Inspiring School Change

Transforming Education through the Creative Arts

Christine Hall, Pat Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138913998
• eBook ISBN: 9781317429043
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Recognising performance and accountability pressures on schools, Inspiring School Change shows how a commitment to the arts in education can meet core school agendas of pupil and parent engagement, attainment, improved teaching and inclusion. Schools are under pressure to develop their students' creativity and to improve their cultural education. This book fills a gap by marshalling the arguments and evidence for a form of education in, through and with the arts that moves beyond individual projects to become central to teaching, learning and school reform.

When the arts are taken seriously, schools become different - and better - places. Using research evidence to promote greater awareness of the capacity of the arts to promote educational change, this text captures four key themes that run through all of the chapters:

• Inspiration - sharing experiences and the way they happened, documenting inspiring pedagogy by understanding the reason it was done, the factors and the people involved in making it work.

• School change - the need for schools to better prepare young people for the lives they will live in the twenty-first century; to engage young people more effectively and so educate them better, and the recognition that in an unequal society schools can contribute to making things fairer.

• Creative arts - demonstrates, through international research, how the arts can facilitate whole school learning, meet core agendas, such as attainment, inclusion and promote lifelong learning.

• Transforming education - marshals the arguments and evidence for a form of education in, through and with the arts that moves beyond individual projects to become central to teaching, learning and school reform.

Tackling the hot topics of parent and pupil engagement, standards and accountability in a fresh way, Inspiring School Change offers those engaged in the research and practice of improving teaching and learning with insight into the educational value and possibilities of arts-based teaching and an arts-rich curriculum

1

STARTING POINTS

The title of our book is intended to capture the four key themes that run through all of the chapters. Put in their simplest form, these themes can be labelled ‘inspiration’, ‘school change’, ‘transforming education’ and ‘creative arts’. This first chapter discusses each of the themes in turn, to introduce our orientation towards our subject matter and to explain how we have tried to weave the ideas together to produce a book which, we hope, is both convincing in its arguments about the importance of the creative arts for education and practical about the possibilities for school change.

Our motivation to write this book comes in part from having worked together as research partners for more than a decade. It is also important to say, though, that we both started our careers as teachers before moving to work in university education departments. For us, this has meant that we share a strong sense of curiosity about schools and an empathy for teachers’ work that has its roots in our personal as well as our professional identities and experiences.

Inspiration

The etymological roots of ‘inspiring’ – from the Latin for ‘to breathe or blow into’ – carry with them associations with divine inspiration, which provide us with metaphors about animation, bringing things to life, filling people with a desire or a sense of their own ability to do something. In the course of our work together, we have been privileged to witness, and sometimes document through our research, teaching and teachers who have inspired their students and inspired us. This book is in part about sharing these experiences and the way they happened, focusing particularly on the area of the creative arts. Our hope, of course, is that we will be able to write about them in a way that inspires our readers.

Being inspired by good teaching is, in fact, a fairly run-of-the-mill experience. For many years, we asked applicants for teacher education courses in our own institution to talk about the qualities of a teacher who had inspired them during their school days. Almost invariably, the interviewees could immediately summon up the image of an inspirational teacher and list the personal attributes, as well as the professional knowledge and skills, of the teacher in question. The UK government’s most successful advertising campaign to encourage recruitment to teaching, which took as its slogan ‘Everyone remembers a good teacher’, was based on the same truism. These kinds of everyday insights about teachers have led to inquiries (e.g. House of Commons Education Committee, 2012) and a body of research (e.g. Barber & Mourshed, 2007) that seeks to enumerate the qualities we should look for or seek to develop in teachers. Teach First, for example, has an interesting list of eight criteria against which applicants are assessed in addition to formal academic qualifications: humility, respect and empathy; interaction; knowledge; leadership; planning and organisation; problem solving; resilience and self-evaluation (http://graduates.teachfirst.org.uk/application-selection/requirements).

While this work has obvious uses in guiding decision-making in teacher recruitment and professional development, most teachers do not consistently match up to the idealised image produced by the tick-box approach to listing desirable attributes. In our experience, inspirational teaching often arises in situations where the conditions seem far from ideal. This is because pedagogy – a term we use throughout this book, so we need to define it here at the outset – is about more than the qualities and performance of the teacher, important though these are. Pedagogy is, of course, about teaching methods and assessment practices, but it also takes into account how activities and interactions are patterned by a particular teacher and with a particular group of students (Leach & Moon, 2008; Schatzki, Cetina, & Savigny, 2001). Pedagogy is, therefore, about relationships, conversations, learning environments, rules, norms and the culture within the wider social context (Facer, 2011; Moss & Petrie, 2002); it may extend beyond school to community and public settings (Ellsworth, 2005; Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010). Robin Alexander puts it this way:

Teaching is an act while pedagogy is both act and discourse. Pedagogy encompasses the performance of teaching together with the theories, beliefs, policies and controversies that inform and shape it. Pedagogy connects the apparently self-contained act of teaching with culture, structure and mechanisms of social control.

(Alexander, 2000: 540)

Documenting inspiring pedagogy therefore involves understanding more than simply what was done – ‘what worked’. We also need to know the reason it was done, the factors and the people involved in making it work.

Teachers learn early in their careers not to waste a good idea; they borrow and share (and sometimes steal) them. Teaching usually works best in an environment where teachers collaborate. Inspirational teaching necessarily involves a topic, a particular place and time, and at least one person other than the teacher. Learning from examples of teaching that has inspired others involves understanding pedagogy in the round.

We know from current government statistics on teachers leaving the profession that burnout and low morale continue to be issues that challenge schools and school systems. While we do not want to ignore the very real issues that exist for those engaged in education, we do think that there is a good reason to focus on what our Australian colleague Erica McWilliam calls ‘non stupid optimism’, meaning a belief that it is possible to be positive about formal education and what can be achieved in spite of constraints (McWilliam, 2005). This is a perspective that focuses on what people are able to do, individually and together. In eschewing lengthy critique and concentrating on the positive, we not only maintain reservoirs of hope (Wrigley, 2003) but actively build up ‘augmentation’ (Massumi, 2002) of what is imaginable.

Our focus on inspiration is of this order. We do not assume that there are no challenges and difficulties, but we want in this book to focus on what can be – and has been – achieved.

Our title, though, is Inspiring School Change – and this leads us to the second of our themes.

School change

The requirement to change is a constant feature of school life in developed countries. It wasn’t always this way, but nowadays even institutions whose core identity might in the past have relied upon maintaining traditional, predictable modes of schooling, of the kind offered to previous generations, face accusations of complacency or ‘coasting’ if they don’t demonstrate that they are willing to change. There are many rationales for the requirement to change. Among the most common are: the need for schools to better prepare young people for the lives they will live in the twenty-first century; the need for schools to engage young people more effectively and so educate them better; and the recognition that in an unequal society, schools can contribute to making things fairer. How these goals are to be achieved is, of course, a matter of fierce philosophical and political debate, which has been, and will continue to be, rehearsed at length in the media and in academic scholarship (see Thomson, 2011 for an overview of the research and writing in this area). But the particular rationales for change given above are, in themselves, widely accepted across political and philosophical divides.

Our starting point in this book is to accept fully these rationales for school change: we think that schools need to prepare young people better for the futures they will face, engage them more effectively in learning things that matter, and promote social justice. The particular take we have on how best to achieve these changes is developed throughout the book. In this introductory chapter, we set out our starting points.

It is probably already obvious that we consider school change to be essentially about changes in teaching and learning. Wrigley, Thomson and Lingard put this very well:

[W]orthwhile school change is a thoroughly pedagogical matter. Organisational change, and the processes through which change is promoted, must serve pedagogical ends and be pedagogical in approach. Educational leadership needs to be thought of as pedagogy, focusing on and supporting the teacher, community and student learning.

(Wrigley et al., 2012: 195)

Wrigley et al. also quote the well-known aphorism that there is nothing as practical as a good theory, a view we also subscribe to. They comment: ‘We see that all practice is embedded in theory, whether explicit or not, and that all theory has an imagined practice’ (2012: 11). These two quotations sum up our approach well: our focus is on changing schools through changing pedagogies. We believe this is of fundamental importance, because pedagogy lies at the heart of a school’s mission. And pedagogy involves ideas, theories, ways of seeing the world, relationships and values, as well as teaching methods, assessment, grouping and curriculum. So this book discusses school change through focusing on particular practical examples of teaching and learning in the area of the creative arts, while also seeking to identify the theories and the research that underpin that practice. We also address throughout the book, and particularly in the last chapter, the kinds of operational and structural shifts that need to occur in order to make pedagogical change sustainable.

We home in on the particularities of projects, understanding that they are products of specific local places, circumstances and relationships, but aiming to connect the work to the more general ideas and values that underpin it. This, we think, allows the practice and the ideas to be adapted and shared in other contexts. We recognise, of course, that the teachers who devised the lessons and projects have not necessarily articulated these ideas and theories in the way that we do in this book. We hope that our work in making the connections will help positive changes spread, become more embedded and so be sustained.

Another starting point for us concerns what Stephen Ball calls the ‘reallocation of authority in education’: away from teachers and local government and towards head teachers, central government, philanthropists and business interests (Ball, 2015). One aspect of these changes has been to reduce schools’ and teachers’ capacities to change in response to local issues or to reflect the distinctive social and cultural aspects of the communities they serve. Over the last few decades – and in the living memory of older teachers – increasing centralisation of control over the curriculum and conditions of service, combined with the introduction of corporate business approaches to governance and school management, have profoundly changed teachers’ work. Ball sums up the change in this way:

It has positioned education as the product of technocratic solutions, ‘effective’ interventions and the sum of ‘what works’, all to be selected on the basis of ‘evidence’ and ‘value for money’ by teachers who are discouraged from reflecting constructively about what they do.

(Ball, 2015: 8)

The speech marks reflect Ball’s scepticism about the value of what is currently counted by governments as evidence of success in school, but he also points out the difficulty of encouraging honest reflection on practice in the current system (see also Ball, 2003 for a more developed account of how this works). Since reflective practice has been widely understood as a mainstay of teachers’ learning and development since Dewey’s (1933) and later Schön’s (1983) ideas became popular in the profession, this represents a profound change in how teachers understand the work that they do and their personal investment in providing the education that best meets the needs of the children they teach.

As accountability measures are increased and the pressures to perform well against predetermined criteria are ratcheted up, teachers’ sense of job satisfaction has plummeted, and, in many jurisdictions and subject areas, teacher supply has reached crisis levels. Ken Leithwood et al., in a Canadian study of teachers’ motivation to implement policy changes, conclude that heavy-handed control and accountability measures run the risk of ‘squandering’ teachers’ commitment, a resource which, they point out, is very precious to the system (Leithwood, Steinbach, & Jantzi, 2002). This is a widely held view, supported by other researchers and commentators (e.g. Fullan, 2005; Hargreaves, 1994; Hargreaves et al., 2006), and with which we concur. Our orientation in this book is therefore towards identifying opportunities for teachers to become agents of change in their schools, trusted to take responsibility for developing, evaluating and reflecting on initiatives and debating ideas within and beyond the school community.

Another key point we want to stress in this introductory chapter relates to the changing boundaries of schools and the school’s place in its community. The first point to make about this is the obvious one: that the boundaries between home and school are becoming increasingly blurred. New technologies make communication across these boundaries much easier, quicker and more immediate. This dissolves more formal barriers, but also runs the risk of the invasion of privacy or unwelcome incursions into people’s time and private spaces. It makes identities (of teachers, of students and of parents) more fluid and divisions between home and school learning less marked. The cultural, social and pedagogical changes associated with these technological innovations are fundamental elements in the process of school change.

As boundaries become more blurred, it is inevitable that schools will be seen differently and that the role of schools in their wider communities will change. Increasingly, across developed countries, schools are being proposed as community hubs, open for extended hours, offering sport and recreational activities, childcare, and adult and further education, but also as sites for the co-location of services. These initiatives are not new (see, for example, the Every Child Matters policy, Department for Education and Science, 2003), but interest in them has been boosted by a combination of sometimes harsh economic realities and evidence about the importance of creating coherent strategies to address social and cultural challenges that are, by nature, ­complex and interdependent. For example, a discussion paper from the Brookings Institution, a well-respected American think tank, concludes that ‘effective approaches to the problems of struggling neighborhoods – from health to school success and ­poverty – require the focused use of integrated strategies’ and that ‘consistent with this, ­community schools and many charter schools now function as hubs’ (Horn, Freeland, & Butler, 2015). (See also Clandfield, 2010 for a Canadian perspective on this argument and the State Government of Victoria’s 2010 paper on Schools as Community Hubs for an Australian view.) As Horn et al. point out, schools are being required to restructure to be more than ‘just purveyors of academics’ because it is clear that:

Only by ‘integrating backward’ in the business sense (i.e. dealing with problems further back in the supply chain) to deliver a range of nonacademic supports beyond just core academics can schools bolster children’s health and well-being.

(Horn et al., 2015: 2, our italics)

Increasingly, then, schools are being expected to take on responsibilities for a wider social and cultural agen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Vignettes and illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Starting Points
• 2 Vernacular School Change
• 3 Portrait of Rowan School
• 4 Inclusion and Wellbeing
• 5 Recognition and Respect
• 6 The Importance of Story
• 7 Creative Learning and Teaching
• 8 Portrait of Oak Tree School
• 9 Place and Community
• 10 Leading and Managing School Change
• Endnotes
• References
• Index