Introduction: creativities + hope = sowing seeds for co-authoring change
Being a primary educator in the twenty-first century is an inspiring journey, but one which has become increasingly complex. Educating children to be positive, healthy, engaged, active global citizens who are prepared for uncertainty has become even more relevant because of the complex societal challenges of global health crises, climate change, disruptive geopolitical matters and increased inequalities. Meeting the challenge of educating children necessitates new practices, new spaces and new forms of leadership. Primary education can help to create new societies where educational encounters are sculpted by new creativities to inspire change. But how are these seeds of change sown?
Primary educators are being called to make greater use of research to inspire change and to co-create ways to unlock research together to co-author change. These iterative unfoldings and seeded meshings of innovative research-informed change-making practices demand at least a radical break – and at best an accelerated change – in ways of thinking about our primary schools. This requires more than ‘tinkering’ with our professional practices but rather rethinking and transforming our primary education systems.
At the centre of this chapter – as (dandelion) seeds sown across its parts – are the planks of an argument and catalyst for unlocking research. In many childhood memories, blowing a seeded dandelion flower involves making a wish. Using this as a metaphor for this chapter, if you blow the seeds from a dandelion plant and make a wish, what comes true is new creativities, each of which activates the seeds, moving in the winds of change. Each creativities seed is a performed enactment of hope, which, we suggest, can be ground-breaking and sustainable. Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire (1995) identified hope as a foundational element that renders education possible; how hope, as a human experience, is constructed in and through social institutions such as education. How might hope be explored and mobilised? The seeds sown across all parts of this chapter (and all other chapters in this book) are intended to inspire, shape and unfold change-making practices that (re-)invigorate, (re-)empower and (re-)position primary education practice. How can this come about? By diversifying creativities with specific purposes in particular contexts, which helps re-balance, improve and support changes, and which generate new meaning and significance in the lives of children and educators. Here, our invitation and challenge to the reader is to perform new forms of relating, thinking, and communicating, to inspire new acts of peer group inquiry, to co-author new partnerships, and to catalyse and operationalise a multiplicity of creativities. These will inspire ways of re-imagining and shifting away from the stubborn remnants of outmoded primary education systems (in particular the dominant discourses that block innovation in pedagogic practice, school curricula and leadership roles).
How does this type of seeding-change work? In the past, creativity was seen as a clearly defined concept. As Biddulph and Burnard (Chapter 3) explain, it was largely monocultural or culturally blind. In diversifying and pluralising creativities, the whole panoply of what we usually see in primary education practices is displaced. Fostering multiple creativities should play a central role in any commitment to future-making education because a future-making education is a widening-out of possibilities for appraising and attending to our presence and our purpose in the world. This calls for different kinds of creativity, however, wholly different from the kind coveted in earlier centuries. Pre-Enlightenment associations with the concept of ‘creativity’ referred to ‘god’ or the god principle, divine aspect, god as creator, a god impulse. Throughout the Renaissance, ‘creativity’ became a characteristic of ‘great men’, not as conduits for the divine, but as ‘geniuses’ themselves. The origins of creativity scholarship, emerging from philosophy, psychology, aesthetics and other fields, carried a humanist focus until after the Renaissance, as it slowly turned toward the multiple nexus of creativity-aesthetics-imagination (Craft, 2015). More recently, a focus on creativity’s value-creating factors has moved the rhetoric of creativity from leading economies and social good, to secure democratic and political capital in the Imagination Age, and from the source of the romantic lone genius to an era defined by constant innovation which is technologically more-than-human (Burnard & Colucci-Gray, 2020). While the ability to think and act creatively is recognised as an educational imperative, it is also one of the core competencies recognised – in and through research – by proponents of twenty-first-century (future-making) education (Harris, 2016). This is producing educators who think differently and more critically about education systems and movement makers who initiate change and are preparing to educate the next generation. This remaking and reseeing requires an openness to the multiplicity of new creativities in motion, so that we might materialise the possibilities for future-making primary education.
Long-standing creativity research provides evidence of the many different pathways needed to mitigate and manage the economic, social, and cultural contingencies that continue to make teachers feel constrained, such as the culture of accountability in primary education. This is where these different creativities matter as seeded sets of points and positions for realising transformational change. This is how new creativities open us up and set in motion the possibilities for co-authorship and co-design. This is why co-creating ways to unlock research together is inspiring and inspires change by mutually connecting with what children, families, and their communities need to flourish in their lives, along with what educators need to thrive in their profession. Thus, this chapter offers ways for thinking through and framing new ways in which educating for diverse creativities – for both children and teachers – offers hope for a bold new agenda of change in and through primary education.
The idea of ‘multiple creativities’ is not new. Howard Gardner (1983) proposed a theory of multiple intelligences which has been applied to creativities which can be bounded by subject disciplines, but also engenders different practices in and across the interrelationships between sciences and the arts. For example, where creatives often relied on different intelligences to manifest their creativity, where for example, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou and T. S. Eliot made their reputation through linguistic intelligence and language creativity, they also opened new paths that intersected with literary creativity. Ada Lovelace, Katherine Johnson and Albert Einstein developed processes of reciprocal capture in mathematical creativity through logical-mathematical intelligence. Similarly, Hildegard von Bingen, Amy Beach, Clara Schumann and Igor Stravinsky became famous through the combination and fusing of their musical intelligence and musical creativity (Gardner, 1983).
Reconfiguring the concept and theory of multiple ‘creativities’, as a core element of primary education found in the moments of always becoming creative, allows us to re-think one of the most significant concepts in society, and therefore future-making primary education. From this premise, the conception of a plurality of creativities (rather than the outmoded singular notion of creativity) addresses a performative space (rather than a representational space) and acknowledges different and diverse enactments. These are both emerging and continuously re-made through material enactments, which are authored together (co-authored) by teachers and children. This authoring of diverse creativities arises in and permeates everything at the level of classroom practice. For, of course, it is teachers, not politicians, who determine the nature and quality of children’s learning and it is teachers who define and shape which creativities are encouraged and become commonplace in primary schools. The research evidence reported in the UK and beyond shows the significant positive impact that diverse (posthumanising) creativities can have on motivation, engagement and achievement (Craft, 2015). The evidence of multiple creativities can offer differentiations specific to language, mathematics, science, music and art that are interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, collaborative, communal, digital, everyday, spatial, environmental and pedagogical (Burnard & Colucci-Gray, 2020; Burnard et al., 2017).
Creativities we live by: co-authoring hope
Whether a child, a headteacher, a classroom teacher, a teaching assistant, part of the support staff team or a parent/carer, being a member of a primary school learning community which is bravely building community means authoring the performative uses of diverse creativities. By this we refer to a plural conception of creativities, where language creativity (or the artful use of language) and science creativity, mathematics creativity and other types of creativity for specific purposes in particular contexts generate meaning and significance, and inspire and transform the lives of children and teachers in diverse communities. From this starting point, the advancement of multiple creativities can enable us to work differently as learning communities, to engage with children in classrooms differently. Acknowledging multiple and diverse creativities is key to opening more hopeful possibilities for change.
Throughout this book, you will find examples where enacting diverse creativities has brought about new or reimagined possibilities for primary education such as the learning environment, pedagogical approaches, leadership, and community building. Performing creativities are both emerging and continuously re-made through material enactments, which are authored in material relationships that are complex, dynamic, and situated. This can be seen as authoring and performing change at strategic, policy, or system levels, and seeing how this permeates everything else at the classroom practice level. In so doing, developing and sustaining the capacity to (co-)author, co-create, make, co-design, experiment, and open up to new practices and new possibilities will enable us to create together what might, to others, seem impossible or barely possible. Herein lies the potency and potential of shared action and ideas which open space for performing the indefinite and uncertain. In this pluralisation and multiplicity of creativities is the foundation for hope and for bringing about hopeful communities. In this unification lies the promise of primary education turned around by sculpting new creativities. Such education, rather than teaching children about the world, allows children to be taught by it and enables their co-creation of ways through it.
In this chapter, we invite you to ask yourself where, how and when you have authored (and/or co-authored); that is, come up with new ideas, actions, ways of doing, thinking, and being as primary educat...
