Primary Arts Education

Contemporary Issues

David Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134988129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Primary arts - art, music, dance and drama - is gaining recognition as a subject, and support in the value it offers primary children. This text examines the problems and opportunities, faced by educators, resulting from recent educational reforms and the implementation of the National Curriculum.

1	A Cultural Perspective on Creative Primary Teaching and the Arts in the 1990s

Rod Mackenzie

This chapter considers the wider political and cultural context affecting primary education and offers some general background on creative teaching and the arts in the 1990s. Woods (1995, pp. 1-2) defines creative teaching as being ‘reflective’ rather than ‘routine’ involving ‘holistic perceptions’ of children and the curriculum and as being concerned with ‘the affective as well as the cognitive’ (p. 2) and the ‘whole child’. Woods also indicates that creative teachers tend to see knowledge as ‘indivisible’ and are deeply knowledgeable of ‘subject matter, pedagogy and pupils’. They have ‘adaptability and flexibility’, show both ‘flair’ and ‘discipline’ and are skilled in avoiding polarized views and resolving the dilemmas of everyday practice (Pollard and Tann, 1992). In the 1960s early pioneering versions of creative teaching associated with project work and the processes of the integrated arts were officially endorsed by the Plowden Report (CACE, 1967). By the 1990s, however, much had changed with the ‘Three Wise Men Report’ (Alexander et al., 1992) criticizing ‘Plowdenism’ and marking the fact that child-centred teaching had finally fallen from ‘official grace’ (Darling, 1994, p. 108). Creative teaching through the arts also lost its previous place in the renewed utilitarian climate in which attempts to strengthen instrumental and vocational rather than personal and liberal education aims were made. These changes are reviewed here in order to set creative teaching within a longer perspective after World War II and to relate the gradual politicization of primary education after Plowden to the wider general context of cultural change. Against the prevailing stereotypes, it is suggested that primary teachers in general responded to social and cultural change by becoming increasingly reflective rather than ideological, and that this professional development was post-modern rather than progressive. A brief case study of a project based in the arts is considered in this light, and creative teaching is connected to cultural reconstruction and a democratic future.

Creative Primary Education After the Second World War

Attempts to put change in primary education in perspective might recall Herbert Read’s (1943) Education Through Art because it synthesized so many pioneering insights and offered a vision of progress after the war. Read (1961, p. 8) gave very wide definition to ‘aesthetic education’ which he held could be advanced through the integrated arts, and argued that ‘in a democratic society the purpose of education should be to foster individual growth’ within the ‘social group’ (p. 9). He drew on John Dewey in advocating schooling for a democratic society and the project approach for primary education (p. 237). He also drew on Martin Buber’s ideas of the central place of creativity and communion in education sustained through the quality of relationships made possible by class rather than specialist teaching (p. 230). Sybil Marshall’s (1963) influential An Experiment in Education gave a practioner account of project work in this spirit in a rural primary school during the war and after. The arts were used to initiate a wide process of personal and social development through which opportunities to teach other skills and subjects were also pursued eclectically and holistically ‘so that like a symphony, it is only completely satisfactory as an entire whole’ (p. 172). Marshall tells us that she was ‘headteacher and all the staff combined’ (p. 14) and that there were about thirty children on roll some of whom were evacuees from the bombed London dockyard areas, others of whom had found the rural ‘stillness’ ‘a greater ordeal than German bombs, and had returned to Bethnal Green’ (p. 13). The school house had ‘neither gas nor electricity’ nor running water and she was six months pregnant. Despite this the achievements of the children across the curriculum were high, far beyond basic expectations. Marshall (1970, p. xi) later warned however against ‘carrying the methods too far’. Despite Plowden’s endorsement of the ‘one per cent’ of schools that were ‘leaders of educational advance’ (CACE, 1967, para. 270), Marshall saw that misunderstandings and false polarizations would ‘set back’ (ibid., p. xii) creative teaching and it was not long before this came about.

Plowden child-centredness was first subject to various criticisms in fact by academics and researchers (for example, Cox and Dyson, 1969; Rodgers, 1968; Peters, 1969; Sharp and Green, 1975; Bennett, 1976; Alexander, 1984; Edwards and Mercer, 1987). However this critique was in its turn overtaken by political allegations of progressivism under successive Labour and Conservative governments from the 1970s onwards. The subsequent political interventions of the 1980s and 1990s buried the earlier professional debates under both the legislation and the accompanying rhetoric. Kelly (1995, p. 166) identifies an attempt to ‘erase’ the language of Plowden, and to replace it with a populist discourse which mixed free market consumerism with the controls of the National Curriculum and testing in the 1980s. In the 1990s, however, policy failure led first to the Dearing Report (1993), and then to further problems associated with class sizes and standards. This left primary education, like many other aspects of life in the 1990s, subject to deep political and cultural uncertainty. Pollard et al. (1994) point out, therefore, that there is a need to ‘take stock’ (p. 2) of the situation if vision is to be renewed, and this is approached here by first considering the politics of primary education after Plowden and then relating this to the wider cultural context.

The Politicization of Primary Education and the Myth of Progressivism After Plowden

The allegations of progressivism that precipitated the politicization of primary education after Plowden masked underlying economic realities. The optimism of the 1960s in fact foundered in the oil crises of the 1970s. Plowden’s vision was overtaken by economic recession and ‘back to basics’ in education was initiated by Labour Prime Minister Callaghan’s Ruskin College speech in 1976. Alexander (1994) summarizes:

Despite the gap between progressivism in its pure form and what was actually going on in the majority of England’s primary schools, primary teachers as a profession had to endure a barrage of media and political misrepresentation as progressivism and therefore they themselves, became the scapegoat for the country’s educational and economic ills. This started shortly after Plowden, with the publication of the Black Papers, reached a peak in 1974-6 with the William Tyndale affair, Bennett’s apparent demonstration that traditional methods were more effective than progressive and Callaghan’s ‘Great Debate’, and then resurfaced in response to the publication of the Leed’s report in 1991 … Primary education had become politicized: and truth, as always, was the first casualty, (p. 28)

In truth there is little evidence of progressivism in primary schools in the research and reports after Plowden (Bennett, 1976; Bealing, 1972; Barker-Lunn, 1982 and 1984). Galton et al. (1980) found that the realities in the 1970s were quite the opposite since two thirds of primary curriculum time was spent on ‘fairly traditional’ basics and noted that ‘language and mathematics (or number) have formed the staple of the curriculum from the days of payment of results (1862)’ (p. 78). Simon (1981) therefore concluded that the progressive ‘revolution’ was a myth. Despite research findings however the myth of progressivism was recycled in the run up to the 1992 General Election, the ‘Three Wise Men Report’ was commissioned, and the Office for Standards in Education pursued the issue subsequently (Galton, 1995). However the ‘Three Wise Men’ themselves had recognized that:

The commonly held belief that primary schools, after 1967, were swept by a tide of progressivism is untrue. HMI in 1978, for example, reported that only 5 per cent of classrooms exhibited wholeheartedly ‘exploratory’ characteristics and that didactic teaching was still practised in three-quarters of them. (Alexander et al., 1992, para. 19)

Alexander (1995, p. 286) thus notes that it was only a minority who kept a ‘network’ of creative teaching alive in a discouraging climate. However there were further general professional developments in the late 1970s and 1980s. Blenkin and Kelly (1981) identified a mixture of elementary, child-centred and developmental traditions influencing practice at this time, an analysis broadly echoed by others (Richards, 1982; Golby, 1986). Alexander (1988, p. 167) thus described ‘competing imperatives’ operating which Mackenzie (1983) found created a ‘hybrid’ approach. Nias (1989) noted the holistic ‘craftmanship and artistry’ (p. 197) involved in balancing multiple expectations which intensified with the advent of the National Curriculum. Pollard et al. (1994, pp. 12-14) also indicate that through the 1980s the ‘strengthened professionalism’ (p. 14) of teachers was evident and that this was associated with the growth of ‘reflective teaching’ (Pollard and Tann, 1992), which will be considered later in the chapter. Pollard et al.’s research into the effects of the incoming National Curriculum in the early 1990s found that ‘about one fifth’ (p. 101) of teachers at Key Stage 1 employed ‘creative’ (p. 99) strategic responses associated with reflective teaching. The need for reflection if the hybrid mixed condition of primary education is to be mediated and enacted remains clear, as is the need for wider reflection on the political and cultural context (Zeichner, 1995).

The ‘back to basics’ theme also developed further important social and cultural layers in the 1990s which had been lying dormant. Traditional cultural concerns on the Right led to pressure for National Curriculum subject rewrites from 1990 onwards. Ball (1994, p. 7) identified an increasingly ‘authoritarian’ and nationalistic curriculum emerging and warned that ‘political’ rather than ‘economic’ reasons underlay this development. This climate was initially fuelled by the Conservative General Election victory in 1992, and then by uncertainties created by economic recession, European Union and the ending of the Cold War. The murder of the pre-school child James Bulger in 1993, and the headteacher Philip Lawrence in 1995 added further dimensions of moral panic. Kelly (1995, p. 151) identifies a preoccupation with ‘law and order’ developing in the mid 1990s, as education policy showed reemergent concerns with moral, social and cultural cohesion and control (NCC, 1993; OFSTED, 1994), which were pursued through initiatives from the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority (for example, Tate, 1996).

In summary it can be concluded that in reality primary teachers were more conservative ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1. A Cultural Perspective on Creative Primary Teaching and the Arts in the 1990s
• 2. Making Sense with Stories
• 3. Beginnings, Middles and Ends: Whose Realities?
• 4. Controlling the Wild Things: A Critical Consideration of National Curriculum Documentation for Reading at Key Stages 1 and 2
• 5. The Glue That Sticks: Quality Assurance and Art Coordination in the Primary School
• 6. Hidden Strengths: The Case for the Generalist Teacher of Art
• 7. Educating the Human Spirit: An Approach to the Spiritual Dimension of Primary Arts Education
• 8. Using the Arts to Explore Issues of Loss, Death and Bereavement
• 9. Music Technology in the Primary Classroom
• 10. Against the Odds: Drama After the National Curriculum
• 11. Dance Teaching in the Primary School: Voices from the Classroom
• Notes on Contributors
• Index