The Artful Educator

Creative, Imaginative and Innovative Approaches to Teaching

Sue Cowley

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781785831157
• eBook ISBN: 9781785832338
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Is teaching an art, rather than a science? Instead of measuring education and reducing everything to data, what if we looked at it through the lens of the arts? Sue Cowley demonstrates how teachers can become artists, sculptors, actors, dancers, musicians, playwrights, poets, designers and directors, no matter which subject or age group they happen to be teaching. The artful educator paints the air with ideas and weaves magic with words. They aren't afraid of a little risk, or of planning and delivering lessons a little differently. Learn how to be more creative, experimental, playful and imaginative in the methods you use to manage your classroom, and in the myriad ways in which you help your students to learn. Discover what an 'artful attitude' to education looks like, with plenty of practical, real-life ideas for artful teaching and learning. Sue has collected inspiring examples of how colleagues in a range of settings, from early years to secondary and further education, are already using artful approaches in their classrooms. Find out how to engage with your artful side, reinvigorate your approach to teaching and inspire yourself and your children with the pure joy of learning. Getting artful can involve borrowing techniques from the arts to use in teaching, getting learners hands-on with creating artworks themselves and also engaging learners with great existing works of art, cultivating the cultural capital that comes from this in the process. A collection of suggestions designed to inspire you to take creative risks with your learners, this is a book for explorers and rebels. An ideal resource for trainees, NQTs and experienced teachers alike, The Artful Educator is for anyone looking for inventive, innovative approaches to teaching.

Part One:

Artful Attitudes

Chapter 1

The Artful Philosophy

‘They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.’

(attributed to) Dinos Christianopoulos

It is notoriously tricky to define what ‘art’ is, which is exactly how things should be. One of the defining features of art is that it is not about right or wrong; nor is it about certainty and standardisation. This can make artful approaches challenging for an education system that values binary answers. What then does it mean for an educator to be artful, in the context of this book? For me, the artful philosophy is about taking an imaginative, innovative and creative approach to what happens in your classroom. It is the antithesis to standardisation because it comes out of a creative relationship with the learners you teach. Art is in the eye of the beholder – it is an expression of our common humanity that arises from a unique and individual response to the world, and so being artful requires you to give your children a sense of personal agency. The process of making and exploring art will create an emotional reaction in your learners and it will allow them to express their own visions of their world. This makes it a powerful force for building children’s self-confidence and promoting their enjoyment of learning. Art is about the senses – it will elicit some kind of sensory response in the audience, and make them think or feel at a deeper level than usual. Artfulness is the antithesis of ‘there is only one way to teach (or indeed to learn) and this is how everyone must do it’. In the current educational climate, where success in high stakes testing is prioritised, artful, experimental, imaginative teaching may feel like an act of subversion. In this book I argue that the time for a principled and artful rebellion has arrived.

The artful educator believes that children are unique – that they have a unique set of talents and interests, and that each child learns best in a way that is individual to them. This means that it is nigh on impossible to standardise the process of education – to say ‘if you do it like this it will work’ or ‘research shows that method X is the best one to use’. The artful educator keeps asking awkward questions like ‘What you do you mean “it will work”?’ and ‘Who exactly will it be “best” for?’ and ‘But did you think about the impact of X on Y?’ The artful educator believes that just as no two pieces of art are the same, nor are any two lessons. Perhaps, the artful educator wonders, the true measure of whether a lesson has ‘worked’ is if it gets children to think, to be curious, to laugh, to engage or to take a deep interest in a subject, not if it gets them to pass their SATs. The artful educator cannot countenance the idea that teachers could ‘deliver’ a scripted and standardised lesson to a waiting class of obedient children. An artful educator is there to perform creative magic with the children, not to read out a standardised script that someone else wrote for them to deliver. And although that magic might not always happen, the artful educator is going to give it a damn good try.

The artful educator understands that learning is a tricky, slippery, awkward thing – it is a bumpy ride along a rough and winding track. The journey is rarely straightforward, and it is highly unlikely to take a straight line from A to B. We might have to loop back on ourselves to get to where we wanted to go, or cover the same ground many times before we finally get close to being happy with what we have achieved. We will probably have to try and fail, over and over again, and suffer some bruises along the way. And then, just when we get to where we thought we were headed, we might suddenly realise that there is a whole lot more still left to learn, or that we had the wrong destination in mind all the time. This is the journey of a learner, whether it is a child in a classroom or an adult learning and developing as a teacher. But a bumpy journey is not a bad thing – you can’t learn how to get it right in the end without getting it wrong en route.

What is Artful?

Being artful is not exactly the same thing as being artistic. The essence of the artful approach has been captured with all its components on pages 8–9.

Chapter 2

Artful Attitudes to Learning

‘I’m not afraid of storms for I’m learning how to sail my ship.’

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

The skills that the artful educator must learn are not those of a surgeon – cutting and stitching. They are not those of an engineer – measuring and constructing. Nor are they those of a scientist – theorising and researching. Neither are they those of a businessperson – measuring and analysing. No, the skills that you must learn as you develop as an artful teacher are more akin to those of an artist – the attitudes you will need to adopt are more like those of a painter or a playwright. You need to learn how to weave magic with words, how to build relationships out of thin air and how to bring learning to life, in all its multisensory glory, in a classroom filled with the noise and energy that thirt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The Artful Educator
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One:: Artful Attitudes
• Part Two:: The Artful Educator
• Ten Tiny Steps
• References and Further Reading
• About the Author
• Copyright