Our global community is now faced with enormous environmental, political, economic and social challenges, all requiring creative responses. Making our collective way through the 21st century will arguably take all of our creative thinking, doing and being. It is not clear that school education, charged with the generational transfer of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values, is up to this task. The benefits of education are inequitably distributed. If we are to have âfutures-producing schoolsâ then we have some way to go in reimagining what education may be like. One resource for rethinking education is in educational research in general, and creativity research in particular.
Creativity as a field of research has a long history in education-related disciplines including aesthetics, design, and developmental psychology. Once creativity in education was predominantly approached as an elite skill of gifted individuals, requiring a streamed âtalent developmentâ approach to the lucky few. Today, however, creativity is being reconceptualised as a basic human characteristic that can be enhanced in all individuals, and indeed must be fostered for contemporary mobility, employability success, and self-realisation in networked global culture. This book positions itself in this new field, approaching creativity through a range of diverse and emerging lenses including creative ecologies and ecosystems, design thinking, and those within arts education who advocate for a re-integration of the arts âAâ in STEAM education, a transdisciplinary answering back to the narrowing STEM agenda that seeks to polarise science âversusâ arts as ways of understanding and instrumentalising the creativity imperative.
This book focuses primarily on challenges and opportunities within the UK/Australian educational systems. These two education landscapes have family patternings arising from Australiaâs colonial and British imperial history; the two are more like each other than either is to the USA or other geopolitical education landscapes. While we note that US scholarship does not always contextualise itself as materially and culturally âplacedâ, here it is necessary to note the geographical but also cultural similarities of the UK, Australia and Canada where our contributors are based. These histories are alive in our culturally-emergent orientations as âglobalâ makers, leaders, workers and they inform our responses to â and with â US definitions of creativity, innovation, design and the arts. You will see many of these threads defined and extended across the widely diverse chapters in this book. While dominated by Australian/UK perspectives, it is not limited to them, and indeed one purpose of the volume is to make transparent the interweaving scholarship from non-American contexts that is concerned with many similar â but some importantly different â perspectives than those advanced in American-focused and American-situated scholarship. For example, Kathleen Gallagherâs chapter on multi-sited ethnography emerges not only from a Canadian context, but from the diverse geopolitical contexts in which her longitudinal study lives and thrives â mostly non-white, non-western global locations.
We have brought together a collection of scholars working both empirically out of secondary and tertiary research and curricular contexts. These writersâ research is grounded in the realities of both secondary education and the challenges in higher education of offering a curriculum that will allow a new generation of teachers to teach creativity effectively, and to develop responsive forms of holistic assessment. But some authors here also importantly advance conceptual and methodological innovations incorporating more interdisciplinary heuristics like design thinking and co-design approaches.
As with many conversations about creativity in education, this book includes those who argue from an arts perspective, not always present in more generalist creativity studies (outside of education), nor always evident in metacognitive approaches to creativity education. Many of our contributors see creativity as a domain within the arts and through which the arts expands out into transdisciplinary dialogue with others in and beyond education. The book also brings new geographical, theoretical and disciplinary perspectives to well-worn debates about creativity across the curriculum, the assessment of creativity, and how best to foster creativity in compulsory schooling in diverse contexts.
Why Policy, Partnerships, Practice
Creativity is a hot topic in education. Surprisingly there are few competing or comparable titles that address creativity in education, particularly through the lens of the arts and transdisciplinarity. While we have organised this bookâs three sections with intent, the nature of creativity education research also breaks out of those boundaries. For example, Part I also deals with curriculum, while Part III introduces issues of action research. This book is firmly guided by professional academic practice including innovative theorising, and we apply the âso whatâ question to all good research: who is benefiting from it? For whom is this work? This book answers those questions in theoretical, applied, and policy and curriculum ways.
We have ambitious aims for this book. It has been written with an eye to contemporary debates in creativity education, and future workforce preparation. We hope it will be both affirming but also challenging to creativity theorists, industry-based creatives and culture-workers, and creative practitioners and educators. We see it as a guided seminar discussion for pre-service teachers, or teachers who are returning for advanced degrees; in such contexts, the writing will provoke lively conversations around new approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. While there are now numerous publications on creativity in education, very few approach creativity in transdisciplinary teacher education, particularly through the perspective of the arts (Blumenfeld-Jones 2016; McIntosh and Warren 2013). The book will be of use in pre-service art education classrooms and in art education graduate programmes.
The book may be most useful in programmes that are exploring transdisciplinary connections in teacher education, and indeed the widespread transdisciplinary obsession with STEM/STEAM and design thinking approaches to all workplace and higher education endeavour. And, although the book primarily reflects an Australian/UK perspective, we trust it will find wide readership in all communities of practice who seek an expanded view of creativity research, particularly creative education research.
Creative Ecologies
This volume contributes to contemporary creativity education by re-imagining new creative ecological networks, relationships and events. Our goal is threefold: (1) to encourage a more complex approach to creative onto-epistemologies, (2) elaborate critical theoretical approaches to creativity in educational contexts, and (3) contribute to more synthesised and networked approaches to changing education policy to better foster, understand and teach creative mindsets, skills and values.
The authors in the book explore specifically-designed strategies that anticipate sustainable concepts of creative learning as and beyond partnership, threaded with a more widely attended digital approach to tertiary contexts, with a strong focus on teacher education. The growing interest in creativity in education settings over the past 10 years extends to both formalised academic curricula and policy, as well as a stepping off point for encouraging new understandings of creative economies, and a re-integrated âcreative and cultural industryâ approach to the education-workforce continuum. We invited these authors to consider how diverse representations and enactments of creative mentorship (hosts/collectives/business), projects (negotiated events or opportunities rather than institutionalised and static programmes such as internships), and digital transformations have come to matter, engaging with and linking artistic and creative research practice with career pathways in creative (particularly digital) ecosystems, and a renewed interest in more holistic pursuits of living a âgood lifeâ rather than just a âsuccessfulâ life defined solely in economic terms. We build upon the foundations not only of design thinking, creative economies, and poststructural theory, but also the âwise creativityâ (2013) of Anna Craft, who theorised the ways in which contemporary creativity in education offers us a mirror to consider our cultural and individual values, aspirations, and relationships to both human development but also ecological sustainability.
The chapters extend contemporary work on creative economies, linking what some would call a crisis in the natural environment and the creative industry/business sector. The authors move beyond the realm of informing individual creativity, towards equipping students with network connectivities through developing (creative) education ecologies, ecosystems in which nodes are linked by threads of practice and flows. They eschew a more traditional, atomised approach to developing creative individuals. Sustainable and mutually-informing relationships between creativity and science are seen as a necessary tool for change, development and management of new concepts of creative economies. The entrepreneurial figure becomes a socially engaged student who actively conducts themselves as a socially responsible innovator, learning to synthesise the need for original ideas, market value writ broadly, and the pleasure of creative play or making (also known as a DIY ethic).
More nuanced understandings of entrepreneurship are required in creative ecologies to help move beyond a âhuman capitalâ approach to developing and populating global 21st century workforces. Emerging scholarship encourages a networked approach in which mentors, projects and mentees are in relationship as co-âinhabitantsâ (Marttila 2018, p. 576), who intrinsically seek to develop and upgrade skills and understandings. The ways in which mentors, projects and digital platforms prefigure the interstice, places the entrepreneur as an ââimplementerâ ⌠because internationally competitive knowledge intensive production came into being as a result of the aspirations of entrepreneurial subjects to bring about economic innovationsâ (Marttila 2018, pp. 576â577). Several authors here argue in favour of greater institutionally supported resources for dynamic and transdisciplinary creativity.
This book additionally advances understandings about the ways in which creative risk-taking and synthesising strategies can be designed alongside two key concerns of educational environments: equity and sustainability. For many teachers, creativity is inherently collaborative, non-hierarchical, and critically reflexive (i.e. concerned with sustainability). Yet creative industries has sometimes been critiqued as âinnovation for innovationâs sakeâ (Craft et al. 2007), and the authors here take this call to a greater creative sociality as a foundational concept.
In the context of understanding creative partnerships and careers as dynamic yet precarious journeys in diverse and rapidly-changing environments, questions about how the constraints of contract employment, global workforces, and multinational corporationsâ extreme profit-focus and micro-cultures arise. In contemporary art and design practice, for example, there is a great deal of interest in transdisciplinary art/science collaborations, and exploring how living on edges, boundaries and in transitory/extreme environments can expand understanding of living systems and lived experiences, with greater consideration of both the constraints and resources at play for both humans and more-than-humans.
Organisation of This Book
We are pleased to present these diverse and rich chapters from leading scholars in the UK, Australia and Canada. While the contributions orient towards the titular meta-categories of policy, partnerships and practice, there are important sub-themes to note.
Firstly, more than a third of the submissions address or include the notion of âcreative ecologiesâ, reflecting a recent shift in approaches to fostering creativity in schools from a singular âteachingâ and/or âlearningâ orientation, towards more networked, environmental and collective perspectives; indeed the exceptionalism of more traditional âgifted and talentedâ research on and development of individual creativity seems to have become a thread that weaves educational collectives now together. Hatton & Mooney, Snepvangers, Gallagher et al., de Bruin, Mitchell, and Harris all address creative ecologies, and taken together, their chapters offer a diversifying range of scholarship on this important evolution.
Christine Hatton and Mary Mooney (AUS) consider schools as creative ecologies in which creative partnerships play a central role, here drawing on a primary and secondary school artist-in-schools case study. Kim Snepvangers (AUS) argues from a visual art and design education professional experience model that organised âcreative encountersâ with external mentors advances understanding of how contemporary creative ecologies can be conceived as a self-organisational partnership in a university academic context. Kathleen Gallagher, Nancy Cardwell and Dirk J. Rodricks (CAN) beautifully weave the notion of creative ecology with an âecology of careâ and the affective and intimate labour required. Leon de Bruin (AUS) links creative ecologies with organisational change across teacher education and in-service teacher profes...