Evaluating Creativity

Making and Learning by Young People

Dr Julian Sefton-Green, Julian Sefton-Green, Rebecca Sinker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134739097
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Evaluating Creative Practice discusses:
*the function of evaluation in general
*the role of formal assessment and its relation with informal evaluation
*the role of the audience for the creative product
*the value of making within the subject discipline
*the balance within the subject paid to product and process
*the role of reflection and the place of the students voice.
Examples of practice from subject disciplines English, Art, Music, Drama, Media Studies, Design and Technology, Gallery Education and Digital Arts will enable those involved with primary, secondary, further, higher, gallery and community education to learn from each other and to develop a coherent approach to the range of creative work produced by young people. By focusing on questions of evaluation and containing a range of practical examples the book sets an agenda for creative work by young people in the school curriculum and beyond.

1
Introduction

Evaluating creativity

Julian Sefton-Green

Creative subjects

In modern industrialised countries a typical week in school is broken down into now traditionally accepted units of time, place and sense. This kind of organisation is so widespread that it almost seems odd to draw attention to it. Students, especially those of secondary school age, experience their formal education in terms of a timetable and the bounded knowledge of subject disciplines. At secondary schools they frequently experience different subjects in specialised locations with different teachers, all of whom will have been trained in their own specialised discipline. For younger children, in primary schools, the process of compartmentalisation may not appear so acute—they will not have as many specialised teachers or access to distinct classroom spaces—but they still move between separate kinds of activities, often bounded and named as Art, English and so on.

The origins of this practice lie in a complex history, where the sociology of knowledge, how we come to understand and make sense of the world, has interacted with the social history of mass schooling. A pragmatic and contingent system has developed to allow kinds of knowledge to be managed within the day-to-day concerns of the school. Indeed, the effects of institutionalised schooling are so pervasive that it is very difficult to think of any activity or experience, practice or idea that cannot be categorised as belonging to the body of knowledge or activities we might label as one particular subject or another. This is not to say that the boundaries around subject disciplines are immovable, and there are many examples, especially in higher education where new trans- and interdisciplinary subjects are developed and sanctioned. At the school level, however, there has been a remarkable continuity over the last hundred years in terms of the structure of the curriculum, the use of a timetable and the notion that what is to be taught can best be managed in terms of traditional subjects: the basic building blocks of knowledge itself.

Subjects, especially in schools, however, cannot just be defined in terms of types of knowledge, or even understood in terms of the history of education—how certain kinds of knowledge came to be viewed as belonging to specific subject disciplines. Subjects also include particular practices, activities and experiences as well as their own models of development and progression. Of course, these are not arbitrary: the idea of conducting experiments, in say Chemistry, is inseparable from an empiricist epistemology, where the idea of testing hypotheses is what constitutes the validity of the subject. Similarly, studying Shakespeare is considered more difficult than learning to write your name, for obvious reasons. However, as has been noted by a range of commentators (see, for example, the study of English in Batsleer et al. 1985 or Doyle 1989) subjects tend to settle and define themselves as a series of conventional activities and discourses, which often mask the rationales for the activities or progression in the first place. Obviously, good teachers are always happy to go back to first principles, but in the main, the underlying theories behind these conventions are rarely made explicit for students. Thus, students’ understanding of their learning is more likely to be in terms of what they do in each lesson and how they perceive, or are perceived by the teacher, to demonstrate progress within it, than on any meta-discursive level—analysing why each subject is organised the way it is.

A key element of making sense of our education system then, is how subject disciplines define ability in their subject; that is to say, how a student’s progress can be measured and recorded to demonstrate control of any particular field of knowledge. Here the different ways different subjects record or evaluate understanding and progress is important and a key theme in this book is to explore the differences and similarities between the descriptive languages or discourses, used by a range of arts subjects in this respect. The use of the term discourse is significant because I am suggesting that different subjects employ distinct repertoires to talk about themselves, not just in terms of specialised vocabularies, but employing different value systems and even drawing on different models of thinking and learning. Again, I would stress this is a process which does not exist in the abstract. Indeed, it is very difficult to separate the wider institutional imperatives of the school system to define or assess individuals or groups from any intra-subject evaluative procedures.

The focus of this book is one part of this larger picture. A number of subjects in the school curriculum ask students to make various kinds of practical and arts based productions. Typically these might include: paintings in Art; creative writing in English; performances in Drama; recording in Music; videos in Media Studies; and multimedia ‘digital creations’ in all or some of these subjects. In addition, students of school age will often produce ‘creative work’ in the semi-structured environments of Gallery and Community Arts education. Yet even within these discrete subject areas there are a number of contradictions which arise when students are required to be cultural producers in this way, and these contradictions are most acute when teachers and students either choose, or are required, to evaluate this kind of creative work. Indeed, considering the various evaluative perspectives operating across these experiences raises a series of questions: about the function of evaluation in general; the role of formal assessment and its relation with informal evaluation; the role of the audience for the creative product; the value of making within the subject discipline and to the learner him or her-self; the balance within the subject paid to product and process; as well as pedagogic considerations such as the role of reflection and the place of the student or young person’s voice. These questions, amongst others, are continually debated across this range of fields with their varied sets of subject-based criteria.

As I have already suggested, these various subject disciplines each draw on different discursive traditions: they employ a variety of models of teaching and learning as well as possessing different conceptions of cultural production. Here the history of different subjects is important. For example, one strand in the history of English or Art has fetishised an ideal of romantic creativity, with the idea that poets and painters are divinely inspired. By contrast, subjects like Design and Technology or Media Studies have emphasised notions of ‘learning a craft’ or ‘trade skills’ and pay attention to the shaping force of the market. Additionally, subjects may have different notions of how to make sense of young people as producers, in that some subjects value the output of children in itself, whilst others view what young people make in terms of defining a stage in the young person’s development. For yet others, practical work merely illustrates theoretical understanding. Yet across the school curriculum and between formal and informal sites of education young people are expected to make arts and media within this range of—sometimes contradictory—perspectives.

Of course, discussing the value of creative work in this context raises other sets of issues in addition to the nature of subject disciplines. The nature of artistic creativity and its place in the curriculum (as well as its relationship with established subject disciplines) is itself a topic of discussion, drawing on a range of analytical perspectives from arts education and cultural theory to developmental psychology. There is debate about the value of the arts in education and indeed about the role of creative work both within young people’s learning and the school system. And these debates are linked with a wider set of arguments about the role of the arts in society and individual development roughly covering four inter-related areas. First, from psychological perspectives: that creative work is an integral part of children’s personal development, that it facilitates particular cognitive skills and that arts work has a general transferable role in helping young people to grow, think and feel. Second, there is a body of writing exploring the cultural dimension to creative activities. Here it is argued the arts perform two kinds of ideological work. First, developing liberal understanding, empathy and insight into people and society. And second, as I discuss below, this perspective also encompasses the ideas of self-expression and imagination including the study of young people’s cultures, thus at times, like the first perspective, distinguishing the concept of creativity from the social practice of the arts. Third, and related to this second perspective, creative work is often considered in the context of debate about the cultural transmission role of the curriculum, that is to say, how creative work relates to developing an understanding and appreciation of a society’s literary and artistic heritage, The Arts and Literature. Finally, creative work is valued from vocational and training perspectives, in that it produces a skilled workforce for the cultural industries as well as developing more general work related practices such as team building and negotiation skills.

This book tries to explore some of these broader questions about creativity, young people and education through its seemingly narrow attention to the question of how a range of different schools subjects evaluate practical production by young people. Before introducing the individual contributions to this book I want to map out some of the key themes underpinning debates about evaluation and the arts—themes I shall return to in the concluding chapter of this volume.

Making sense of learning: evaluation, assessment and the school system

Many of the contributors to this volume differentiate between evaluation and assessment. On the whole, and this is not a clear-cut distinction, evaluation is the term often used to describe informal judgements made by teachers about individual students or pieces of work. Evaluations will often include an extended or discursive response, but can include a grade or mark. Sometimes evaluation is used as a diagnostic term—to make sense of an individual’s progress—although this is also called formative assessment. On the other hand, assessment is used to refer to formal summative assessments, both terminal examinations or teacher-based marking, either required by law or the internal reporting system of a particular school or institution. The difference between the two concepts is sometimes a matter of degree—a sort of hard and soft kind of distinction and sometimes a matter of principle—see the title of Cullingford’s (1997) collection, Assessment versus Evaluation. It is of course very difficult to make an absolute distinction between the two terms, because in practice evaluation frequently (sometimes only) takes place during assessments and some assessment procedures are fundamentally evaluative in nature. In some discussions, evaluation is used in the sense of ‘making a judgement about’ and assessment to mean ‘quantifying the amount of’, but again this is not an absolutely reliable distinction. The terms are frequently blurred together by teachers and students themselves, but despite any confusion, it would seem as if there is a value in being able to make the distinction between the two terms as concepts, even if recognising their common point of origin.

Maintaining a distinction is all more the important in the current educational climate where increasingly centralised control of formal assessment procedures by the State has placed the nature and function of assessment under the spotlight (Broadfoot 1996). Indeed, part of the impetus for this book derives from a tradition of resistance to the recent changes in assessment resulting from the turn to conservative educational policies in the 1980s (Jones 1992). The increased regulation of assessment procedures, most obvious in the publication of competitive league tables listing schools’ examination results, has, it is frequently argued, resulted in an education system dominated by anxiety about assessment. It is accepted that changes to the examination system, (including national testing for seven, eleven and thirteen year-olds in addition to the gateway examinations for sixteen and eighteen year-olds), have resulted in an increased awareness by teachers of some of the fundamental principles of assessment—such as the differences between norm and criterion referenced marking systems and the relation between curriculum planning and the assessment cycle. Nevertheless, there has been increased debate about the ownership of the assessment system and especially its relevance to creative activity. In particular, the authority of teachers to make judgements about their students’ learning has come under a variety of attacks, and the role of teacher evaluation in this process is under scrutiny. As many of the contributors to this collection discuss, the importance of evaluation in understanding students’ learning, and the role of class teachers in this process, is all more significant because it is suggested we are living through an era of direct conflict between the State and other traditional sources of intellectual authority, especially that in the teaching profession (see Bauman 1989; Edwards 1997).

From this perspective, evaluation as a term exceeds its more literal (or ambiguous) meanings, and becomes a battleground where teachers and the traditions of their subject disciplines are fighting for command of the educational high ground. The right to evaluate and above all the importance of evaluation is positioned against the technocratic demands of a crude assessment system. Of course, there is a specific political history to this conflict (Jones and Hatcher 1996) but from our point of view we need to avoid parodying both sides of the argument. Broadfoot’s (1996) analysis of the relationship between society and schooling focuses on the role of the assessment system to regulate competition between individuals and social groups for entry into the labour market. Her attention to the macro perspectives surrounding recent changes to the education systems in the UK and France show how changes in the global economy and job patterns are both cause and effect of the changing nature of the State education system in modern social democracies (see also Young 1998). Here, the role of assessment in ensuring the status quo and the maintenance of traditional class boundaries, (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), or in controlling and regulating access to elites and social mobility may seem a long way away from how teachers comment on a child’s drawing, but it is important to be able to maintain the theoretical connections between such an analysis and the focus of this book. Broadfoot’s work, and that of other sociologists of education point to the ways in which assessment functions as a mechanism for social exclusion whereas writers on evaluation tend to come from a tradition which credits individual development. Whilst not denying the absolute points of difference between sociological approaches to the role of assessment and educational analyses of evaluation, the political stand-off between the two traditions has done little to see how attention to the micro process of teaching and learning in specific classrooms may begin to impact on the wider social effects of changes to the educational system as a whole. A focus on evaluation inevitably raises this larger dilemma.

One relatively recent approach which begins to synthesise this tension is the attention to teachers’ cultures and the formation of teachers’ identities through studying their personal or group biographies (Goodson and Hargreaves 1996). Here the values of different subject traditions are comprehended through an analysis of how teachers perceive themselves and their work as professionals, thus showing how individual judgements articulate with wider political imperatives. Sanderson’s (1997) study of how a sociology teacher marked a candidate in a public examination showed how the teacher’s use of criteria to evaluate a student was operating on a subjective and cultural level, drawing on a professional discourse of shared values, rather than making any ‘scientific’ objective judgement about the student’s work. Similarly, Richard’s (1998) study of how a media studies teacher defined her role as a teacher of that subject through identifying with the broader values and traditions of the subject drew attention to the affective and personal nature of making professional judgements. In both cases, making evaluative judgements can be understood not as the disinterested exercise of objective rational analysis, but as very particular to how individual teachers perceive their social role as teachers (see Tobin 1997 for a parallel cross cultural study). From this perspective, the discrete histories of subject disciplines are highly relevant to any understanding as to why different subjects value young people’s creative work in different ways. This perspective also relates to any understanding we might have of how students make sense of evaluations made about them: how learners internalise the values of different subjects (see Williamson 1981–2).

The final issue I wish to consider in this section is the complex relationship theories of evaluation have with methods of evaluation. On one level all questions about evaluation are methodological: how we make judgements about students or a piece of work; what counts as evidence; how we interpret the data and so on. All judgements ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Evaluating creativity
• 2. Art education and talk: From modernist silence to postmodern chatter
• 3. Evaluation and Design and Technology
• 4. Writing in English and responding to writing
• 5. Music as a media art: Evaluation and assessment in the contemporary classroom
• 6. Measuring the shadow or knowing the bird: Evaluation and assessment of drama in education
• 7. Making the grade: Evaluating student production in Media Studies
• 8. Whose art is it anyway?: Art education outside the classroom
• 9. Making multimedia: Evaluating young people’s creative multimedia production
• 10. From creativity to cultural production: Shared perspectives
• Index