Memorandum submitted by Malcolm Ross, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter

 

Executive Summary

The Creative Partnerships project, despite its many successes, was flawed in conception and has failed to deliver on its primary objective: the encouragement of creativity across the curriculum. Its basic mistake was to over-identify creativity in schools with the arts. Whereas the arts are a special case of creativity, and artists might well prove exemplary creative practitioners, they operate by distinctive conventions and to highly specific ends, i.e., the giving of artistic pleasure. Creativity for children and young people in schools, more broadly understood, comes down to learning how to have one's own ideas, in whatever subject one is studying. Creativity is a general human impulse but manifests itself through the mastery of highly specific, non-transferable skills and understandings. The National Curriculum is now being modified to take account of creativity as part of a more general recognition that children need to enjoy learning. But creativity is about much more than having fun. It is at the root of human adaptation. Curriculum reforms and re-training programmes for teachers will need to be radical and comprehensive if the full potential of personal and institutional creativity is to be realized. The memorandum below proposes a practical model for converting schools into 'hubs of creativity'. Creativity is defined against its opposite. The model restores the dialogue between innovation and continuity, change and stability, the interests of the individual and those of the collective, all of which the National Curriculum has so disastrously silenced.

 

 

 

1 Creative Partnerships

 

1.1 Creative Partnerships was devised in response to the recommendations of the Report by the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE), published in 1999. The Report's thrust was to re-position the arts in the curriculum as the principal means of delivering 'culture' and 'creativity'. The notion of bringing artists into schools was of course not new, but given the degrading and depletion of arts teaching as a result of the changes introduced by the National Curriculum, it seemed a sensible way of repairing the damage and edging the arts back towards the main stream. It also chimed with other changes prompted by Government in the management of schools and the delivery of the curriculum, changes aimed to maximize available resources and open up the teaching profession to the principle of partnership.

 

1.2 Whilst the Creative Partnerships project has not been without its successes (see OFSTED Report) especially in helping hard-pressed schools in difficult circumstances to raise their sights and in lifting morale, its critics would argue that it has always lacked a coherent underlying philosophy, and more particularly, has been inadequately documented, monitored and evaluated, given the scale of funding poured into the scheme. My own view (in some measure confirmed by the same OFSTED Report) is that the policy of identifying creativity more or less exclusively with artists and the arts has been both a serious conceptual and practical mistake, diminishing the impact of an otherwise important initiative. Creativity is an impulse common to everyone and not particular to artists: it also marks originality and innovation across the whole gamut of human endeavour. The CP project has by no means proved either that its approach delivers creativity across the curriculum or that partnerships between teachers and artists have significantly improved the quality of arts provision in schools. I believe these to be two separate if related issues requiring clear differentiation and specific strategies. The present Inquiry is advised to insist upon making this distinction before going on to identify the special expertise that arts educators might have to pass on to their non-arts colleagues.

 

1.3 I find it regrettable that the recently commissioned inquiry into creativity in education by Paul Roberts and his colleagues ('Nurturing Creativity in Young People', 2006) chose to identify itself so closely with the thinking and pronouncements of NACCCE. Similarly, the decision to pack the inquiry with Creative Partnerships personnel calls into question its basic provenance and integrity. The debate about culture and creativity in education now needs to move beyond NACCCE and Roberts. The threat to the prospects of real change lies in the fact that the current re-writing of the National Curriculum is probably in the hands of the very people who devised it in the first place and have been its enforcers ever since. The danger is that we shall be fobbed off with a make-over rather than entering upon a radically new vision; that we shall be obliged to settle for a trivialized account of creativity rather than the real thing.

 

2 Creativity in Education

 

2.1 Discussions about creativity tend to be bedevilled by empty definitions or impenetrable generalisations when they are not rooted in the principle of context. This has nowhere been more evident than in discussions about creativity in education. My case is that creativity in education is a special case, and a clear and productive discussion will only arise from a proper appreciation of the educational context that must inform it. Essentially, we wish to know what part creativity should play in an account of a balanced and relevant curriculum and what teachers should be doing to deliver it. At the heart of the discussion will be some kind of an account of creativity as a universal human impulse and its application across the whole field of human knowing and being as it informs the design and implementation of the curriculum in schools.

 

2.2 Creative learning in many ways defines itself against the conventions of traditional schooling: the receptive and systematic accumulation of knowledge and skills, with capacity tied to age and subject matter broken down and graded according to an abstract and quantative schema. The emphasis has been upon so-called basic skills and a graduated induction of the student into the prevailing culture. There is nothing wrong with this within a balanced curriculum but the National Curriculum was never a balanced one. Since the introduction of the National Curriculum and its attendant regime of continuous testing, a mechanistic (Gradgrind) model of learning has become ever more deeply entrenched in schools. To be fair to the Creative Partnerships project one of its aims was to ameliorate the more damaging effects of this policy and where it has proved successful it has largely been in restoring more informal relationships and getting schools to 'lighten up', become more playful and people-friendly. No mean achievement. What remains in doubt however has been the capacity of the project to embed the principle of creativity across the curriculum: all too often the arts-based creative curriculum has been perceived as a tiny ghetto of joy in a big mad world.

 

2.3 So what is creativity in education? It has two aspects, both equally important. Firstly, it is a distinctive method of teaching and learning that defines the style of a school's approach to its work and reflects or embodies its philosophy. In so far as schools are these days pretty much tied to the philosophy embodied in the National Curriculum, they will rightly be suspicious of anything that might be read as bucking the trend. If creative methods are to develop in schools then the National Curriculum must give the lead - and that means it has to be radically revised (see note 6.1 below). Secondly, creativity is a universal human impulse that in many ways accounts for the adaptive success of the species. It manifests itself in many familiar ways: as curiosity, as experimentation, as innovation, as the readiness to take risks, as imagination, persistence, laughter, lunacy and the drive to autonomy and self actualization - finally, creativity is our unquenchable desire for freedom. Creativity in education is not a set of techniques (e.g., in 'lateral thinking'); creativity is a cast of mind. A creative education is raised on the twin principle that creativity is both a spontaneous impulse ready to be tapped in each of us and that it is best fostered by example: for children to behave creatively they must be in creative relationship with their teachers. In other words, creativity in schools begins with the teachers; the pupils will not need to be asked twice (see note 6.2 below).

 

2.4 It must be said, however, that, though tough-minded creative people might seem to thrive in adversity, creativity as a gift of life cannot survive in a radically hostile environment: barren homes and the kind of mechanistic school regime associated with the National Curriculum, are anathema to it. To move towards a creative curriculum we must re-conceive the educational project, not in a way that pits the traditional emphasis on useful skills training and practical knowledge against personal expression and learning as play, but in a way that integrates these two apparently irreconcilable approaches. A model exists that would effect such a reconciliation and that would place creativity at the heart of the whole curriculum: I shall be introducing it later in this paper (see section 4 below). The model proposes an approach to learning that encourages the development of personal autonomy, a profound sense of attachment to others and to team-work, a hunger for learning to last a lifetime, and a global sensitivity to the natural and cultural environment. In aligning capability with opportunity (see Amartya Sen) it also provides the basis for the individual's induction into the world of work. Finally it is a scheme that lends itself to effective assessment through the deployment of a wide range of formative and summative techniques.

 

2.5 A depth account of creativity in education (see M Citzentmihayli) must pay attention to the creative personality of the Individual, the Domain (curriculum subject or discipline) and the Field (of creative application or practice). The Individual will have a personality more or less well endowed for and schooled in creative thinking; the Domain will fund that thinking; The Field will provide the opportunity for having creative ideas where it matters. Creative practices are ways of having ideas in specific Fields of practice (see note 6.3 below). Books like 'Unleash Your Creativity: 52 Brilliant Ideas for Creative Genius' are not what we are talking about here. Creativity teachers bring understandings of the Individual, Domain and Field together in a coherent and comprehensive pedagogy. This is their expertise and must be their training. They must be freed from the strait-jacket of the National Curriculum to offer their own curriculum - as a gift to their students (see note 6.4 below).

 

3 The Role of the Arts in Creativity Education

 

3.1The singling out of artists to lead the charge on creativity in the curriculum is based on several false premises and has resulted in missed opportunities and misdirected energies. Creativity in the arts is a special case of a general human impulse. As we have seen above it is funded by specialist knowledge of a specific Domain and receives expression in a particular Field of practice. Whereas having musical, theatrical, choreographic or sculptural ideas may all be instances of creative activity, they are only possible as media-specific manifestations. This in not to say that there are no such persons as artistic polymaths, nor that different arts might not work inter-actively or combine to mutual effect with other Domains. However, as instances of creativity, they are Domain and Field specific. In the same way, and more obviously, new thinking in mathematics, physics, anthropology, and philosophy while all equally attracting the epithet 'creative' (on the judgement of experts within each Domain and Field), are to be understood as special cases of a universal phenomenon. None can claim a special authority in creative thinking over any other, or might reasonably be taken as best suited to exemplify creative thinking as a generic phenomenon. To become a creative scientist you need to be taught by one. If you are interested in producing a generation of creative scientists you would be well advised to make creativity the defining ethos and pervasive principle of the prevalent pedagogy.

 

3.2 That said, the so-called 'creativity' of artists has something of the status of folklore in our culture. The link between the two has been reinforced in the public mind by the re-branding of the arts and media within the national economy as the 'Creative Industries': a dubious coinage. Most of our creation myths depict the divine creator as an artist or craftsman fashioning the world and its occupants. With the Renaissance emerged the notion of the artist as genius, mystically inspired, an idea further elaborated by the Romantic Movement in the C19th. Modernism gave a new twist to the notion of the artist as innovator by demanding that art be entertaining, shocking and new. Little surprise perhaps that it was to the art world that the policy makers turned for a lead on creativity and culture in an effort to revive seriously under-performing communities and schools. And in so far as authenticity and making new are intrinsic to the idea of art, I believe arts educators may indeed have a lot to contribute to a wider understanding of the nature of and prospects for creativity across the curriculum. But I distinguish between arts educators (teachers, academics, researchers) and professional artists (actors, dancers, painters, musicians) here. What is needed is an effective arts pedagogy informing continuous arts provision in schools rather than the occasional 'treat' of a live visit from a practising artist. Having said that, artists can make a huge contribution in terms of inspiration, energy and innovation. A fully understood pedagogy in the arts has much by way of insight and understanding into creativity education to offer to colleagues working in other disciplines. However, every specialist teacher, in the arts and everywhere else, must think their own creative curriculum through, in their own terms and for themselves.

3.3 It has been argued that the Creative Partnerships project, far from either liberating the curriculum as a whole or licensing artists to release the expressive potential of the school community, has proved a device which, while paying lip service to reform keeps potentially disruptive energies on a very tight rein.

3.4 The Greeks gave the word techne to the aspect of material productivity in arts practice. For the notion of mental creativity and inspiration by the muses they needed another word: poiesis. These two notions taken together define the particularity of the arts and give us what distinguishes the role of the arts within the creative curriculum. The arts focus on the cultural forms of human expression (signs) as manifestations of the individual and collective psyche and its attachment to truth and beauty. In her book 'Ariel's Gift' - on the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - Erica Wagner says, 'The nature of art is infinite'. Infinite, indispensable and absurd. The German philosopher H G Gadamer spells out the three principles defining the special nature of creativity in the arts: play, symbol and festival. Culture and creativity while inclusive of the arts are neither of them to be exclusively identified with them. Requiring the arts to function in schools as the paradigm case and principal promoter of creativity and culture has been a profound mistake, at the same time diminishing the arts and failing creativity education.

3.5 Art Creativity

Expressive language Cognition

Communication A cast of mind

Symbolic order (aesthetic) Having ideas of one's own

 

3.6 The present Inquiry should immediately be followed by an Inquiry into the Arts in the Curriculum.

 

4. Creativity in Education: a practical curriculum model

 

4.1 There is space here only to give an outline introduction to the model, even so, I hope to show its potential for delivering creativity in the classroom. Needless to say I should welcome the opportunity of expanding on the sketch provided in what follows and to make proper reference to the research out of which it has arisen. The model in its original form was first proposed by Rom Harre in his book 'Personal Meaning'. It is a dialogical model rather than a technical one, and brings together two dimensions of human experience: the private/public and the individual/collective. Harre sees himself modelling what he calls 'identity projects', and these he describes as creative, 'expressive' acts. I initially adopted and adapted his model as a way of presenting the creative arts curriculum (see my 'Assessing Achievement in the Arts'); its earlier application by Harre himself ties it to the creative process in life, making it applicable across all Domains and Fields of creative activity, when that activity is understood as broadly expressive and concerned with a continuously evolving sense of personal identity.

 

4.2 The model takes the form of a two-dimensional matrix understood to map a cyclical process:

PUBLIC

 

Q4 Publication Q1/Q5 Conventionalization

 

INDIVIDUAL + COLLECTIVE

 

Q3 Transformation Q2 Appropriation

PRIVATE

 

4.2 The creative cycle, as represented by the matrix, has four phases and brings four sub-processes into play.

Q1 Conventionalization is the process by which the person accommodates to the cultural world into which they are born - the world of conventions, customs, values and practices which are their cultural given or endowment. If we take language development as our example, this is the language stock. In arts and science it is the stock of knowledge, historical artefacts and received practices. In terms of personal creativity, nothing comes of nothing: the richer the endowment the greater the scope for creativity.

Q2 Appropriation is the process of assimilating the cultural stock to the individual personality. In language terms it is to find one's own voice. In the arts and sciences it is to identify one's own style, preferences, tastes and expertise.

Q3 Transformation is at the heart of the creative process of 'having ideas' - and includes, among other things, understanding the way imagination and the unconscious work in generating new thinking. It is Winnicott's 'potential space', the site of Gadamer's notion of play as a dissolving of rational and conventional boundaries, Sheldrake's 'chaos', Oakeshott's 'conversation'. To work with and assess the student in such a space the teacher needs Sterne's techniques of 'attunement' - and unfailing sympathy. As language acquisition this is where language opens itself up to the possibility of articulating ideas of one's own.

Q4 Publication means sharing our ideas and submitting our thinking to public evaluation. Here is where we take the stage and speak up for ourselves, take our place as members of the wedding. Here, also, the world of education meets the world of work. Where our creativity proves valid then our ideas are absorbed into the continuously evolving and self-replenishing cultural stock (Q5): sometimes making a significant historical difference (as work of enduring worth) - more often as a committed participant in the creative community.

 

4.3 For the model to function as an account of the creative process, the individual must cycle continuously through all its phases. Much in traditional education short-cuts the cycle, for example by omitting phases 2 and 3 and simply shuttling the student between Q1 and Q4, thereby, incidentally, ruling out altogether Q5 (i.e., the distinctive nature of the cycle as a continuous and endlessly self-renewing creative process, a process now being described in cognitive science as autopoiesis).

4.4 The creative curriculum, with its attendant pedagogy and assessment practices, is derived from the questions raised about learning and teaching in each of the five phases (see my books, 'Assessing Achievement in the Arts' and 'Evaluating Education Programmes in Arts Institutions'). This is the work that has to be done by the task force charged with revising the National Curriculum, and it had to be done in such a way as to restore the dialogue between innovation and continuity, change and stability, and the interests of the individual and of the collective.

 

4.5 By virtue of the fact that creativity is central to their work, arts educators may well be in a special position to influence the shift to a creativity-centred curriculum. But for their example and expertise to be effective there has to be a radical commitment to change throughout the system and across the whole curriculum.

 

5 Conclusions and Recommendations related to The Inquiry's Terms of Reference

 

5.1 Creativity is the capability and opportunity to have ideas of one's own. (2)

5.2 There is insufficient evidence to claim that present initiatives have had a positive impact on the creativity of teachers. (1)

5.3 A shift to creativity would have profound implications for the training of heads, teachers and cultural animators and would require a complete re-think of professional training programmes. It goes without saying that it would have a similar impact on the National Curriculum in schools which would need to be completely overhauled. But because creativity is in every child's and teacher's blood, we would be pushing at an open door. (2)

5.4 Encouraging creativity in the home would mean a public strategy for re-educating parents and care workers. (2)

5.5 The arts have a special contribution to make to creative education through their commitment to play, imagination, authenticity and self-expression. The arts urgently need, and deserve, a Select Committee Inquiry of their own. Included within such an Inquiry would be the 'partnership' role of the professional artist and cultural animator in arts education. (3)

5.6 Career opportunities in the Creative Industries will add relevance to the creative curriculum: but steps must be taken to identify creative opportunities across the whole employment field. (3)

5.7 Too little hard evidence is currently available to make the claim with any confidence that a creative approach to teaching and learning improves basic skills across the board. Experience and common sense suggest this would be the case. However, a serious commitment to research and evidence gathering is urgently needed. (1)

5.8 Again, we need to gather much more hard evidence if the link between creativity, motivation and learning across the curriculum is to be firmly established. A thorough study of existing research should be undertaken to establish the framework for such a project. (1)

5.9 Acknowledging and assessing creativity would essentially mean re-jigging assessment procedures to allow room for the full deployment of existing formative and qualitative methodologies and the devising of new ones. The practices of student self-assessment and 'negotiated' assessment must be further explored: my own work on the 'reflective conversation' (reported in 'Assessing Achievement in the Arts') could be relevant here. (4)

5.10 To embed creativity in the school curriculum and the philosophy of education in this country the National Curriculum must be re-written and the current regime of testing and assessment radically revised if not actually abandoned. Tinkering will not be enough. What is needed is new thinking: a New National Curriculum. (4)

5.11 The way to link creativity in the classroom with the wider world of work and leisure is through a radically re-conceived and re-configured Creative Partnerships programme. (4)

 

6 Notes

 

6.1 There are strong indications that a re-think of the National Curriculum is already under way. Among other initiatives, QCA is reviewing Key Stage 3 National Curriculum (2007); there is the influential Christine Gilbert's Personalised Learning Report: '2020 Vision'; QCA has plans to review KS 2; GCSEs are to be revised and new 14-19 diplomas proposed. All these moves could provide fertile soil for the kind of approach argued for in this paper, but in themselves are unlikely to be radical enough.

6.2 The TES 8 June 2007 reports the new 'creative' curriculum emerging in primary schools, encouraged by the Government's publication 'Excellence and Enjoyment: A Strategy for Primary Schools' (2003). The TES comments: "The reason for the Government's change of heart was clear enough. As Ofsted points out in a series of reports on schools that have adopted the new flexible approach, it works. In short, schools that have created their own curriculum are often very successful.... It is common sense that teachers will be more enthusiastic about lessons they have devised than about a curriculum handed down to them by officialdom. That enthusiasm means interested and motivated pupils. Innovation leads to inspiration."

6.3 In a paper called 'Shakespeare's Sister' delivered in Cambridge in 1928, Virginia Woolf describes what it means to 'have an idea of one's own'. It is a long passage but so fine it is worth quoting in full.

"Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please - it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with colour - even it seemed burnt with heat - of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders.

There one might have sat the clock round, lost in thought. Thought - to call it by a prouder name than it deserved - had let its line down onto the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until - you know the little tug - the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line; and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass, how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say.

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind - put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still."

She got up and wandered off across the lawn, only to be confronted by an angry 'beadle' who instructed her to keep off the grass - "which sent my little fish into hiding". The idea-fish in question would seem to have been the feminist impulse that inspired her highly influential 'A Room of One's Own'.

 

6.4 The book everyone interested in creativity should be reading is "The Gift' by Lewis Hyde.

 

 

 

 

June 2007