Creativity: Luxury or Lifeline?
Survive and Thrive in a changing Educational Landscape
On 30 September 2009 250 delegates travelled to Bradford for our Conference Creativity: Luxury or Lifeline? Survive and Thrive in a Changing Educational Landscape. Three keynote speakers launched the conference themes of creativity at the centre of young people’s learning, partnership at the centre of practice, and enquiry at the centre of professional development. Delegates then had the opportunity to explore their responses to the speeches in 27 exciting seminars.
Valerie Hannon sought to move us forward from creativity per se to considering both the need for, and evidence of, social innovation. She illustrated the extent to which there is already a move towards democratic innovation, often channelled through IT connections, involving mass collaboration and self-organisation. This tendency may be spurred on by the widespread recognition that those who had previously held the reins in determining the future (policy makers, bankers etc) had fallen short, despite their own access to the ‘best’ education the world had to offer. Valerie advised that we look for inspiration and leadership beyond policy makers and school improvement strategies to the wider and more responsive world of social innovation. This stood the chance of getting beyond the deep, sometimes hidden, and always damaging disengagement of young people.
Valerie Hannon Presentation
Paul Collard revealed that while he had often been asked to talk about creativity, he had never had to talk about partnership. He raised a number of concerns about the wisdom of assuming that partnership was necessarily an appropriate approach to our work. He focussed largely on the more organisational aspects of partnership (funding, strategic, programmatic etc) but in raising the challenges faced for partnership working it became clear that some are common to both strategic and personal partnership working – unequal power, communications and co-ordination etc. Paul suggested that the cadre approach to partnerships with young people did little to change the wider culture (perhaps raising the question of how very limited interventions in schools could hope to achieve what the rhetoric requires) but instead led to further rounds of replicant projects.
(At the end of the day, Arnie Aprill suggested that focussing on those more personal partnerships between teachers, creative professionals and learners may have the potential to strengthen the case for, and inform the approach to partnership working at more strategic levels.)
Paul Collard Presentation
Anna Craft discussed the place of enquiry at the centre of professional development. She proposed that enquiry needed to take into account the changing characteristics of childhood and youth and highlighted their engagement with IT as central to those changes. Do we wish to question how things work, do we have the desire to understand, and do we have a commitment to action that might spring from new understanding? Can people be taught to be reflective?
Who gets to be impacted upon when enquiry processes are undertaken? (Anna had some surprising answers to that one!)
Anna Craft Presentation
Offering a CAPE Chicago perspective, Arnie Aprill’s summation seemed to caution against planning too much ahead of time, and instead letting the work have space to emerge through the developing relationships/partnerships, which themselves needed the right kick-start through joint or co-training. Click on Link to read Arnie’s write-up in CAPE newsletter.
Our Lady of Victories Primary School, Keighley - Podcast
The media team from Our Lady of Victories Primary School Keighley broadcast live from the Cape UK 'Learning and Creativity' Conference at the National Media Museum. Our Lady of Victories have recently been awarded 'School of Creativity' status.
Time to think: Luxury or Lifeline Awards Bursary Scheme
