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Memorandum submitted by Professor Robert Pope, School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University
Summary Creative Partnerships are placed theoretically and historically in relation to: 1. my area of expertise and work on creativity 2. a review of what 'Creativity is (not)' 3. a historical interlude on 'Originality' and 'Invention' 4. the need for a fresh concept such as 'Re . . . Creation' 5. clusters of key terms 6. what next
1. Area of expertise: my recent and ongoing work I write as someone with a strong academic as well as practical commitment to creativity, teaching and learning, chiefly but not exclusively from the perspective of higher education. For example, as well as being the author of the publications below, I am the co-convenor of an Arts & Humanities Research Council seminar series on 'Creativity in Everyday and Literary Language', a National Teaching Fellow, a British Council adviser, and a Professor of English at Oxford Brookes University. Also relevant is the fact that I am the father of four children (ages 15-25) who have all been through or are currently in state schools.
My comments on the Creative Partnerships are based on formal institutional involvement with them through the Westminster Institute of Education at Oxford Brookes University. Many people are offering witness testimonies to particular projects. I shall take a different line. As a historian as well as theorist of creativity, I shall comment on the principles in play and what I judge to be their especial timeliness at the present moment. This will help set up a general framework in which other people's more specific observations may be placed. This will also help signal the nature of my involvement in the National Audit of the Creative Partnership scheme as a whole, without anticipating particular outcomes.
So as not to clutter up the document with unnecessary notes, what follows should be read in the context of my own recent work on the theory and history of notions of creativity at large (items a) and b)) and on pedagogy that combines creative and critical approaches to the teaching of language and literature in particular (items c) and d)). Much more detailed argument and references can be found in these.
a) Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, Practice, London & New York: Routledge, 2005.
b) Rob Pope, 'The Return of Creativity: Common, Singular and Otherwise', Language and Literature, Volume 14, Number 4, 2005, pp. 376-389.
c) Rob Pope, 'Rewriting Texts, Reconstructing the Subject: Work as Play on the Critical-Creative Interface' in Teaching Literature, ed. Tanya Agathocleous and Ann Dean, London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 105-204.
d) Rob Pope, 'Critical-Creative Rewriting' in Teaching Creative Writing, ed. Graeme Harper, London & New York: Continuum, 2006, pp. 130-146.
My work on the subject should be read in conjunction with the initial defining documents for the Creative Partnerships scheme and, latterly, Shakuntala Banaji, Andrew Burn and David Buckingham, The Rhetorics of Creativity: A Review of the Literature, Arts Council / Creative Partnerships, London, December 2006.
2. What creativity is (not) Firstly, then, I would like to set the record straight - or at least get it the right way up - with a few pithy definitions of what creativity is and is not. All of these are pretty well expressed in the formal aims of the Creative Partnerships scheme; and most of them, as far as I can see from the testimony of colleagues and others to date, it is actually achieving in some shape or form. Common misconceptions are the big problem so I shall begin with those:
Creativity is NOT . . . · about art or the arts in a narrow sense, or even 'creative writing' or 'creative practice' as such · the exclusive property or absolute priority of any single discipline · a matter of individual geniuses working in splendid or miserable isolation · a single thing, object, product, commodity, concept or even 'idea' as such · a 'bolt-on', 'add-on', 'optional extra' or even something that can be 'value added' · mere novelty or sheer originality in the sense of never-been-done-before-in-any-shape-or-form or as if 'creation from nothing' · what only special people do rarely and everyone else can never do
Creativity IS . . . · about the arts (fine, applied . . . of living) and sciences (pure, applied, human . . . of life) in so far as all and any of them involve kinds of critical and creative 'making' (ars/artis) and analytic and synthetic ways of 'knowing' (scientia) · inherently inter- and multi-disciplinary in tendency, even while usually beginning with some specific material, issue, method or apparatus · what people do for and with other people as well as themselves, in dialogue and exchange with others even if not explicitly collaborating or co-operating (though often they are) · an interrelation, process, change, exchange, combination of ways of saying, seeing, doing, being, becoming that is reckoned to be fresh and valuable · what emerges out of - often as - a fresh and invigorating sense of community, culture, belonging (including the longing for such things) · to do with conditions, contexts and relations that encourage and support, stimulate and extend in more or less sustainable ways - not just one-off or once-and-for-all · a matter of new-old tensions and fresh-familiar dynamics, 'creation from something else', 're . . . creation', with the emphasis on the '...'(see below) · something special about what anyone can do (be, feel, become) at least some of the time - even if not everyone all the time
Through its school-centred and problem- or topic-based approach, and in so far as it represents a genuine coming together of teachers, managers, creative practitioners and students, Creative Partnerships has gone a long way towards dispelling archaic and inappropriate notions of what 'Creativity is not'. Indeed, in the best instances it has enacted and embodied the above definition of what 'Creativity is' in exemplary and very various ways. But such logic is still essentially binary. Though initially convenient - and it continually needs to be reaffirmed, it only gets us so far. The next step is to get beyond 'creativity' as such. To do that, we need some other terms and we need to put on some other historical and theoretical lenses. /...
The following are offered as ways of recasting - and casting forward - the creativity agenda. Some are already there in what has been done through Creative Partnerships. . Some were potentially there. Some are yet to be undertaken and reframed as such. But first . . .
3. A historical interlude
A remarkable but rarely remarked fact! The abstract noun 'creativity' has only been around in English since about 1875. According to the OED, it seems chiefly to have been introduced to distinguish a specifically secular and human kind of creative activity from that of God and more or less divinely inspired artists (for which and whom the preferred and older term was 'creation'). Further, also according to the OED and Webster's, 'creativity' only started to be applied to all sorts of day-to-day activities (from advertising to handicrafts - as well as 'creative writing') from the late 1920s and early 1930s onwards, initially in the US. That was when and where the term first took what might be called its currently dominant 'democratising' turn. So obviously there were - and still are - all sorts of other terms (INSPIRATION, ENTHUSIASM, IMAGINATION, GENIUS, TALENT, ORIGINALITY, INVENTION, for example) that needed - and still need - to be fed into the intellectual mix to make it good and strong and supple.
These are changes and ranges of meaning that have profound and continuing cultural significance. So much so, in fact, that we had perhaps better talk of 'originality' in terms of a far richer and deeper 'old-new', 'back-to-the-future' dynamic; and conceive of 'invention' as turning on a 'found-made' axis, referring simultaneously or by turns to something that in some sense already 'is' and yet is also there to be 'brought into being' -- an act of 're-cognition', perhaps, and in every sense 'realisation'. Such complicating cultural and historical issues often get overlooked in the currently welcome but usually one-sided preoccupation with creativity as something exclusively 'novel' or 'innovative'. (There are big cross-cultural dimensions too, for in many ways these are distinctly Western as well as Modern preoccupations.) Certainly they get drowned out by casual appeals to 'creativity' as a kind of 'open sesame' or universal panacea, at worst, a merely fashionable buzz term shortly to pass its sell-by date. This tendency was stirringly countered by All our Futures (the 'Robinson report', 1999) and has been given the lie to by the main principles and much of the best work in the Creative Partnership scheme.
My own contribution to the creativity debate, for what it's worth, can be summed up in the word 'RE . . . CREATION'. In fact, this is one word that breaks into two and in principle can be opened up to make many more. It is an attempt to register the fact that there is always a gap between the old and the new, the already familiar and the less so. This gap constantly needs to be jumped or bridged afresh -- not just again. Or at least it does if it is not merely to be filled in or fallen into. Put another way, and the whole point is that there are always other ways of putting not-quite-identical things, 're. . . creation' can be grasped as a working model of a kind of similarity-difference, repetition-change engine. Crucially, the emphasis is on the suspension dots '. . .'. And one of the things they requires us to 're . . . create' is the concept of creativity itself. Her, by way of provocation and problem-posing, are just a few of the many possible gestures in that direction. Readers - as writers - should add their own:
5. Clusters of FURTHER KEY TERMS organised by PREFIXES
CREATIVITY RE . . . CREATED will involve some of the following . . .
-act -formation -relate -action INTER -face TRANS -ition ('between') -disciplinary ('across') -lation -vention -ferable
-create -operate -cycle CO -llaborate RE -flect ('with') -(m)pete ('afresh') -form -(n)flict -late -(n)sensus
6. What next
For me, briefly, the important thing is to extend and transform ('re. . . create') the Creative Partnership scheme not only further (and freshly) into primary and secondary education but also into Further Education and Higher Education. The above is therefore offered both with the present scheme in mind, retrospectively, and future potential schemes, prospectively. It sketches some theoretical and historical parameters, and suggests some trajectories in which I feel things ought to move from here.
July 2007 |