formats and approaches that will ‘work’ with them. As a result, the special needs teacher has created or adapted a multitude of artefacts: the visual timetable to support the needs of children with autism or ADHD, a multitude of communicational aids, the sand tray to reinforce multi-sensory approaches to spelling and so on. Many of these ‘creations’ have often found their way into a mainstream context as what turns out to be effective for individuals with special needs is also often more generally effective (Lewis and Norwich 2005). The approaches underpinning the concept of a ‘Dyslexia Friendly Classroom’ (Pavey 2006) are one example of this, which incorporate structured and multi-sensory strategies into standard teaching methods that are suitable for all. Any teacher however, including those working with special needs, may be eager to enhance their understanding of creativity and their skills in applying and developing its potential.

One could say that the creative teacher is also the critical teacher and it is noteworthy how most of the case studies in this book highlight this characteristic. This does not mean creative teachers go around opposing every decision and criticising their students and colleagues. It simply means that such a teacher is a reflective practitioner and applies the skills of criticality to what and how they teach, and the broader context in which their practice takes place. Such a teacher understands that the field of special needs is often inhabited by controversies, such as how a developmental disorder is diagnosed and even differentiated from others. As a result they may well have a theoretical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• Image acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• 1. Series introduction
• 2. Creative approaches to inclusion
• 3. Creative school organisation and curriculum
• 4. Fostering creativity in the early years
• 5. Working with creative partnerships
• 6. Making learning visible
• 7. Engaging Deaf students through ICT
• 8. Creative approaches to promoting voice
• Index