This project was commissioned by Creative Partnerships in August 2005 and ran till July 2006. It explores understandings of creativity in relation to learning and to the interests of partners and stakeholders: how these understandings develop, where they come from, how they are used, and in whose interest.

The project developed a robust model of rhetorics of creativity. The working hypothesis here was that arts educators deploy a range of different claims about creativity which emerge from different contexts (artistic, bureaucratic, pedagogic, political), different artistic traditions (fine arts, popular arts, different art-forms, commercial art), different academic or quasi-academic traditions (liberal-humanist; aesthetics; communication studies; cultural studies), and different policy contexts (social inclusion; vocational education; gifted and talented).

Two problems for the effective planning, implementation and evaluation of projects emerged from this varied landscape. One is that stakeholders might only have a vague and ill-formed idea of what they mean by creativity. For instance, teachers interviewed in the BECTa Digital Video evaluation associated creativity with vague notions of freedom, which was actually at odds with productive forms of constraint used in the best practice in these projects (Reid et al, 2002). The second problem is that stakeholders might have quite specific ideas of what they mean; but that different partners within the same project have different ideas and understandings. Both problems are arguably quite widespread in the conception and execution of arts education projects in the UK. This project provides a matrix of clearly-described rhetorics and clearly-described stakeholder positions, contexts and interests. Using this matrix, projects can be much more precise about what exactly they mean by creativity, what traditions they are working in, and how this will translate into the learning experience.

This project systematically reviewed academic and professional literature, and developed more specific models of creativity in education, arts education, and new media, regards the idea of creativity as a negotiated term, subject to rhetorical uses associated with specific contexts, social, cultural interests and even financial interests, and educational and artistic traditions. These rhetorics were tested with experts in the field at an Experts Seminar held at the Institute of Education, on the 16th of January 2006 and disseminated to CP directors as a matrix in handbook form, which should be helpful both as an evaluative tool, in assessing what forms of ‘creativity’ are at stake, and in aiding clear and coherent planning for future projects.

The project makes, we hope, a useful contribution to the theory of creativity in general and in the specific case of arts education.

Attachments:

File	Description
The Rhetorics of Creativity - A Review	by Shakuntala Banaji and Andrew Burn