Teaching (in) the arts through partnerships and collaboration:

constructive tensions or impossible contradictions?

Graham JefferyG.Jeffery@uel.ac.uk

‘Creative partnership’, contradictory drivers

• ‘knowledge economy’ or ‘knowledge society’…?

• Applying and using knowledge, not just reproducing it - needs a more generative/creative curriculum?

• ‘partnerships’ part of New Labour rhetoric of governance/public sector management

• Rhetoric of skills, competitiveness, innovation

• Technological change - networking across boundaries/hierarchies

• Arts have caught onto this, and thus creative economy rhetoric

Increasingly networked and collaborative institutional landscape…for education, business and society….

• The ubiquity of creativity discourses…

Performativity and creativity

• Standards rhetoric• Output measures• Intensive testing• Audit apparatus• Risk aversion - making

education ‘teacher-proof’?

• Grading and comparison• Functional knowledge

and skills• Marketised environment

• Open-ended tasks• Integrative and

connective learning• Porous institutions and

viral innovation• Questioning and critical

orientation - enquiry based learning

• Understanding social and cultural contexts for learning

…coexist in an uneasy and uncomfortable relationship

Change is a multidimensional

process…‘Top -down’ drivers• Standards rhetoric, but

tempered with ‘inclusion’, personalisation, creativity etc.

• Intense scrutiny of institutional (and individual) performance

• ‘Megaphone innovation’

‘Bottom-up’ drivers

• Practice in the classroom (and beyond) still matters

• Pedagogy counts• Leadership and

innovation from below?

Change and innovation can be activated in the institutional gaps and spaces of this agenda….

Creative partnerships as panacea?

• ‘deficit models’ of student and teacher performance

• Creativity as a kind of catch all

• As an intervention designed to ‘raise standards’?

• A kind of stimulant from the outside (in the case of Creative PartnershipsTM)

It is about creative education, by which I mean helping teachers teach more creatively, using creative journeys as educational drivers and developing creative skills in young people. Creative education will for me achieve a range of benefits like linguistic development, more confident students, more motivated students who are more committed to education,more emotionally literate students, more curious students, imaginative kids with lots of ideas, students with an improved capacity to take intelligent risks etc”.

(Paul Collard, interview in January 2006)

policy and practice: contexts

• creativity as a rhetoric within the umbrella of policy…or a challenge?

• partnerships - to take learning beyond the classroom setting

• developing more ‘authentic’ contexts for learning?

• productive pedagogies that share multiple territories and build bridges between different interests…require new ways of thinking about teaching, learning and leadership

Policy and practice: conflicts

Cultural policy, the creative economy and community identities

• Is it about arts and culture or about creativity across the whole curriculum? Or both?

Place marketing, civic boosterism, youth and social inclusion

Rhetorics and realities of creativity and cultural diversity

relationships between different kinds of institutions and professional identities

different contexts…

different rhetorics…

Huge claims…and implementation is far from being systematic or system-wide…

• Rather, has the status of a set of (uncontrolled) experiments

• A repository for all sorts of different pedagogic practices…

• A cauldron of innovation and/or a confusing mess?

Arts education is caught up in these tensions…

• Arts education as a repository/refuge for creative practices within schools and colleges?

• Expressive aims alongside ‘subject knowledge’ is a potent mix

• ‘Role ambiguity’ in partnership-based pedagogies…

• Some types of curriculum and assessment are more tolerant of these than others…

• Hybrid and unsettled forms of identity and professional practice?

• Teacher/artist/educator…

This work is fed by many different traditions and approaches…e.g:

• In the US ‘teaching artist’

• In Europe ‘animateur’

• In the UK ‘creative agent’?

• Artist in residence• Public artist• Artist as agent provocateur?• The arts as repository of

cultural tradition/identity

• Teacher as practitioner

• Teacher as artist

• Teacher as activist

• Teacher as expert and role mode

• Youth and community arts

• Community media

• Socially engaged arts practice

• Theatre in education, community dance

Complex relationships between arts sector and education…

• Many artists have supported/supplemented their practice by working in education (particularly FE and HE?)

• Many teachers of the arts have professional histories in the arts

But…many other teachers are uneasy and uncomfortable with the principles and practice of arts education and prefer more fixed/easily defined approaches…

Arts education institutions gain huge value from this blurriness

• It resources practice• A lot of movement

between the inside and outside of organisations for ‘creative professionals’ - hybridity?

• Organisations can be hubs and brokers

• You need to acknowledge cultural practice from outside the institution…

• Students benefit from working with ‘professional artists’

• Models of ‘stealth mentoring’ and informal apprenticeship - a characteristic of British cultural education?

This mediation and negotiation is part of the condition of being in a pluralistic

education system…

• Use of time, space, and resources provides the ‘legislative’ framework/ social architecture within which schools operate - but how flexible and open is it?

• Are the conditions and space for collaboration present?

• Relationships between formal and informal learning…

Creative partnerships imply…

• New types of relationship between formal and non-formal education provision

• Recognising the value of these models of learning means confronting awkward and difficult questions for more established institutions and curricula

Three stories about these issues….

1. The story of ‘Home’

• Hybrid curricular/extra curricular project

• In the context of a connective vocational performing arts curriculum

• Artist-teacher led• The ethics and risks

associated with this work…

2. A story from TAPP(www.tapprogramme.org)

• Artists and teachers in dialogue as part of a sustained programme of professional development

• Action research/enquiry partnerships

“Difficulties in the theory: is it just me?

- the constant call for collaboration in an area which is often about a fairly solitary, highly personal exploration

- the emphasis on verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with

words- the focus on Artists as some sort of uniquely, innately skilled creative problem solvers who will be able to redress an

inherent lack in the system - The desire to promote equal partnerships in a system

where artists and teachers can never be equal- a blurring of expectation between the definitions; ‘artist’

and ‘art educator’- an over-simplification of what an artist is, packaging them

to fulfil a ‘required’ service.- Time, as a contributing factor to all the above is not

valued enough and only recently being analysed.(Thurle Wright, artist)

3. A story about ‘dissemination’

• Risk of adopting an uncritical approach to policy

• How to maintain an activist and challenging edge

• Being alive to the contradictions in policy rhetoric

Challenges…

• Articulating the theories that underpin the approaches to learning more clearly - building a case and explaining pedagogies

• Being aware of contradictions - it’s in the cracks that we can open up ‘spaces in the standards agenda’

It’s in the cracks and fissures of the systems and the rhetoric that creative

solutions emerge…

But..

• Values?• Ethics?• Climate/culture for

creative partnership is important

• ‘Reflective practice’ and ‘action research’ as a reconciling strategy?

Context and community…not just standards and structures

• New hybrid learning spaces - extending into city and community - linked to ‘learning city’ movement: building frameworks of support for cross-sector partnership - this is political…

• Example of Stratford Circus in East London - as learning space shared between formal and non-formal sector:

www.stratford-circus.com

Questions of pedagogy and leadership

• ‘entredonneurship’ in the public sector

• Institutions are resilient - ‘organisational hacking’ is needed

• Ethical frameworks and professional cultures - imagining kinds of new professions and approaches…the artist-educator, the teacher-artist…

“Mediated conversations at a cultural trading post” - forthcoming from TAPP

(www.tapprogramme.org)

The Creative College: building a successful learning culture in the arts (Trentham Books, 2005)

G.Jeffery@uel.ac.uk

generalpraxis.blogspot.com