Memorandum submitted by Dr Shelby A. Wolf, Professor and President's Teaching Scholar, the University of Colorado, Boulder

 

Executive Summary

 

1. For the past four years, I have been conducting research into Creative Partnerships in two sites in England to look closely at how language, attention, inspiration, and collaboration within two schools in England changed through artistic partnership.  With my colleague Shirley Brice Heath-the Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at Stanford University-our research was initially outlined in two sets of booklets. One set of booklets reports on Visual Learning in the Community School (Creative Partnerships, 2004) while another set concentrates on Dramatic Learning in the Primary School (Creative Partnerships, 2005). Since that initial inquiry, I have continued this work on my own, and my latest publications are The mermaid's purse: Looking closely at young children's art and poetry (Language Arts, 2006) as well as a monograph entitled A playwright's life for me! Young children's language & learning through drama (Creative Partnerships, 2006). All four of these publications are available on my website at http://www.colorado.edu/education/faculty/shelbywolf/ or by clicking on the links above. All four (as well as three upcoming publications) will be described in brief in the sections on Factual Information and Recommendations for Action below.

 

2. Mark Turner argues, '"To have a cognitively modern human mind is to be robustly artful.'"  But the question is how this is developed. My research suggests that children gain much when given sustained opportunities to engage with the arts including:

 

• extensive practice with technical tools under the direct guidance of a professional;

• activation and expansion of creative thinking integral to the arts as well as literacy, numeracy, sciences, and ICT;

• development of cognitive strategies essential to holding sustained attention and internalizing the process of working from initial idea through planning to project execution;

• emotional maturation that comes from carrying a project from beginning to completion with ongoing critique; and

• most important, heightened opportunities for language development as children learn to communicate their creative ideas in increasingly sophisticated ways.

 

3. Teachers and artists also gain in the process because:

 

• teacher learning is inextricably linked to student learning, especially if professional development is centered on addressing and filling the gaps between aspirations for pupil achievement and ultimate pupil performance;

• teachers and artists learn best how to address these gaps within long-term collaborations;

• professional development is often most effective when teachers and artists stretch into more expansive ways of thinking about their content with colleagues who have varying kinds of expertise; and

• in truly collaborative partnerships, the stream of learning must flow both ways-from artists to teachers as well as from teachers to artists. Critically, all this learning is centered on children's creative learning and language development.

 

4. In sum, throughout a substantial period of time, both adult and child learners gain habits-linguistic, cognitive, and emotive-that they take with them well beyond their work in the arts.

 

Brief Introduction to the Submitter

 

5. I am a professor of education and an award-winning teacher and educational scholar.  In 2006, I was invited to join the ranks of the University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholars -a guild of faculty from all three CU campuses who excel in teaching, scholarship, and research. Their mission is to endorse teaching excellence throughout the university. My research centers on children's language and learning through engagement in literature and collaborative as well as creative modes of expression-discussion, writing, the visual arts, and drama.  My most recent book, Interpreting Literature with Children (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), portrays my close work with teachers as co-researchers in the study of children's literary learning.  I have worked within numerous school-change programs to validate the perspectives of teachers who undertake enquiry into how learning works in their classrooms.  I am a senior author of Houghton Mifflin English, a textbook series devoted to helping children improve as writers.  With Shirley Brice Heath, I wrote The Braid of Literature: Children's Worlds of Reading (Harvard University Press, 1992).

6. Based on my expertise in children's literary worlds, I have been appointed senior editor of the first Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature, which will be a volume assembling chapters by a group of illustrious, international scholars (in preparation, Routledge, 2009)

7. In addition to my work with Creative Partnerships in England, I have recently begun a new project sponsored by the Tate Modern Museum on the impact of artistic instruction on children from some of the most economically deprived areas in London. I will follow the same 12 children over a period of three years as they receive instruction in the visual arts as well as opportunities to study the art in the Tate gallery. My work will focus on the '"imaginative continuum'" in young children and how that can be stretched to even greater capacity not only through viewing the work of professional artists, but also through their own creative endeavors. 

Factual Information: Results from the Research

 

8. Working with a government initiative that highlights children's creative potential is a unique opportunity, especially because the arts play a much smaller role in American schooling. When we think of the arts in school, we too often think of creativity as playful and relatively undisciplined. Although the arts welcome imaginative play, they also call for serious cognitive work, as children learn to plan, problem-solve, and ultimately produce a final product. Most important, the arts offer children opportunities for serious seeing. The research pieces offered below summarize just how this is accomplished.

 

Visual Learning in the Community School

 

9. This set of booklets narrates the first year of the study, following the four-, five-, and six-year- olds at Hythe Community School in Kent. Although the project covered a range of artistic encounters, the children's work with visual artist Roy Smith made a deep impact on their creative thinking. Roy worked with small groups of students, emphasizing the attention needed to draw complex objects, from a self-portrait to a sheep's skull. Each lesson featured a professional artist's work, then children were instructed to create a drawing before progressing to paint or sculpture. Roy felt that artists need to '"draw with detail'" before tackling more vibrant media. Roy's emphasis on complex objects demonstrated his belief that intricate shapes could command children's attention, and within the first few months of the study the children went from drawing for less than 10 minutes to attending to the details of their drawings for over an hour.

 

10. Roy repeatedly emphasized that art is all about looking, for as children work to create art, they also practice paying attention. It wasn't enough for a child to stab at his paper with his pencil to depict the spots on a banana; instead, he needed to capture the unique shapes of the splotches. It wasn't sufficient for a child to draw her eye as a circle; instead, she had to pay attention to the spoke of lines emanating from the pupil. In one of his sessions, Roy had the four-year-olds draw a figure on their own. Then he gave them a doll to help them observe more detail and instructed them to draw their figure again.

 

11. One example was Leanne's work. Leanne's initial figure had all the appendages extending directly from the head. The fingers were skeletal, the hair sparse, and the features the simplest circles and lines. Her second figure-done only a few minutes later with the aid of an Action Man prop-showed Leanne was learning to look. The eyes included the iris and lashes, and ears with detailed inner lines had appeared. The entire figure was filled out, and the fingers had taken on a more realistic shape. For a four-year-old child who wrote her name in reverse, taking the time to look was a critical step.

The Mermaid's Purse: Looking Closely at Young Children's Art and Poetry

 

12. In the second year of the study, Roy and the children were invited to exhibit their work, and the focus shifted to the powerful combination of visual art with poetry. Using the sea as their central theme, Roy taught the four-year-olds photography and taught the older children the art of assemblage-compositions using a juxtaposition of objects to create a desired effect. Their teacher (Deb Walkling) and another artist (Claire Smith) worked with the children on their accompanying poetry. The photography and assemblage initiated the poetry, and the poetry helped to complete the art. Moving from one sign system to another, often called transmediation, is deeply engaging work, for one must look and look again to see if the meanings created in one system are explaining and enhancing the meanings in the second system.

 

13. As the children of Hythe thought about how to communicate their seaside home to others, they learned to transform the ordinary objects in their everyday worlds into the extraordinary. Along the way, they gained practice in holding attention for sustained periods of time, and they had multiple opportunities to develop competencies in planning and design, metaphor making, rhythm and rhyme. They learned to shift perspective and see things how others might, and they acquired key ideas in foregrounding and backgrounding, proportionality, as well as dimensionality. They learned to shift back and forth from one medium to another in ever-expanding meaning making. And they solved problems-considering, revising, and rethinking their work all in the creation of a final product.

 

14. When children are engaged in serious seeing, they learn to hold sustained attention, to see detail, to view alternative perspectives, and to perceive the poetry that exists in the objects they are viewing and creating. As Maxine Greene suggests we must avoid the tendency of '"seeing things small.'" Instead, we must learn to be open to and validate '"the passion for seeing things close up and large. For this passion is the doorway for imagination; here is the possibility of looking at things as if they could be otherwise.'"

 

15. Seeing big also involves seeing the potential for art in one's life. What might it be like to be an architect? A photographer? A filmmaker? An actor? A poet? Exploring multiple media allows children to look over the available range of possibilities in the arts, all of which build children's capacities for flexible thinking and new ways of seeing. And experimenting with the range of possibilities may lead some children to the medium that could turn into a life-long passion. As Sir Ken Robinson reminds us: '"How many people never discover their creative capacities because they don't find their medium? Too often they conclude that they're not creative when in truth they may not have found how they are creative. Not finding their medium, they haven't found themselves.'" This is equally true for children. For it is in multimodal and multi-media aesthetic opportunities guided by creative and caring adults, that they may find their own medium and learn to see themselves as artists.

 

Dramatic Learning in the Primary School

 

16. This set of booklets follows children's connections with drama among all students at Bexhill Primary School in Sunderland. In the first year of the study, Bexhill worked with a variety of artists, yet one of their most successful partnerships was with the adult actors of County Durham's Theatre Cap-a-Pie. Together the actors, teachers, and children learned that dramatic work goes well beyond its traditional role of entertainment or serving as a curricular '"extra.'" Instead, the children's extended participation in the development, production, and performance of drama proved essential for their development in language and mental agility. Drama gives young players practice in critical academic skills; they must learn to think quickly, see the world through the eyes of others, and integrate a range of different kinds of information into one's character.

 

17. Mark Labrow of Theatre Cap-a-Pie was especially deft as he constantly reminded the children to think and feel as their characters might. He narrated what he was interpreting from their actions to show why their characters were taking certain actions and how they were feeling, and he asked questions that prompted the children to do the same. In multiple discussions with Mark as well as with other artists, the teachers considered how they could incorporate drama into their classrooms in substantive ways. For example, Linda Nesbitt, a teacher of seven-year-olds, combined it with her own method of developing children's language through engaging activities and thoughtful questions. Reiterating the goal of understanding character intention and motivation, she worked to draw her children deeper into reflective and justified explanations of why characters behaved as they did, helping them to analyze text in critical ways.

 

18. She and colleague Lesley Watson organized a drama club for their children, and the focus on analysis continued. The club also opened up social worlds for the children, expanding their perception of the roles they could play. They learned to play the princess as well as the peasant, and they learned that a seven-year-old boy could link arms with a girl and live to tell the tale. For a community where the perception of parents was initially that '"lads don't do drama,'" linking arms with a girl or taking on a female role were giant steps.

 

19. The teachers in the study also undertook giant steps as they learned to take on more and more creative curricula. Joy Lowther, Bexhill's Headteacher, explained:

 

When we first started with Creative Partnerships and started on the drama, we chose it because it was so closely related to the speaking and listening skills we were so worried about for our children and also because we thought drama was something we weren't universally doing-apart from when we did plays and things like that. But the biggest worry for everybody was, '"How do we fit it in?'" and '"Where do we put it?'" '"How do we find the time?'" And I think that the message that came through was that it's not necessarily something that you put on the end. It's just something that becomes a way of working.

 

20. Any new effort at school reform or innovative teaching can easily be perceived as an add-on as well as a potential threat to time needed to reinforce learning within the national curriculum. Moreover, the constant pressure of test performance heightens anxiety over '"wasting'" children's time in learning materials not relevant to these measures of achievement. However, over the months of working together with their children and with professional artists, the Bexhill teachers had learned that drama education brought them a host of resources for their own thinking, need for creative outlet, and ideas for sustaining the creative language and thinking the children gained through drama.

 

A Playwright's Life for Me! Young Children's Language & Learning Through Drama

 

21. In the second year of the study, the six- and seven-year-old children continued to work with Theatre Cap-a-Pie, and when they were asked to playwright a script for the adults to perform, they immediately jumped on board. This action was appropriate, for they were asked to help write a pirate play. From a theatrical point of view, the children, their teachers, and the actors worked to create an ensemble-the spirit of an acting troupe or company-to develop a sense of mutual responsibility for every aspect of their play. The teachers (Linda and Lesley) and the actors (Mark and Gordon) developed a heightened professional relationship as they planned and critiqued their creative curriculum together.

 

22. From a literary point of view, the children's voices combined with those of the adults to script the play, and their process had strong links to Mikhail Bakhtin's description of polyphonic creation. Still, there were tensions in the process. On one hand, the adults in the study sought the '"surprise'" that Bakhtin was so fond of-they listened to the children's voices and incorporated their words into the play. On the other hand, it was difficult to achieve Bakhtin's notion of '"unfinalizability,'" for they had deadlines to meet, characters to develop, settings to stage, and plots to resolve. Thus, the openness and surprise of polyphony battered up against the very real constraints of putting on a play. In essence, the tug of children's voices combined with the pull of adults putting on a performance highlight the very real transformation of children's lives as they learned about drama.

 

23. Even more important they learned about language. In the creation of their play, the teachers and artists gave them ample opportunities for comparing and contrasting, using hypothetical language, posing and answering questions of substance, utilizing sophisticated vocabulary, analyzing character and theme, learning about narrative structure, experiencing ensemble, and growing through critique as they weighed the pros and cons of each of their creative decisions.

 

24. The teachers also commented on their own learning. In answer to a question about what made this particular creative partnership work so well, Linda responded:

 

I think basically it was the relationship between Mark and Gordon- It's their personalities really. They were excited with the prospects of this. I don't think a lot of adults would be. And seeing what we thought our children were capable of. Because in the past, we've had a lot of drama practitioners who've come in with a package. They deliver the package and then leave. And they didn't really achieve very much. I mean, we certainly had a pleasant afternoon, a pleasant day, but there was nothing we could use from it to follow up because it was a set package. In and out, and the relationship wasn't there. Whereas here, we built the relationship.

 

25. Linda's words were confirmed in an earlier interview with the Cap-a-Pie performers Mark and Gordon. As Mark explained: '"Linda and Lesley have been really strong. It's the first time I've worked that closely with a teacher. Most of the time, the teachers go, 'Come in. Do your thing, and get on with it.' But from day one, Linda and Lesley have been with us.'" Linda characterized it in the following terms: '"They listened to us. And we listened to them.'" And most important, everybody listened to the children.

 

Upcoming Publications

 

26. I've planned three upcoming publications to showcase the results of years three and four in both sites. Two publications-The Mysteries of Creative Partnerships (under review with The Journal of Teacher Education) and From the '"Mantle'" to Expertise: The Arc of Creative Partnerships (in preparation) concentrate on the continuing professional relationship between the artists of Theatre Cap-a-Pie and the teachers of Bexhill Primary School. The first piece concentrates on the increasingly collaborative relationship among the adults and the resulting creative language and learning for the children under their charge. Intriguingly, the second piece highlights the separation of this creative partnership, as the teachers Linda and Lesley went on to a unique project for their children that they created, executed, and continually critiqued without the help of the theatrical artists. This substantively represents the ultimate goal of Creative Partnerships-for the intention has always been to change creative practices in schools with the help of artists, but for the teachers to ultimately take up these practices on their own.

 

27. The third piece-The Art of Amalgamation (in preparation)-is on the community school in Hythe, which has undergone amalgamation with a junior school to form the Hythe Bay Church of England School. Anyone who has followed the process of amalgamation understands the difficulty of such endeavors as teachers and administrators with often drastically different orientations toward education must come together to decide on coherent curriculum, instruction, and assessment appropriate for their children. This is particularly difficult when one school is well steeped in creative curriculum and the other is not. Thus, this piece will concentrate on the artists' initiative in bringing these two disparate schools together. As in the case of Bexhill, however, it will also disclose the gradual withdrawal of the artists as the schools-under the guidance of an inspired leadership team-made creative decisions for proceeding on their own.

 

Recommendations for Action

 

28. '"On their own'" are three very provocative words. On the one hand they do represent the intended arc of Creative Partnerships-bringing in artists to help change practice as well as influence their own, but the ultimate responsibility for sustaining the transformation would fall to the schools after the artists moved on. But on the other hand, there is a troubling tenor in these three words because, quite simply, teachers, artists, and children should be lifelong learners, eager to engage in collaborative and creative work with others from diverse backgrounds in order to grow in their thinking.

 

29. In my research in England, I have been fortunate to work with two highly successful sites. It may be the case that other Creative Partnerships have not had such compelling stories to tell. Notwithstanding, this government initiative is well worth the candle, and the results described above shine light on what can happen in the best of Creative Partnerships. While I know that the vision, structure, and financing of Creative Partnerships will change in the coming years, I would hope that the initiative will gain power from the experience of the last several years and continue to support teachers and artists working and learning together in an effort to create substantive change in the lives of children. I only wish my own government would take up a similarly inspired challenge.

 

30. We know that children are all too often silent in school. As Egan reminds us: '"While young children live in an oral culture, it is too often the case that their oral cognitive tools are not adequately developed. What many students who are having difficulty with literacy need is a richer orality to build literacy on.'" Egan goes on to explain that one of the central cognitive tools of a creative curriculum is mystery:

 

Mystery is an important tool in developing an engagement with knowledge that is beyond the students' everyday environment. It creates an attractive sense of how much that is fascinating remains to be discovered. All the subjects of the curriculum have mysteries attached to them, and part of our job in making curriculum content known to students is to give them an image of richer and deeper understanding that is there to draw their minds into the adventure of learning.

 

31. The results of the creative curriculum that the Hythe and Bexhill teachers, administrators, and artists designed stretched their children's language by inserting mystery within the problems they posed. Whether the children were creating photographic and poetic representations of their seaside town or designing potential scenes for a new play, the questions and comments were strikingly similar: '"How can we solve this problem?'" '"What would happen if...'" '"Maybe we could try...'" '"No, that might not work, because...'" As a result, the children asked and answered multiple questions, pondered possibilities, agreed and disagreed, tested out new vocabulary, and brought their background knowledge to bear on the issues at hand. By casting themselves into mystery, they entered into the adventure of learning.

 

32. The teachers, administrators, and artists shared in the adventure, for they too entered into the language and learning that come with creativity, collaboration, compromise, and critique. As they worked together over the years of their partnerships, they learned to lean on each other, take further risks, reflect on their decisions, and offer alternative possibilities. By creating ample space for their children's language, they developed a language of their own-one that highlighted their excitement and engagement with continual professional learning. Thus, an effective creative partnership depends on mystery-knowing that behind what we know there is always more to learn.

 

July 2007