Tidying up and keeping track...

Archiving and capturing information when you're so highly reliant on an ever-changing swarm/web infrastructure can be a challenge. There's something satisfying and tactile about a physical book or artefact, and fires, plagues or floods permitting, they are reasonably secure stores of information. Not the case with the web, where resources and infrastructures which were once heavily trafficked can vanish into nothing overnight as corporations, governments or skint organisations switch the servers off.

There are several tasks I need to accomplish over the next few months. One is to digitise and store analogue material from my archive of projects and outputs from the last 20 years: not too many are worth salvaging but those that are, I intend to put online and back up to hard drive; and also I need to check back through the various blogs I've built, download and archive the important bits, and try to make sure the links are current.

This relates to another project I'm just beginning to compile on the various histories of what have been called, at different times, community and participatory, and more recently "socially-engaged" arts (as if art could ever not be social...although some practitioners and connoisseurs would prefer to keep the arts liberal-individual). More about that at another point, although it clearly links to the work that we're doing on the Remaking Society project, as the same thing seems to come up again and again - the point I've repeatedly made about the need to be a bit clearer about the genealogies, histories and typologies of the various strands of participatory arts practice.  In one sense it could be argued that we are moving towards a much more participatory culture, in which the tools and resources to produce and communicate are cheap and almost ubiquitous, but the problem remains that there's no way it is possible to describe the world as democratically organised, not least when the symbolic violence of giant corporate spectacles so dominates public discourse, and wealth of all kinds is so unevenly distributed. So deconstructing and reconstructing terms like 'participation', 'community' and 'collaboration' becomes incredibly important, especially if we want to reclaim them as valid tactical approaches to cultural production. There are some good recent bits of work that have done just this -  for example in some of the scoping studies for the AHRC's Connected Communities programme, and of course the Kester vs Bishop barney about 'socially engaged' art is worth a look too.

Anyway, it might just be worth re-capping where the various bits of information about my various obsessions are to be found. This blog chronicles a fair bit of my work over the last five years, and to go earlier you'd need to read the Creative College book, which captures what we were up to in East London before that, and then fled the scene before the Olympic tsunami hit. The UWS blogs have information about my current workplace and the research and development agendas being pursued there. The 'museum of..." series is a repository for what I think is interesting ephemera from the 1970s, '80s and '90s. I guess I should also start a 'museum of the 00s' but in some ways I'm more interested in thinking about how we got here than doing lots of recent digging through the dirty world of neoliberal fast capitalism. I've also been thinking a lot about 'network pedagogies' and how digital/distributed learning combined with face-to-face might open up possibilities for much more porous forms of learning organisation and learning architectures.

I guess the other thing to consider is that in the liquid, digital world approaches and strategies constantly melt and change. But this just makes it even more important to be aware of how and why we do what we do...

Creative Media Practice at UWS

In my day-job at the University of the West of Scotland, we've just launched our new MA Creative Media Practice, starting this September. It's is new and innovative programme focusing on the development of knowledge, understanding and creative and technical skills in the fast-moving areas of screen and broadcast, digital content creation and the wider creative industries, including audio, performance and digital arts.

Although based primarily at our Ayr Campus – which has some of Scottish higher education’s finest media, broadcasting, and recording facilities – parts of the programme may also be delivered at Glasgow’s Pacific Quay, and it's also likely that we'll be doing some projects and workshops at Glasgow's CCA, where UWS has just become a Cultural Tenant. Some of the intensive workshops, such as screenwriting and creative documentary, may also be offered as residential 2-3 day or one week events.

Aimed at graduates from a wide range of disciplines, and industry professionals seeking to enhance or diversify their skills, the programme has been designed with industry input, including consultation with Scottish Screen and Skillset. We think that the programme will appeal to experienced professionals looking to consolidate their work or even thinking about a change of direction. We're hoping to build a dynamic learning community and encourage lots of collaboration across the programme.

And we're very pleased to say that under a new initiative from the Scottish Funding Council, just announced, a number of funded places are available for part-time postgraduate diploma study of this programme (which covers the first half of the course).

There's more information here and you can contact the programme leader, Tony Grace, directly at Tony.Grace@uws.ac.uk.

Creative Scotland?

This is an edited version of a talk I gave last week at a half day ‘thinktank’ exploring what vision the new body Creative Scotland (formed by a merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen) should have for ‘learning and skills.”

Building creative capacities

How is Creative Scotland going to make a distinctive contribution in a very crowded field of policy and practice? And what should its ‘vision’ be?

There is a tendency for people to talk about creativity as if it were one thing. In fact there are many different kinds of creativity and many different Scotlands. That’s a source of social strength and cultural richness, but although glib elisions of ‘learning, skills, creativity and Scotland’ alongside photographs of kids with video cameras, crowded auditoria and enthusiastic library users might conjure up images of national success, competitiveness and innovation, it will take a lot more than the rhetoric of a knowledge economy to produce a knowledgeable and talented society. Getting the headline narrative right is important but it will be no substitute for enabling people to make real changes.

We shouldn’t just assume that learning and skills can be boiled down to one thing either – in fact you can probably be trained in ‘basic skills’ without learning very much, or at least developing the capacity to learn for yourself. But perhaps creativity and knowledge are two sides of the same coin, and ‘skills’ all the different ways in which the coin can be flipped, and if Scotland is going to be a place which develops the skills of its whole population then creativity is going to be vitally important.

Knowledge isn’t raw information, it’s the capacity to interpret, process, analyse and create new ideas from existing materials. Skills aren’t just measurable competences that can be ticked off on learner profiles; to be genuinely skilled is to possess a kind of artistry which is the capacity to go beyond the routine and everyday, and mobilise tacit knowledge, intuition and a deep sense of purpose and possibility – in whatever field you happen to be working.

Of course Creative Scotland needs to promote the value of creative and cultural learning, but there are three important caveats:

1. Not all forms of culture are necessarily experienced by audiences or participants as 'creative'. A lot of cultural and educational institutions have a lot to learn about creativity, even though aspects of their work can teach us a lot about creativity too. Moreover, different communities find different value in different kinds of cultural activities – there can be no single arbiter of quality in a complex culturally diverse society.

2. Science, technology, management and accounting can all be creative too

3. The challenge is to articulate a vision that is inclusive and inspiring, but not vague

As a colleague from the US, Mat Schwartzman, who has a talent for one liners, puts it:

“creativity is a muscle”

which can be used in lots of different ways.


Creative and cultural policy?

In policy speak there tends to be elision of creativity and culture. The official line tends to stress the economic benefits of the creative economy – and have a strong rhetoric about capacity for innovation and supporting ‘excellence’ in cultural provision – but:

• creativity and cultural questions can be uncomfortable and challenging
• culture can give rise to knowledge that doesn’t fit easily into official versions of the knowledge economy,
• truly innovative and creative work challenges consensus - curators, commissioners and customers have to cross the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the traditional and the avant-garde, all the time if you want work that is going to be challenging
• a lot of the reasons why people participate in art and culture aren’t primarily economic, but artists still have to eat...

If we agree that creative and cultural learning is important then Creative Scotland needs to be a champion of a country in which everyone can experience creative learning.

For me, creative learning is fundamentally about a sense of agency, of being able to make and remake, of being able to invent – in small or large ways. Not everyone will innovate (that is to say, embed their creativity systematically and change social or technological processes) but everyone is creative – and the notion of promoting creativity as a life skill is important – a skill not just for work (although that’s important too) but a muscle that can be exercised at all stages of life, in all situations. It’s welcome that this is clearly flagged in the public thinking around Creative Scotland to date.

Creative Scotland will need to address:

• training for arts and cultural, and media professions – building and advocating for the infrastructure in Scotland for this – and addressing issues of funding, pathways, and partnerships along with all the other agencies responsible for education and training

• professional development and professional learning for practitioners in the creative industries at all stages of their career, from entrance to exit

• learning about and valuing culture across all sectors/segments of learning

• lifelong learning and community learning, experiencing and learning through different media and the arts

• the contribution that artists, cultural institutions, and storytelling through media make to placemaking, well-being and quality of life.

• how culture creates a sense of distinctiveness and identity. It’s the quality of cultural expression that gives a place its distinctive characteristics – and this cultural expression appears in architecture, in design decisions about the built and social environment, in literature and storytelling, in fashion, media, cinema, radio, television, and everyday language. Culture is the conversation that a society has with itself on a daily basis. So learning and culture are totally intertwined.

I worry about Paisley, where I live, when the most visible monuments of its incredible cultural heritage, other than a lot of great 19th century architecture in fairly poor condition, are black and white photographs of Victorian mill workers on the walls of Morrisons supermarket. The everyday disconnect with the place’s incredible cultural heritage – and potential - is evident in the lack of ambition for the place, which often seems to be limited to more supermarkets, more retail sheds, more service centres, more motorways, more low grade jobs. That’s no recipe for a cultural or creative renaissance. Other towns and cities in Scotland with a similar history have fared rather better – perhaps a job for Creative Scotland is to champion the ways in which culture and creativity can contribute to place-making in its broadest sense.

And we know that although the arts, culture and media can make an important contribution to the economy, they are also there precisely because they speak about those things that can’t be accounted for or measured.

The arts are too important just to be left to the market.

Creativity and Scotland’s cultures

Creative and cultural learning isn’t just about more entertainment, beautification and aesthetic appreciation – bread, circuses, monuments, or classic texts - but also about engaging in dialogue and debate – isn’t that what effective learning is supposed to be about? Culture is a conversation – sometimes it’s a constructive dialogue, sometimes it’s loud, vocal, dissenting, difficult, sometimes obscure and hard to understand, sometimes direct and to the point.

Scotland has a fantastic heritage of critical dissent and activism which continues to be kept alive by new generations of artists through places like Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals, the Greater Easterhouse Arts Company, Craigmillar, and in communities in the Highlands and Islands that have sustained an incredibly rich cultural life on very limited resources.

Scotland has big questions to confront and I’d suggest that the arts, film and theatre do this rather better – you get more subtle and nuanced responses - than the politicians generally do.

There will be many Creative Scotlands - the commercial and the subsidised, the classical and the vernacular, the traditional and the popular – and lots of different types of work. In fact, especially in a small country, many workers move almost seamlessly between these worlds and perhaps its better not to get too hung up on the distinctions. On the other hand it’s important to understand some of the differences. Paying for the time of some musicians and some artists to undertake some artistic experiments in a cave and make an experimental film, like the one I worked on with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Durness last year, is a very different proposition to trying to produce a No 1. single or the next big movie made in Scotland.

But without the creative soil to grow the big moneymaking trees in, they will fall over and dry up for lack of nourishment from the grassroots (to over-extend an already over-used metaphor).

We need a vibrant commercial media/culture industry, we need a strong education/training sector and we also need not for profit organisations. We need to recognise the value of informal participation and the work of the voluntary and community sector, because culture and creativity is too important to be left to the marketplace. So a learning strategy needs to acknowledge all this and ensure it provides more than the minimum for all. This is a considerable challenge/balancing act because each of these sectors speaks different languages, has different antecedents, and different expectations. There’s a translating and negotiating job to be done. But value can be found in linking together the formal and the informal and developing conversations between different communities.

A second related issue, which it’s really important not to overlook, is what I call the informal creative economy – i.e. all the activity around and on the fringes of the officially recognised cultural sector. If we’re talking about the creative economy we need to pay attention to the shadow economy – the ways in which people find ways in – not just the official economy. That includes voluntary participation, informal clubs and associations, and the role of religious, ethnic and political affiliations in making meanings through cultural activity.

The simplest way to do this is to make time and space for people to do their own thing. When I think about my students working flat out in breaks between lessons in the studio to rehearse and record, I realise that those sort of informal learning places and spaces, because they are immersive and self-organised, are often more productive for musical learning than formal instruction. Room 13, which is developing offshoots all over the world, explores similar ideas using the visual arts and a radical commitment to learner autonomy, from Fort William. But because policy money usually has to be attached to measurement of outputs, for reasons of ‘value for taxpayers’ etc, there is often a squeeze on space for informal experiment. When public funding is attached to creativity, there will always be tension between ‘delivery’ (delivery of what?) and incubation (preparing for the unknown).

I suspect that the strategic potential of arts and media activity to support cultural cohesion and sustain community development, as well as the tourism, retail and media industries, are still not fully understood by government agencies and policymakers, who sometimes confuse the ends with the means. Culture does not exist to ‘deliver’ social policy objectives, but there is plenty of evidence that participation in cultural activity can lead to social gains. However, artists are artists precisely because they don’t want to tow the line and because they can offer a different perspective to established orthodoxies. Grit and challenge are important – part of a democratic culture.

A confident and vibrant society would be one in which there are creative opportunities – in which quality of life, health, and a sense of wellbeing, engagement, and citizenship are all present.

Ideas

So, to conclude, here are four ideas for the dimensions of a possible vision to consider:

1. Infrastructure issues – the institutions and networks which provide the learning opportunities – how they work, how they are funded, how they are supported, how they can collaborate and build shared agendas. Because resources are scarce, collaboration tends to work better than competition but people in educational and cultural institutions need to learn how to make these work better...

2. Intelligence issues – helping practitioners and participants to access knowledge and skills – to advocate and publicise work, to access the learning resources that they need – given that a lot of artists and cultural practitioners have a pretty precarious existence it will be important that Creative Scotland is forward looking, strategic, helpful and a source of good information and intelligence...

3. Innovation issues – professional learning and development to make creativity sustainable, and systemic change in the cultural sector, in the education sector, in the public and private sector which embeds a vision of creative learning not just in the school curriculum but throughout all stages of life

4. Inclusion issues – how to maintain open and participatory institutions, remove barriers and obstacles to participation, enable dissent and difference and embed a sense of opportunity – I was really pleased to see the idea that formal/informal learning will be woven together in the new Curriculum for Excellence – that’s an essential ingredient of creative teaching and learning

To which perhaps we could add a fifth – internationalism – not just taking cultural products from Scotland and the UK to the global marketplace (although that’s important) but also to exchange learning – with europe, the US, the developing world, etc. and to understand that forging links and networks with like-minded people globally will be the way to build a sense of momentum and opportunity around this work.

In a difficult economic climate, advocacy and innovation will be crucial and it’s really important that we don’t just have retrenchment to the tried and tested given that public money will be tight – therein lies a failure of nerve and ultimately this will also lead to economic failure, as well as further social divisions.

Culture and creativity provide the tools to make sense of the world – to tell meaningful stories – to make sense of the present and to build and imagine possible futures.

So – let’s hope that Creative Scotland will be funding work which is catalytic, which moves the debate forward, which isn’t about duplication, and which builds capacity for creativity...so that the all the different Scotlands can train, build and flex and their creative muscles in the years to come.

Artists, teachers, learning and pedagogy

Here's a fairly lengthy piece I've just finished for the forthcoming manual that we've been developing from the Teacher-Artist Partnership Programme(TAPP) and work done with David Jenkins as part of the research into the language and discourse of TAPP. It's still something of a work-in-progress but I thought I'd publish it here in the hope of garnering some responses.

The pedagogy of artist-teacher partnerships: research perspectives

Pedagogic partnerships between teachers and artists are useful because they tend to bring to the surface issues which may be taken for granted or hidden in learning settings. They can have a catalytic impact because they enable hidden or unconsidered assumptions about the use of time and space, the organisation of learning, or even established relationships with individual learners to be questioned and challenged. Partnerships can provide a sense of authenticity and engagement because they shift learning into the ‘border zone’ between the worlds of education, culture and communities, opening up a wider set of contexts and reference points for learning than a single teacher or school can provide alone.

However in order for their potential to be unlocked TAPP believes that there is a need to develop a critical and reflective approach to collaboration which displays a sensitivity to potential inequalities and differences of perspective between the partners. Alongside this critical attitude a strong commitment to ambitious and artistically challenging practice needs to be fostered.

1. Artist-educators and arts education

The notion of the artist-educator or teacher-artist has a considerable history. In The Creative College I categorised this field as driven by four dimensions:

a) Artist-teachers
Firstly, art and design education (and some traditions in the performing arts) has championed the ‘artist-teacher’. In the model of artist-teacher, the skill and craft of the arts practitioner is blended with pedagogical knowledge in order to develop forms of teaching which mobilise notions of artistic ‘authenticity’ and integrity. This develops forms of cultural apprenticeship between learner and teacher. Under hierarchical arrangements learners are apprenticed to the ‘master artist’ and learn through exposure to his or her craft and skills, but learning process can also take a more dialogical form, involving ‘collaboration’ and facilitation’ in which the teacher does not seek to direct outcomes but to enable creativity. In most learning, a combination of instruction and collaboration is usually found, but with different emphases in different settings. This is commonly cited in the principle of practitioner-teacher found in conservatoires and art colleges. It is also found in some versions of early years education and, more recently, entrepreneurially focussed vocational education and training in which education is aligned with preparation for the workplace.

b) Teaching as artistry
Secondly, a rich vein of research from Dewey to Stenhouse to Schon has championed the idea of teaching itself as a type of artistry, which involves making rich, complex judgements about teaching - a form of empowered, active professionalism in which the creative decisions taken in everyday teaching settings mobilise tacit knowledge and subtle communication skills with learners.

TEACHER AS ARTIST
Can I be both teacher and artist?
While the artist was in a position to completely immerse herself in the process of play with the children once a relationship of trust had been established. I had other incidental duties to manage that impinged upon my ability to become completely absorbed." Tapp participant

c) The arts as resources for learning
Thirdly the work of art itself is a huge resource for learning. Works of art are made, encountered and ‘performed’ in a huge range of social settings, and the interaction between the art ‘object’ – whether a play, painting, piece of music or piece of media - and its social and cultural contexts provides educators with a massive array of questions, issues, philosophical and aesthetic materials that they can invite learners to explore.

Partnership based pedagogies seek to increase learner engagement by involving students in the processes of cultural production and participation, drawing on the social world of cultural institutions. They promote active engagement, which includes observation and acquiring cultural knowledge through being in an audience or culturally focussed visits. They are perhaps less likely to take notions of cultural value as ‘givens’ and are more inclined to open up the processes of cultural production to debate and re-interpretation. This is because they are intended to encourage a process of negotiation between the cultural assumptions of the school and those of the collaborating partner, as well as a self-critical attitude on the part of educators in which their own cultural assumptions, histories and preferences are deconstructed and examined.

From a TAPP perspective, participant-centred arts learning is based on encouraging involvement in the processes of making and doing in the arts – projects which foreground student engagement and inventiveness rather than exercising tight teacher control over the precise form and content of what learners produce. Paradoxically, developing such projects successfully requires a high degree of control and skill from the facilitator, but conceived of in a different sense from traditional teacher-centred instruction in which learner autonomy is limited to the teacher’s view of what is the ‘correct’ outcome. Pedagogical frameworks which are enabling and open require careful attention to structure, resources, and group dynamics. In this version of arts education, observation and analysis are an important part of planning and ‘aesthetic appreciation’ is developed through an involvement in making new work as well as experiencing the work of others. In becoming familiar with a range of cultural texts, products and processes, and making cultural products themselves, learners can develop more sophisticated forms of engagement which feed back into a richer cultural environment for learning.

d) Learning through making art

Fourthly the learning process of making art - particularly processes based in professional studio practice or rehearsal for performance - are used as an educational model. These processes often involve group collaboration but it is important to remember that they can also be highly solitary and individual. Sometimes the justification for students being involved these processes is couched in terms of the generic or transferable ‘soft’ skills that they develop, such as collaboration, communication or team working. Art-making is intimately bound up with identity and self-awareness; this enables teachers and learners to make space in the pressurised social world of the school for self-expression, and can validate many different forms of cultural experience and affiliation.

IIRRECONCILABLE TENSIONS?
"The positives in art education work are evident and well documented, and I value the work I do in schools highly. However there are aspects of working as an artist in secondary schools which do not sit right...
The constant call for collaboration in an area which is often about a fairly solitary, highly personal exploration
• The emphasis of 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 above is not valued enough" Tapp participant

Because arts education is increasingly annexed to a wider agenda of ‘creativity’ which includes but is not limited to the arts and cultural education, there are often considerable elisions and ambiguities between these four positions. The TAPP research points to the notion of ‘creative professionalism’ as a possible reconciling identity for those working in this fast-moving field, in which it is common for practitioners to adopt multiple roles and identities according to the different contexts in which they operate.

2. Artists in schools

Emily Pringle’s 2002 report We did stir things up: the role of artists in sites for learning provides some ways into discussion of the issues. She explores the many different roles that artists may play in working in educational settings. Frequently artists are labelled as ‘catalysts’ or ‘change agents’ but the evidence from the TAPP research is that either just playing the role of agent provocateur or being invoked as a ‘catalyst’ in the face of the resilient (and resistant?) systems of schools and colleges is unlikely to be successful unless this work is undertaken within a framework of dialogue and conversation. Teachers and school leaders need to be willing to engage with some of the challenges of embedding this approach into the pressured world of the school. This is why TAPP places such great emphasis on shared reflection and dialogue in order for both teachers and artists to be enabled to arrive at a mutual understanding of the problems and issues involved in the work of ‘partnership’.

There can be a tendency for large scale programmes to suggest that ‘creativity’ is something to be supplied by the outside agent. This is a particular risk when using the term ‘creative agent’ to describe the work of visiting professionals, as if what a school or a teacher needs is a kind of ‘injection’ of creativity. A ‘shot in the arm’ of creativity might be useful to stimulate a process, but in the longer term the key issue is to put the capacity and expertise into the educational system to make serious systemic change. So long-term professional development is critical. In the TAPP programme, we drew attention to the considerable heritage of this work in forty years of participatory arts practice and in innovation at the boundaries between schools and communities. We also emphasised the ways in which professional development processes can feed back into learning, pedagogic change and development in schools and cultural organisations.

The engagement between schools and artists could be regarded as an encounter between different kinds of cultural practices, each with their own conventions, codes and approaches. If this engagement is approached in the spirit of a conversation rather than an intervention from outside, we suggest that it is likely to be more successful. A second dimension is that the artistry and creative professionalism of teachers needs also be recognised and supported. A conversational and dialogical framework for professional development is intended to achieve this.

3. Artists in ‘dialogue’?

The notion of ‘artist in residence’ can sometimes carry the sense of a ‘retreat’, but in education the artist in residence is usually seen as a type of public engagement or provocation. There is a considerable history, but very fragmented documentation of artists entering into dialogue with other sectors, in industry, in healthcare, in communities and in education. Artists play many different roles in the modern economy of cultural production, beyond producing cultural products for commercial markets. In fact their skills and experience are in increasing demand as part of a shift towards a more networked and knowledge based society, Some artists, informed by developments in the performing and participatory arts and ‘dialogical aesthetics’, lean more towards using their creative and cultural skills as a social service, rather than as simply the capacity to make physical (or digital) objects or artefacts to be bought and sold in a marketplace. Teachers of the arts, as Henry Giroux points out are also ‘cultural workers’ who put their artistic expertise at the service of others. Many artists (and some teachers) have ‘portfolio’ careers which span the worlds of commerce, community, education, research and social media, with much contemporary arts practice difficult to compartmentalize in a fast-moving informational economy.

A common agenda in residencies that artists are invited to act as either a kind of ‘grit in the oyster’ in order to stimulate or provoke change, or that they are commissioned to ‘aestheticise’ the working environment by producing artistic interventions in the form of public artworks or participatory projects. This is a heavy burden for artists to carry – and not all artists may be comfortable with this role, in spite of its economic benefits - but the underlying thesis, common in conversations about business innovation, and in interdisciplinary practice, is that engagement from different perspectives leads to new insights, feed innovation, and help professionals to redesign and re-imagine their practices. The evidence from TAPP’s ‘Mediated Conversations’ research is that some of the most effective innovation takes place when artists and teachers focus on pedagogic change at the level of the class or in small groups of students, with focussed areas of enquiry, a clear shared understanding of what is being attempted, and an emphasis on testing and refining pedagogy.

4. Artist as ‘role model’

In a ‘liberal’ version of arts education, it is the aesthetic and craft skill of the artist, allied to their deep historical or cultural knowledge of the artform, that students learn to appreciate, emulate and reinvent for themselves. In a more ‘economic’ version of this discourse, artists are cast as a ‘model’ cultural worker - modelling collaborative practices of the workplace, the ‘project team’ in the creative industries, or demonstrating and sharing their ‘creative process’ with groups through acting as a workshop leader, facilitator or choreographer. There are various justifications advanced for this, some cast in the language of vocational or business education; essentially giving learners experience of the professional practice and milieu of the artist. A further, socially oriented model of arts education is that artists with particular ethnic backgrounds or other attributes deemed to be educationally desirable are cast as ‘role models’ for young people or representatives of particular cultural forms.

There are particular risks attached to all three of these representations, which at worst can be tokenistic, but at best can be transformative.

5. Artists and curriculum ‘outcomes’

One of the most commonplace assumptions is that artists are employed to assist in the delivery of ‘curriculum goals’ – and that including a wider range of professionals – and thus artistic engagement - in students’ learning will raise standards of achievement, an approach championed in different ways by the ‘arts integration’ movement in the US and by Creative Partnerships in the UK. While there is some evidence that this may often be the case, measuring the success of an artist’s work in the classroom in terms of whether learners achieve predefined ‘learning outcomes’ may neutralise the potential of the pedagogic partnership, unless there is a commitment to exploring slightly more broadly what the terms of engagement are. For this reason we strongly advocate for sufficient time to be allocated to planning, preparation and evaluation so that a clarity about the status of the artist’s work in relation to curricular frameworks can be achieved. Paradoxically, the most spectacular shifts in outcomes are often achieved when the most attention is paid to refining the processes through which the artist and teacher collaborate. This requires time for planning, reflection and debate.

DIALOGICAL TEACHING
The challenge I have faced, in seeking to create a more dialogical relationship with students, has been in promoting critical listening and questioning amongst themselves; they view me as the ‘subject who is supposed to know’ (Lacan 1981: 232). In an attempt to assert a change in my authority from teacher to artistic collaborator, participant and learner within the pedagogical environment, I had previously worked with a Theatre-in-Education practitioner to develop a workshop (influenced by the work of Heathcote and Boal) in which I was in role as an artist. The intention had been to for me to model risk taking in the creative process by presenting a depiction in which the action and therefore the meaning-making potential would be directed by the students’ responses so that they become what Boal terms ‘Spect-Actors Tapp participant’

6. Complex histories

Since the mid-1970s there have been many accounts written of artistic interventions into schools. However there is no systematic account of this work available, although a fairly extensive bibliography is available as part of the ‘Mediated Conversations’ research report and in research surveys undertaken in the US (Fiske, 2002, Seidel, 2002). Some of these accounts are those that foreground the ethical dimensions of this practice and which root the approach in traditions of community based learning, socially engaged practice and participatory approaches to making art, in which the work of the artist is as much about enabling other people to act creatively alongside self-expression and communication of their individual artistic ‘vision’. But there are many fine lines between inspiring others to create, producing innovative new work, reinterpreting the past, and encouraging knowledge and appreciation of different cultural forms. Not all artists, intensely protective of their individual practice, on which their livelihood depends, will be content to have their work or their role recast in officially sanctioned programmes of cultural learning. But it is precisely in exploiting the tensions, cracks and contradictions of the contested cultural, social and aesthetic field that ‘productive pedagogies’ – special cultural and creative learning experiences - can be activated.

7. The cultural politics of pedagogic partnerships

Each type of institutional setting in which artist-educators are found – e.g. the museum, the gallery, the university, the theatre, the school, the neighbourhood arts centre - has a complex cultural politics centred on the symbolic capital that it attracts and represents: i.e. how it is valued and represented, and by whom. For example some artforms and artform training institutions attract considerably more public resources, support and attention than others. Contrast the working lives of those regularly employed in a generously funded ‘temple of culture’ such as a major conservatoire or museum with the experience of an early-career artist working from a shed or a bedroom; or the different working lives of a classically trained actor, musician or dancer and a volunteer tutor in a neighbourhood arts centre (although many artists work in and across the divides between popular and high culture). Artist-educators work in and between many different kinds of institutions and spaces in a highly mobile informational economy; the so-called creative economy can be experienced by its front-line workers as one of considerable insecurity, precarity and exclusion. The proliferation of participatory spaces, media platforms and arts-educational projects provides opportunities, but also highlights divisions and differences in status and resources between individuals and artistic sectors.

This infuses the work of practitioners, and a school curriculum grappling with this rhetoric of a ‘creative age’, with questions of cultural value. A complex politics comes into play when certain groups - or cultural practices – are described by those in power as socially or culturally ‘excluded’. Artist-educators, working with limited resources, are often expected to mediate differences across what may seem to be intractable cultural boundaries and divides involving issues of race, class and gender.

8. Mediated conversations, occupational mythologies and professional identities

TAPP’s Mediated Conversations research project focussed quite narrowly on the linguistic forms and descriptions used by practitioners working together in partnership. Even the terms ‘teacher’ and ‘artist’ are far from unproblematic. They describe roles with complex social histories and mobilise powerful mythologies and stereotypes, which when used in everyday conversation can easily lead to muddles and misunderstandings. Teachers and artists are perceived differently by learners and this can lead to useful forms of pedagogic encounter.

Most participants , whether they primarily defined themselves as ‘teachers’, ‘artists’ or ‘ arts educators’ in TAPP and Eastfeast had complex career histories with multiple affiliations across both the education sector and the field of culture. Partnership based pedagogies seek to recognise, value and mobilise these in forms of curriculum and project design which allow for a richer encounter between learners and different kinds of ‘teacher’ than the common model of one teacher/one classroom/thirty children all of the same age. Many other combinations are possible, but in order for these to become embedded in everyday working lives of schools, a radical shift in the way in which pedagogy is conceived of is needed – which regards schools as nodes in a much wider learning network encompassing cultural institutions, neighbourhood and community resources, and which fosters the skills in educators to build projects across these divides.

The territories occupied by teachers and artists seeking to collaborate are far from being a ‘level playing field’. They are shaped by complex power gradients which often take the conversational form of mythologies, muddles and misunderstandings, which may contain partial truths but rarely reflect the whole picture. A few examples of such mythologies and muddles that emerge from our analysis of the ‘generative metaphors’ underpinning some of these conversations might be as follows:

• salaried educators and freelance artists face totally different economic realities and everyday priorities
• artists and cultural organisations embody cultural authenticity while the culture of schools is controlling and highly regulated
• the creative freedom of the individual artist is in tension with the ethical commitment of the teacher to the wellbeing of children;
• ’risk’ is to be avoided in schools and embraced in the arts;
• the systematic and regulated nature of daily timetabled life in the school is a world away from the ‘creative laboratory’ of the artist’s studio;
• the outcome-driven assessment systems of the school may appear to ignore questions of quality and value, central to the arts, that are not easily reduced to grades and ‘levels’.

These root metaphors and occupational mythologies in the discourses of teachers and artists need to be interrogated and unpacked. Our research shows that this is one of the areas of attention for creative professionalism. At times of stress, there is sometimes a tendency for practitioners to fall back on unproblematised definitions such as these, drawn from reference orientations.

A key task for like-minded CPD programmes is therefore to develop in professionals the cast of mind which can hold some of the concepts in the notion of artist-teacher in tension, whilst stlll being able to act constructively and courageously in the complex contact zone between formal education and the cultural sector. It could be argued that this is precisely kind of critical ‘high wire act’, ultimately a characteristic of creativity and critical intelligence, that CPD programmes designed to promote partnership based pedagogy should be seeking to develop.

A convivial culture for health

Here's a link to Jackie's dissertation, written back in 2000 as part of her MA Art in Architecture programme at the University of East London. It's called

A convivial culture for health: case studies in holistic practice

and it gives an account of five key sites for arts and health development in the second half of the 20th Century - the Peckham Pioneer Health Centre, Charlton Lane Acute Mental Health Unit in Gloucestershire, the Bromley By Bow Centre, Vital Arts at the Barts and The London NHS Trust, and Dr Malcolm Rigler's work with artists at Withymoor Surgery in the West Midlands. It could be a helpful reference point for people that want to find out more about the origins and development of the arts in health movement in the UK.

Constructive tensions/impossible contradictions

For those of you that can stomach the download (it's a 25MB file, so apologies!) here is the presentation I gave in Exeter on 9th October. It's called: teaching in the arts through partnerships and collaboration: constructive tensions or impossible contradictions? As always, comments very welcome.

Fifteen observations about 'innovation' and the standards agenda

A bit of a rant, but I'm really worked up about this at the moment. Comments very welcome!

There are lots of articles and activity over at NESTA about the need to encourage risk-taking in the public sector, particularly education, if we’re going to have an education system that produces the kinds of ‘creative citizens’ that are needed in the 21st century knowledge economy. Leaving aside some of the problems with the idea that we really are in a knowledge society (or at least, whether anyone other than ‘knowledge and policy entrepreneurs’ and the bloggers really are) here are some thoughts in relation to this:

1. Schools, colleges and universities (particularly schools and colleges) are under tremendous pressure to continually improve their 'results' - i.e. the quantity and quality (measured in grades) of the qualifications that their learners obtain. Education Minister Ed Balls’ recent speech just underlines this further.

2. In a climate in which educational outcomes are measured by league tables, institutions have to repeatedly demonstrate through internal planning and external reporting and inspection how they are performing. Those that appear to be doing well are rewarded with ‘status marks’, brands, logos etc. Those that do badly are ‘named and shamed’ as failing schools, targeted for intervention and pilloried in the popular press. There’s an understandable concern at the heart of this that no child should be in a school that doesn’t give them an entitlement to high quality learning; it’s not the concern to give equal opportunity that I object to, more the preferred method of achieving it. Michael Fullan, in a recent Newsnight Scotland interview pointed out that the evidence is that collaborative approaches, in which professionals share and collaborate across schools according to particular strengths, and get involved in learning together, is more likely to lead to ‘raising standards’.

3. In my book I also pointed out that there is a central contradiction in exhorting schools to ‘collaborate’ when in a performative system they are pitted against each other, particularly in their competition to attract and retain the best kinds of students (i.e. the least risky in terms of their likelihood of failing qualifications). This prejudices the entire system against young people who, for reasons outside of their own control, are particularly challenged in the performance stakes.

4. So what is ‘performativity’? The phrase originates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 report The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. He argued that, with the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, the collapse of 19th century ‘grand narratives’, and the ending of a consensus that a cadre of elite, expert professionals could determine what counts as valid knowledge, (in part driven by the challenge to ‘normative’ knowledge mounted by the new social movements and by radical politics), instead the value placed upon knowledge is how it performs a function: “in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures.” (1979, p. 46). In other words, knowledge, rather than being based on abstracted laws is validated – legitimated – insofar as it fits the stated aims and purposes for which it is being used.

5. In education performativity leads to an obsessive focus on 'attainment’, as measured in test scores and grades. Anything that is not seen as directly impacting on attainment measures is regarded as less important in the life of the school and harder to justify spending any time or money on. It also sends a message to children that the most significant part of their education is the grades and scores that they get at the end of the process. As Ken Robinson says:

"School reforms always emphasize standards and standardized testing, as if it's akin to a McDonald's franchise. But standardized testing demoralizes teachers, demoralizes students, and incents people to teach to the test. Standardized testing is based on the idea that we have to make education teacher-proof and I think we have to do the reverse".

6. We need to consider the psychological and health effects on learners and teachers of their exposure to this intensive audit culture. It could be regarded as a form of psychological warfare. The government talks about ‘partnership’ with the teaching profession but there is a lot of fear, anxiety and stress in the system which is inimical to fostering effective learning communities. We should be asking the question – what kinds of ‘ideal’ subjects – learners and teachers, young people and adults – do these kind of performativity discourses construct? And how do these performative identities play out in the social and pedagogic relations within schools and colleges?

7. Part of this is to do with how qualifications and forms of assessment which boil outcomes down to grades work. This is especially acute when 'outcomes' are measured by pen and paper tests or multiple choice examinations. Such forms of assessment, unless handled carefully, are blunt instruments that don't really measure anything other than students' drilled ability to pass such kinds of tests. They’re also often based on a pseudo-scientific paradigm that there are clearly right answers and wrong answers, correct and incorrect ways of doing things. That’s a much more difficult thing to show in the arts and humanities than it is in maths and the sciences. This is partly how maths and sciences get their reputation for ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’, whilst so called ‘expressive outcomes’ of the arts, other than when students are being asked to recall facts or perform analysis, get labelled as fuzzy and blurry and imprecise. It goes back to a mechanistic model of education in which ‘delivery’ is built on the notion that there are best practice models of efficient transmission of knowledge which can be effectively measured by outside authorities; paradoxically, a very 19th century way of thinking about knowledge and learning, which doesn’t really acknowledge just how complicated it has become to really prove any knowledge is likely to have longevity or legitimacy. In fact, enabling learners to apply and use a piece of knowledge (or a skill) is the key issue, not simply testing their ability to recall or reproduce it.

8. There’s some evidence that what has happened in the last ten years is that schools have become more adept at getting 'borderline' students to pass tests, which hasn’t necessarily impacted on the wider quality of educational outcomes. What is needed is a much more high quality approach to assessment which draws together a whole range of skills and abilities – the vocational curriculum is one attempt at this, the use of longer assessments which involve students using a whole range of skills another, the RSA's "Opening Minds" curriculum a third.

9. The biggest ‘risk’ that schools face is that they might try a new approach or change their curriculum and that this will somehow negatively affect their ‘bottom line’ – i.e. students’ test or exam scores. So performativity makes schools risk averse. Partly this is because schools are exhorted to guarantee an ‘entitlement’ for young people so that they all reach the required standard – ‘No Child Left Behind’, as the slogan from the US goes – but the flip side of this agenda is that focussing on children’s performance on a really narrow set of measures in literacy and numeracy runs the risk of leaving everything else that school could be about in the shade. There may be some grounds for optimism: the agendas around creativity, innovation and inclusion at least ‘mediate’ the standards agenda, as Dyson et al (2003) put it, “schools can and do open up spaces in the standards agenda”. There is plenty of evidence that a rich learning environment where attention is paid to relationships and informal learning is much more likely to lead to improved outcomes even in formal assessments. But if the central purpose of education is always expressed as if it were about narrow outcomes, or as Lyotard says elsewhere, based on demonstrating ‘skills’ rather than ‘ideals’, there’s always a risk that the debate gets polarised into which ‘teaching method’ leads to the ‘most effective outcome’, as if those terms haven’t always been the subject of centuries of debate, scholarship and contestation.

10. The pseudo-market created by a performative ‘standards’ agenda also has all sorts of other distorting effects – as Frank Coffield (2007) has pointed out it means that schools put huge attention onto the so-called ‘borderline’ learners – those who are likely with coaching to reach the 5 A – C standard, which may well negatively impact those young people who are either very ‘high achievers’ or very low achievers. Coffield points out that every year in the UK there are 300.000 school leavers who fail to gain places in any further education or training, who simply fall out of the system.

11. So long as the ‘standards’ agenda continues to be the dominant way of thinking about education and learning, we are in trouble. Innovation in schools is locked down by the obsession with measuring attainment, so that the power in terms of defining what constitutes ‘effective learning’ for young people, even if they have powerful experiences of social learning along the way, is reduced to very crude measures of attainment. When everything that a school does has to be justified in terms of its impact on attainment, the first question that springs to my mind at least is, what sort of attainment are we talking about anyway? I am not arguing that we shouldn’t have a qualifications system or a defined curriculum, but we need to teach and assess a much broader range of skills and expose young people to a much wider range of contexts than simply classroom based learning with a single teacher at the front of the room. If QCA’s proposals for a new approach to the secondary curriculum or the new 14- 19 diplomas are to succeed, they need a real focus on pedagogy and thinking about teaching and learning beyond preparation for performance in examinations.

12. In fact, there is tons of evidence that students become more confident learners and more highly skilled when they are nourished in a rich, varied and stimulating learning environment, in which they feel cared for, listened to and valued; in which students and staff are given opportunities to participate and lead, and when the whole school is configured as a learning organisation – a form of social architecture - in which enquiry and creativity are valued. But it is very hard to do this when there is such pressure to cover massive amounts of pre-determined learning content which is assessed in pre-determined ways under intensively timed and controlled conditions. These social textures are the stuff of learning, and failure to address this leads to a failure of imagination.

13. Is technology is an issue here? Probably, but too often it’s about being a ‘learning aid’ – i.e. about endorsing predetermined outcomes without really considering what the creative potential of ICT might be. Without really engaging with how culture and society are changing and shifting we will end up in a mess. Communications technologies are enabling new organisational and institutional forms and patterns to emerge. Ironically the debate about curriculum and assessment seems to be locked into a 19th century model of subjects and standards. If the government is serious about innovation then it needs to send a message to practitioners that it values experimentation and professional learning. Schools would be very different kinds of spaces and places if we really explored what a 21st century learning environment could look like. It certainly doesn’t have to be about the idea of a a single teacher in single classroom with a single group of students all of one age, rather it could take a much more networked and distributed form, just like learning does in the rest of the world...

14. More optimistically, schools and colleges are sites of contestation and in spite of the neat grids of central policies classrooms are messy and pragmatic places – so there’s always space for exploration and possibility. After all, isn’t that what learning is for? So the current situation could be perceived as a major opportunity for innovators, if they could just grab the agenda, wherever they are. To be fair, programmes like Creative Partnerships, some of the work formerly done under the banner of the NESTA Learning Programme, some of the SSAT's efforts to get schools to do peer-to-peer learning, some of NCSL's work and the Innovation Unit have all provided pointers, help and support for schools seeking to innovate. Not to mention the role of local authorities. But even that partial roll-call of overlapping agencies (and that's just for schools, never mind FE or HE) shows how unbelievably tangled, confusing and complex the English education system is.

15. Nothing less than a total rethink of how we measure attainment and approach teaching and learning will deliver a high quality education system. At a time of significant curriculum change in Scotland and England, there’s a real need to focus on teaching and learning, not just standards and outcomes. There are lots of curriculum prototypes and great projects from round the world that are attempting to broaden the agenda and open up learning to more imaginative approaches, but we need a more sophisticated way of articulating this rather than the very tired rhetoric of 'standards'. I'm not suggesting for a minute that we should disregard indicators of educational quality, or not ensure that qualifications provide learners with meaningful certification of what they can do, or make sure teachers learn from expert practitioners, or strive constantly to improve what we do, but we need a much more intelligent debate about how to do this than we are currently getting...

Pacific Quay

Just back from spending an afternoon at the very impressive BBC Scotland building at Pacific Quay. An attempt to fashion a 21st century workplace; part technohub, part five star hotel/business park, part performance space. It's designed so that the place can buzz with activity on the 'street' that rises in steps through the cavernous atrium, but the acoustic design dampens down the sound so that it doesn't sound like a shopping mall....Anyone designing a school or college could learn a lot from the place - I've yet to see anything as radical be attempted within schools or universities, unfortunately. More generally, that whole part of Glasgow is being re-branded as a media quarter, alongside Glasgow Science Centre; it would be good to see some of Glasgow's institutions of further and higher education get in on the act, so that ways in for communities and students can be found and the zone doesn't become totally dominated by the monied and the affluent...Glasgow has a spectacular 'riverside' masterplan heavily dependent on increasing revenues from tourism, retail and media/creative industries, but the amount of capital needed to develop the spaces will probably mean that the highest bidders will get the last word... A set of spaces to be watched carefully!

The Learning Curve

Graham is on the Learning Curve on Monday 14th May (repeated at 11pm on Sunday 20th May) on BBC Radio 4, talking about some of the issues involved in the new-found enthusiasm for creativity within education policy. Also featured will be some projects from Creative Partnerships and some interviews with participants in the recent Teacher-Artist Partnership(TAPP) international seminar in London. The TAPP website has just been updated with some further information, including the presentation that we put together to set the context for the international event.

The growth of higher education programmes in community and participatory arts

A quick web trawl reveals that there has been a proliferation of higher education programmes dealing with community and participatory arts practice in the UK. When we set up the Performing Arts: community development programme at UEL and NewVIc in 1999, there were hardly any available, apart from longstanding work at Strathclyde, to some extent at LIPA, and through artform-specific work such as the work in community music at York University and Goldsmiths, community dance at Middlesex and community and applied theatre at Winchester, Bristol, Manchester or Central School of Speech and Drama. There's also been a major growth in postgraduate courses. And a lot of mainstream undergraduate arts programmes now include modules and units in community or participatory arts.

However, to my knowledge most of these courses are not very well networked together. Perhaps there's a need for some sort of research/academic practice/professional practice network/association? I'm not volunteering to set this up, but it would be good to find a way of building momentum around this important field of knowledge. Step forward PALATINE or Mailout to sort this out? Some mapping/directory-building/networking needed, I think. One of the complications is that the fences built by departments, RAE and general academic jockeying doesn't lead to sufficient interdisciplinary dialogue amongst arts practitioners and researchers around participatory, open, democratic and generally progressive arts practice (acknowledging of course that all such labels are not without their problems). As I've argued elsewhere, the theory and practice of participatory arts is emergent, contingent and contested - so coherence isn't likely to be a strong feature of the field right now.

A few interesting ones listed below, and I'm open to suggestions for expanding the list:

All the work we are doing at UEL's Institute for Performing Arts Development, of course

MA Applied Theatre, University of Manchester
MA Applied Drama, University of Exeter
MA in Applied Drama: Theatre in Educational Community and Social Contexts, Goldsmiths College, University of London
MA Community and Participatory Arts, faculty of art and design, University of Staffordshire
MA Community Arts, Cumbria Insitute of the Arts
MA Community Music, York University
MA Cross-Sectorial and Community Arts, Goldsmiths College, University of London
BA Drama, Applied Theatre and Education, Central School of Speech and Drama
MA Social Sculpture, Oxford Bookes University
MA Theatre and Media for Development, University of Winchester
MMus Leadership, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
MA Cultural Performance, University of Bristol
MSc in Music in the Community, University of Edinburgh
Postgraduate Diploma in Arts for Development and Social Justice, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh

Communityarts.net, that excellent portal for knowledge and understanding in the US, keeps a directory of training programmes in community arts, but it relies on contributors to keep it up to date, and right now its coverage of UK opportunities is pretty patchy. The British Council has a useful portal on arts for youth and community development here.

What's so fascinating to me is that the growth of these programmes, not to mention all the infomal training and professional development happening outside universities, means that there must be thousands and thousands of people in the British Isles now training, researching, reflecting on and even earning a reasonable living from socially engaged, participatory and critical arts practice.