Creativity and Democracy in Education

Practices and politics of learning through the arts

Jeff Adams, Allan Owens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415741217
• eBook ISBN: 9781317807469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

The struggle to establish more democratic education pedagogies has a long history in the politics of mainstream education. This book argues for the significance of the creative arts in the establishment of social justice in education, using examples drawn from a selection of contemporary case studies including Japanese applied drama, Palestinian teacher education and Room 13 children's contemporary art.

Jeff Adams and Allan Owens use their research in practice to explore creativity conceptually, historically and metaphorically within a variety of UK and international contexts, which are analysed using political and social theories of democratic and relational education. Each chapter discusses the relationship between models of democratic creativity and the cultural conditions in which they are practised, with a focus on new critical pedagogies that have developed in response to neoliberalism and marketization in education. The book is structured throughout by the theories, practices and the ideals that were once considered to be foundational for education: democratic citizenship and a just society. Creativity and Democracy in Education will be of key interest to postgraduate students, researchers, and academics in the field of education, especially those interested in the arts and creativity, democratic learning, teacher education, cultural and organisational studies, and political theories of education.

Chapter 1 Theories of creativity and democratic education

DOI: 10.4324/9781315815404-2

Themes of creativity and democracy

Concepts of creativity are always historically contingent, arising from social conditions and configurations of power at specific moments, and are therefore always politically and culturally constructed (Fannes, 2013; Nelson, 2013). In the many and varied constructions of creativity that we have available to us there are many commonalities as well as divergences, and there exist deep contradictions that are instructive when analysed in relation to the wider political struggles embedded in global capitalism.

The idea of creativity can be as amorphous as it is ubiquitous, and its history and etymology only confirm the ambiguity and contradictions of the concept. Williams (1976/1984) in his definitions of creativity traces the biblical origins of the word – creativity as the original moment, the genesis – before he goes on to look at the 18th-century development of the concept, where it begins to encompass creativity as an individual practice and as an intellectual faculty and its subsequent association with the arts and philosophy. As he notes, a tension emerges during this transformative period of the concept, as creativity began to be applied to everyday practices while still retaining an emphasis on originality derived from its older meanings. The proliferation of the term has accelerated under the hegemony of neoliberal thought and has become ubiquitous to the point where it has a diminished currency.

The fabric of creativity has been worn threadbare by adorning a multitude of ideological conceptualisations. Craft (2001) has tried to make sense of the many configurations and transformations of creativity that have arisen during the post-war period, and has provided us with a taxonomy of the many, occasionally competing traditions. The variety of types and definitions, and the differing purposes to which these have been used, remind us of the dangers of loosely using this term; creativity signifies many things and has done so with great variety in many cultures and contexts around the world, from the psychological powers of the individual ‘genius’ to the problem-solving capacities of young children. Craft also alerts us to the myriad uses of creativity in governmental policies and to what this might tell us about the political attitudes of the governments and the populace towards the arts and creative practices at any given time.

One important distinction that has frequently been identified (e.g. Vygotsky, 1930/2014; Craft, 2001; Jones, 2009) is that between high and popular or democratic creativity. This is important for us in our text because the former is associated with elitism and notions of the exceptional and the gifted, notions that we reject and have no place in our conception of democracy or education. Democratic creativity, on the other hand, is clearly the domain that we wish to explore; this is the concept of creativity that includes the imaginative events and productions of ordinary people, the masses of the populace. Jones’s (2009) survey of intellectual thought around creativity discusses its recuperation in school curricula in England, noting the transformations that had to be made in some cases to detach it from prior notions that would have linked creativity to equality and criticality, offering instead technical and instrumental conceptions of the idea, more easily assimilated into a performance-based curriculum.

Given this expansion of use, it is necessary to conceptualise creativity as a heterogeneous term, plural and multivalent, with many varieties contingent on an infinite number of specific and local contexts. Nevertheless, new emerging themes of creativity can be identified, some of which have distinctive political features. Most significantly, one can detect forms of creative practice that have an antithetical relationship to global capitalism and neoliberalism in particular. For example, in the Republic of Korea, the intense and competitive curriculum has many casualties manifest in the very high teenage suicide rate (Al Jazeera, 2011); in this case opportunities to be creative in education are seen as a possible panacea for these ills of intense competition, as a protection from the excesses of extreme performativity in education.

As jagodzinski (2010) has observed, innovation frequently crops up as acquiescence, a cynical appropriation of creativity, which is instead a reinforcement of existing orthodoxies. Deleuze, as jagodzinski (2010) has pointed out, argues that ‘creativity proper’ should be distinguished from innovation, the former being a significant event and the latter being what passes for creativity in the routine activity of global capitalism.

This appropriation of creativity for innovation is most obvious in the work of ‘creatives’ in the design and media industry, an example that serves to sustain and mobilise forces of capitalism and to maintain the status quo (jagodzinski, 2010, pp. 160–163). The case of the ‘shockvertising’ precipitated by the Benetton adverts in the 1980s being a case in point; these had the guise of a creative disruption to traditional order but were little more than the novel peddling of goods, which sustained rather than challenged existing orthodoxies and inequalities. On the other hand, the creative activities of Palestinian demonstrators occupying West Bank hilltops in a pastiche of settlers’ land-grabs (e.g. the creation of Bab al Shams), or the creative organisation of protests in Turkey’s Taksim Square, may offer a radical critique of global capitalism as, Zizek (2013) suggests.

The content of creativity, of the creative act, and of creative agency, are all of significance in our work. There are many thorough studies of the typographies of creativity, models in which the content is later added, or analyses of features or characteristics of creative events to which a formula is applied (e.g. Cropley and Cropley, 2008; National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education [NACCCE], 1999). However, the case studies of which this book comprises are principally concerned with the way that content shapes the form of creativity: content is always conceived and understood through practice. The practice of creativity brings about its forms, and the retrospective application of particular models is of secondary importance for us. This is significant for understanding the way that neoliberalism hollows out and colonises creative acts and events, because this is dependent on a mutable, reproducible and eventually dispensable content. For our purposes here, however, the content of the creative event is the antithesis of this conception: it is highly specific, context dependent, and socially engaged. This high degree of specificity determines the form of the creative act or event; in other words the creative form is a manifestation of a particular practice that may be neither transferable nor even replicable, existing only in the moment of the event in which it is identified. Content that is constructed through a specific practice, and governed by the proclivities and politics of a given social situation, is most certainly not amenable to the kind of flexible creativity favoured by corporate, neoliberal advocacy. On the contrary it may be singular, inflexible, immutable and even profound within the micro-culture that produced it. For example Palestinian student teachers’ improvisations in a drama pretext about their situation under occupation are very far from being readily assimilated into formulaic and adaptable notions of creativity. This is not say that creative phenomena should not be subjected to theoretical analysis and classification retrospectively but, rather, that a focus on specific practices that produce equally singular creative events are better understood through the thick cultural narratives from which they arose.

Democracy and equality in education

The conditions for creative practices to flourish in education are largely determined by the extent to which democratic principles are established. Rancière (1991) argues that equality should be the fundamental principle around which education, particularly education by the state, should be founded and function (1991;). This echoes Williams’s (1961) argument that participation is the most fundamental component – and a goal – of democracy, and that the institutions of state, including education, should be seen as enabling in this respect. Equality for Williams is a necessary condition for full participation, and de facto for democracy. Yet for Rancière the means of achieving equality runs contrary to many accepted notions of what education might mean, the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ polemic being a case in point. In his narrative ignorance is cast as a virtue on the part of the teacher, as a prerequisite for learning to occur.

This is because equality disrupts traditional power relations in education in Rancière’s thesis; the teacher is equal to the learner in ignorance, and both refer – and defer – to the object of study as the source of knowledge. The teacher is no longer the explicator or the arbiter of understanding on the part of the student, which Rancière argues is a disabling process, an additional layering of meaning to the original object of study, over which the teacher has absolute control and thereby institutes an unequal and permanent power relation between teacher and student. As Rancière elaborates this model it becomes apparent that he sees this laying as a deliberately obstructive process, which not only ensures that access to knowledge is governed and mediated by the teacher, but that it also structures the student, creating a dependency – which Rancière argues is the real learning that is taking place – learning to be dependent upon the teacher. This disabling of the student, the removal of the belief that the student can learn independently, is a key power formulation that is replicated in western state education systems, and ensures that inequalities are perpetuated, as articulated by class reproduction theorists such as Bourdieu and Passeron (1990). Rancière (1991) makes clear the relations that these cultural structures in schools and universities exist to ensure that the unequal social relations that occur in the wider society are replicated and perpetuated throughout an education system.

In creating this argument Rancière problematises several key terms that are normally associated with learning, most notably understanding. Through the maintenance of inequality, understanding becomes constantly subject to validation by assessment, and this is under the absolute control of the explicator. The determination of understanding is wholly based on the mediation and packaging of knowledge that is presented to the student, and ignores any new, original, idiosyncratic or personal interpretation that the student might bring to the study, because this may deviate from the ‘correct’ understanding provided, and potentially render it invalid. Assessment is then, for Rancière, a validation of the explicator and the controlled mediation of knowledge, rather than a measure of any actual understanding of the original object of study. In this way the determination of understanding is also supported by the acquiescence of the learner, who has internalised the erroneous belief that understanding cannot occur beyond the structures of explication and its subsequent validation. If these arbiters of understanding are also embedded in an unequal society, then it must follow that the consequent form of education will also be entrenched in inequality. Rancière exposes the contradictions of progressive education, especially where it is construed as a panacea for social disadvantage; for while education is purported to, as Rancière puts it, make ‘inequality visible’, as a means to make tangible its egalitarian project, it simultaneously functions as a means to endlessly defer the attainment of equality. As he explains, ‘[s]cholarly progression is the art of limiting the transmission of knowledge, of organising delay, of deferring equality’ (2010b, p. 8).

Disruptive democracy

Giroux (2014 b) argues that one way of challenging this new authoritarianism is ‘to reclaim the relationship between critical education and social change’. The problem he identifies is that democracy has been sullied as a concept and no longer offers the promise of emancipation. The solution for this, Giroux argues, is to institute a critical education as a means to revitalise democracy by encouraging and enabling people to engage with issues of citizenship and emancipation, and, as he puts it, ‘reclaiming a kind of humanity that should inspire and inform our collective willingness to imagine what a real democracy might look like’ (para. 42). As Giroux argues, it is not only participation in education that is important but also the way that education provides the means towards governance. Crucial to this idea is critical thinking, but ‘critical thinking divorced from action is often as sterile as action divorced from critical theory’ as Giroux explains it (2014 b, para. 45). Critical education for Giroux is one that is not subservient to corporations or business interests but, rather, one that is designed in the form of democracy and from which democracy is produced and enabled.

Mouffe (2005, 2009) has argued that democracy is a contest, and on a global scale. She emphasises that capitalism is not integrated with democracy, and therefore, the spread of the former does not necessarily mean the spread of the latter. What it does mean, however, is the spread of conflict as capitalist enterprises colonise new territories and appropriate local powers and means of control. Mouffe analyses this in terms of the articulation of neoliberalism and democracy (2009, pp. 6–7); in this dynamic engagement neoliberalism is frequently the dominant ideology, and democracy is weakened or even negated by the partnership. The casualties of the neoliberal dominance are, according to Mouffe, invariably democratic governance and social justice; the struggle for equality is abandoned and replaced with the deception of liberal freedom. This is a catastrophic mistake because political rights for the majority have always had to be won by political struggle, a contest that continues despite neoliberal assurances to the contrary. Mouffe points out that, historically, the ruling classes have never freely given away their privileges; moreover, those democratic rights that have already been won are constantly being eroded by powerful groups in the maintenance or restoration of their particular interests.

Carr and Hartnett (2010) concur with Mouffe on this concept of democracy being an enduring struggle, a series of rights that are never bestowed on the masses but, rather, have to be won through assertion; they also argue that democratic rights are in a perpetual state of fragility and vulnerability, and therefore have to be protected by constant vigilance. They focus on the free access to high-quality education as the touchstone for the well-being of a democratic society and describe the struggles that have taken place in the establishment of the notion of ‘education for all’ in Western nations. They look at the political shaping of policies for mass secondary education in the UK to demonstrate the resistance to this idea, and the uneven progress towards its establishment as a widely accepted feature of the political landscape. Going on to look at subsequent developments in the education system through the lens of the interests of powerful groups, they warn of education’s susceptibility to policies of privatisation and special interests, which have a corrosive effect on democratic access by the populace. This is exacerbated by fundamental weaknesses present in the structures of a comprehensive education system, whereby privileged interests are preserved in the very foundation of the system – as witnessed by the continued and uninterrupted existence of high-status private schools throughout the period of comprehensive school reforms and reorganisation. The consequent further segregation and division of education into types of schooling, when seen from this perspective, can only exacerbate the erosion of democratic education and create hierarchies of schools.

Ken Jones (2012, using the work on democracy of Canfora), looks at the events of 1945 and after, that is to stay the establishment of secondary education for all in the UK and the growth of teacher control of both the content and methods of delivery of the curriculum in the period running up to the reactionary clampdowns of the 1980s. He argues that the growth of teacher influence was indicative of the wresting of power away from traditional authorities and further that this was also indicative of the progress of democracy itself. Democracy, in Jones’s view, should be seen as a disruptive strategy for redistributing power and wealth. Moreover, it is a contingent and momentary occurrence that has to be constantly reinvigorated. Thus, the events of 1945 in the UK, the nationalisation of health and education, whilst having an important and enduring effect on policy and attitudes to education, were nonetheless limited and proscribed by traditional orthodoxies, which continue to try to re-establish their authority. For Jones, however, the key point is that teachers and educators have managed in the past to collectively establish authority over the content and methods of their teaching and the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theories of creativity and democratic education
• 2 Relational and critical creativity
• 3 Creative pedagogies: Palestine
• 4 Independent and democratic learning
• 5 Contemporary creative pedagogies: Japan
• 6 Creative interventions
• 7 Democratic trends in the politics of creativity and innovation
• Conclusion: creative acts, democratic acts
• References
• Index