Creativity in Schools

Tensions and Dilemmas

Anna Craft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134346950
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Creativity in schools is changing, with greater emphasis being placed on creative skills across the curriculum than ever before. This shift has thrown up some challenging questions which this book tackles head-on in order to better understand the implications of this change and the effects on pedagogy and policy. The questions raised include:

• What is creative learning?
• How does it relate to creative teaching?
• How do we organize the curriculum to nurture creativity?
• What pedagogical strategies support creativity?
• How is creative learning different to effective learning?
• What responsibilities do schools have for stimulating creativity in relation to society, ethics and the wider environment?

Laying out the key concepts in the current debate on creativity and placing them in a broader context based on practice, policy and research, this volume sets the agenda for future discussion and suggests practical ways to encourage pupils' creative development in a new and more thoughtful way.

Part I
Context: policy and practice

Part I
Introduction

Creativity is enjoying a renaissance of interest globally, in academic disciplines such as psychology, as well as applied domains such as education. In the United Kingdom, the revitalising of interest that had been relatively dormant since the work undertaken in the US and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s reflects social, economic, technological and political imperatives. Creativity has become viewed, since the late 1990s, as centrally relevant to education globally in a way it has perhaps never been before. This approach to creativity can be seen as significantly distinct from the era of educational research, policy and practice that preceded it. In many ways it may be seen as a revolution (Jeffrey and Craft 2001; Robinson 2001).

It is a complex revolution, with, as with all revolutions, a history and a trajectory. And, like any revolution, it brings with it changes and challenges. For teachers and schools this means making sense of and taking a stance on the contextual factors which have contributed to greater value now placed on creativity in education, both in nurturing the creativity of learners and in celebrating the creativity of teachers as professionals. It means developing the ways in which we describe and understand practice in schools, to construct and develop a language for understanding and promoting children’s creativity. Developing a shared discourse, though, is a challenging process, and terms are often used interchangeably at the present time (Craft 2003b).

Other challenges are posed by the nature of creativity in relation to knowledge. The role of knowledge is increasingly acknowledged within creativity research, for the domain provides a knowledge context within which to be creative. This is emphasised in different ways by different researchers. For example, Weisberg (1986, 1988, 1993, 1995, 1999) proposes that creativity builds on knowledge, what he calls the ‘foundation’ view (Weisberg 1999: 226). How does this view relate to the notion advanced by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, of creativity as domain related in the foundation stage curriculum (DfEE/QCA 2000) and in the National Curriculum, of creativity as a cross-curricular skill (DfEE and QCA 1999a, 1999b)? Are there any aspects of creativity that are relevant across all areas of knowledge? How does the way that teachers and schools organise the curriculum relate to the promoting of children’s creativity in specific areas of knowledge? What does this mean for teachers’ own expertise in domains of knowledge, and what might a cross-curricular approach mean for developing disciplinary understanding and creativity? These and other questions are faced by schools wanting to promote children’s creativity.

Integrally related to curriculum challenges, of course, are those stemming from the question of how we go about enabling learning; in other words, what kinds of pedagogical strategies may be appropriate to fostering creativity in the classroom. The report of the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE 1999) proposed a number of distinctions, in terms, for example, of creative teaching compared with teaching for creativity. More recently, the notion of ‘creative learning’ has emerged as perhaps definitive of what we aim for in promoting creativity in the classroom. But how do teachers and schools integrate and attach meaning to these terms? How is creativity distinct from learning, and how is promoting creativity in the classroom distinct from good teaching?

These and many other questions are being addressed by policy makers, practitioners and researchers at present, and in Part I of the book we explore what is known and name some further tensions, dilemmas and challenges in the areas of policy development, a language for creativity, knowledge and the curriculum, pedagogy and learning. The last chapter of Part I brings some of these themes together in a discussion of some of the current tensions between policy and practice.

The argument that high creativity and everyday creativity are related is advanced by several researchers (Worth 2000), and the stance taken throughout Part I – and indeed throughout the book – assumes that they are indeed part of the same continuum.

1 Setting the context: policy, practice and constraints

This chapter explores some of the economic, social, political and technological context to the increased value placed on creativity globally, in particular with regard to education. It outlines ways in which creativity has become increasingly valued in policy and practice in education in England and ways in which this has been paralleled by interest from researchers. Finally, initial questions are posed about how appropriate the emergence of creativity in education may be.

Why the revolution?

The place of creativity in education has seen a revolution in value in the past 20 years. In many parts of the world, creativity has moved from the fringes of education, and/or from the arts, to being seen as a core aspect of educating. So why is this?

Politics, economics and social change are, of course, intertwined. To take economic and political change as an example, the globalisation of economic activity has brought with it increased competitiveness for markets, driving the need for nation states to raise the levels of educational achievement of their potential labour forces (Jeffrey and Craft 2001), which we return to later in this section.

Economic change is tied to politics, in that large, so-called multinational companies with global markets have become as powerful – in terms of wealth – as governments. Handy (2001) describes how, in November 2000, Shell and Vodafone each announced their profits for the previous quarter as being £2 billion. BP beat this, in the same quarter, at £2.5 billion. This compared with an announcement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer announcing that, owing to the successful British economy, he would be able to afford, over the coming year, to return £2 billion to the taxpayer in one form or another. The situation – whereby one multinational business alone can have the same amount of resources to play with over just one quarter of the year as a government presiding over the entirety of a country’s social, medical, environmental, defence and other needs has over the course of a whole year – is an indication of the immense potential for powerholding in parts of the economy. Of course, this representation can be seen as fairly simplified; however, the fact is that many multinational companies do hold enormously high levels of resources.

A part of the complex picture of the economy is the changing structure of the workplace, so that an increasing amount of our economy is now made up of small businesses or organisations employing less than five people and with a turnover of less than £500,000 (Carter et al. 2004). Many of these have strong relationships with, i.e. are consultants or suppliers to, large companies/organisations, although a third of those surveyed sold their products and services direct to the customer in a local context. The Federation of Small Businesses Survey notes that a quarter of those surveyed in 2004 began their business in the last 3 years, and there is also a growing trend in home-based organisations (Carter et al. 2004). Handy (2001) notes that organisations have shifted from organising themselves as pyramids, to operating as networks and customised relationships, involving greater awareness of the ‘customer’ and a higher level of negotiation and contract to ensure satisfaction and continued business. As part of this, he describes the growing web of relationships between the individual and the multinational conglomerate, likening the relationship to one between an elephant (the multinational conglomerate) and a flea (the individual). He predicts that the life of the flea, or the independent worker, is the working life of the future for the majority – and this requires a different kind of attitude to work than previously. No longer is the ‘till death do us part’ analogy from marriage appropriate (except in the sense that marriage and partnership, too, have changed to become more itinerant, transient and network-based). For, at the start of the twenty-first century, employment in any one organisation is not for life. Even by 1996, only 40 per cent of the British labour force had indefinite contracts in full-time work. Education has a dynamic relationship with this shifting world of employment, for not only is the structure of work shifting in what has been described as a revolution ‘comparable to the impact of the massive upheavals of the Industrial Revolution’ (Robinson 2001: 4), but what also makes it so significant is the shift from manufacturing to a situation where ‘knowledge is the primary source of economic productivity’ (Seltzer and Bentley 1999: 9). Thus, what is significant in terms of educational achievement is changing accordingly.

So, what is the difference between educational achievement of the past and that of the future? It is not merely excellence in depth of knowledge about certain domains and knowledge how to undertake certain skills, together with knowing how to learn about new areas, that young people need. Critical to surviving and thriving is, rather, creativity. It is creativity that enables a person to identify appropriate problems, and to solve them. It is creativity that identifies possibilities and opportunities that may not have been noticed by others. And is it creativity which forms the backbone of the economy based on knowledge (Robinson 2001). In short, educational achievement is being ‘reconstructed’ and re-conceptualised.

In this reconstruction and re-conceptualisation, there are interesting tensions with what had existed previously. For, as documented elsewhere, since the late 1980s, educational structures, organisations, programmes, curriculum, pedagogies, accountabilities, conditions of teachers’ work and their professional status have all been reconstructed (Woods and Jeffrey 1996). For the incoming New Labour government in 1997, education was the top priority. This was paralleled elsewhere in the Western world, where the reconstruction of education became of paramount importance. Interestingly, however, the directions of these reconstructions varied, and in some cases they went in opposite directions. For example, France loosened its central control, whilst in England it increased (Jeffrey and Craft 2001). One of the common objectives, however, was to make education systems more effective in assisting the nation state to secure higher employment, and maintain economic performance. With manufacturing dispersing globally, new forms of wealth production have emerged, through increased marketing, the growth of service industries, electronic communications and e-commerce markets. This has been called the ‘weightless economy’ (Seltzer and Bentley 1999: 14). Many organisations began to maximise the intellectual and creative capabilities of the labour force, as well as its physical energy and general intelligence. Seltzer and Bentley (1999: 9–10) summarise this, and the challenge posed by these changes for education, as follows:

While qualifications are still integral to personal success, it is no longer enough for students to show that they are capable of passing public examinations. To thrive in our economy defined by the innovative application of knowledge, we must be able to do more than absorb and feedback information. Learners and workers must draw on their entire spectrum of learning experiences and apply what they have learned in new and creative ways. A central challenge for the education system is therefore to find ways of embedding learning in a range of meaning for contexts, where students can use their knowledge and skills creatively to make an impact on the world around them.

As documented elsewhere, the fundamental shift from focusing on individual traits and abilities to concentrating on organisations, climates and cultures has had the effect of ‘universalising’ creativity (Jeffrey and Craft 2001). The shift has encouraged perspectives that suggest that everybody is capable of being creative, given the right environment. These perspectives contrast with earlier ones, where creativity was equated with ‘genius’ and ‘giftedness’ (Gardner 1993). The current competitive discourse has resulted in many institutions and organisations encouraging everybody to be creative in terms of improving the institution’s performance and the creation of ways in which the organisation can diversify in order to expand. Social change within organisations and beyond has accompanied the increased recognition of a need to encourage new ideas. By encouraging creativity and engagement through democratic cultures and rewards for innovation, organisations may elicit higher levels of commitment from employees and greater levels of job satisfaction, and enhance market share. One of the interesting features of the discourse in which creativity is ‘universalised’ is its curious culture-blindness (Craft 2003b; Ng 2003). Thus, strategies and approaches to increasing creativity of individuals, groups and organisations are, together with the discourse, universalised. The extent to which this is appropriate or effective will be explored in Chapter 7, where the possibility of the concept of creativity as being ‘culturally saturated’ will be examined.

Education arguably plays a role in the policy area as well as in the economic area. The promotion of collaborative practices and ‘team work’ prepares pupils and students for work in organisations that need to be creative and single-minded if they are to be effective in their highly competitive markets or in service industries that are underpinned by high levels of accountability.

In exploring why the need for greater creativity is emerging in Western society, we have so far touched only on the aspects of the economic context, and not the much wider social environment. Another significant influence is the decreasing level of certitude in lifestyles of the early twenty-first century. Roles and relationships, unchanging for centuries, are shifting fast. Women’s entry into the workplace has altered the demography of the home, both in terms of the birth rate and also in terms of who cares for young children. A wider variety of contexts in which children are born, from singleparent families to those where couples choose not to marry, to second and subsequent marriages or families, and those where couples are same-sex, all represent a broadening of what we have come to think of as ‘the family’. Expectations of continuity and commitment in family units have reduced as it becomes more ‘the norm’ for relationships to founder, to be replaced by new possibilities together with complex new family relationships. The gradual dissipation of organised religion, and the proliferation of religious and spiritual identity (including the option of Market as God), adds an additional factor to a previously predictable family and community structure and rhythm. All of these social factors combine to mean that a young person growing up and being educated in the twenty-first century has a much more active role than perhaps ever before in making sense of their experiences an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Context: policy and practice
• Part II: A broader view
• Part III: Constructing creativity
• Postscript: Onward research and development
• Glossary
• References