Along with Pat Thomson and Naranee Ruthra-Rajan, I have working as a  general editor for a series of books for teachers called Creative Teaching/Creative Schools. The publisher’s site is carrying a full description of the volumes and they will be available later in the year.

From the series introduction:

We live in creative times. As political aspiration, as economic driver, as a manifesto for school reform and curriculum change, the desire for creativity can be found across the developed world in policy pronouncements and academic research. But creativity in schools can mean many things: turning classrooms into more exciting experiences, curriculum into more thoughtful challenges, teachers into different kinds of instructors, assessment into more authentic processes and putting young people‘s voice at the heart of learning. In general, these aspirations are motivated by two key concerns – to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and ensuring that young people are able to contribute to the creative economy which will underpin growth in the twenty first century.

Transforming these common aspirations into informed practice is not easy. Yet there are programs, projects and initiatives which have consistently attempted to offer change and transformation. There are significant creativity programmes in many parts of the world, including France, Norway, Canada, South Korea, Australia and the United States of America. The English program, Creative Partnerships is the largest of these and this series of books draws on its experience and expertise.

I have been commissioned by MIT Press as part of their MacArthur Review series to work on a short book. It is due at the end of the year.

I aim to  review the literature that has explicitly addressed learning in the non-formal learning sector – in organised out-of-school provision – in order to develop models of how learning has been observed, described, conceptualised or ‘measured’. The book will offer readers a systematic organisation of the kinds of analysis that we can find explicating the ‘educational‘ value across this sector and explore implications for educational ambitions to  invest in this arena.

Later this year I am beginning to work on this project in collaboration  with Sonia Livingstone at the LSE. It will run for two years and is funded by the Connected Learning Network part of the MacArthur, Digital Media Learning initiative.

The place of school in young people’s lives and learning is changing. In today’s digitally connected world, traditional boundaries between school and home, information and communication, learning and playing seem blurred, even reversed – with learning happening at home or with peers online while school is a key site for social activities and the authority of teachers is challenged.

Recognising that young people’s lives are diverse, uneven and complex, this research project examines the emerging mix of on- and offline experiences in teenagers’ daily learning lives. We focus on the fluctuating web of peer-to-peer networks that may cut across institutional boundaries, adult values and established practices of learning and leisure. Key research questions include:

• How do social relationships shape forms of learning in and out of school? And how do forms of learning shape social relationships?
• How do young people use digital technologies within their daily activities within and beyond the classroom, as part of their ‘learning lives’, and under what conditions is this constructive, enabling or impeding?
• How is youthful engagement with digital technologies shaped by the formal or informal practices, opportunities or risks, empowerment or constraints of the institutions and spaces in which learning occurs?
• Insofar as these technological mediations enable or complement learning, can this be harnessed constructively to develop future recommendations?

Working with an ordinary London school, we will follow the networks within and beyond a single class of 13-14 year olds at home, school and elsewhere over the course of an academic year – observing social interactions in and between lessons; conducting interviews with children, parents, teachers and relevant others; and mapping out-of-school engagements with digital networking technologies to reveal both patterns of use and the quality and meaning of such engagements as they shape the learning opportunities of young people.

I am starting a new project along with Pat Thomson, Ken Jones and Chris Hall.

This piece of research has been commissioned by Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) to explore the pedagogy at the heart of the Creative Partnerships programme, and to characterise the distinct ways of working that artists and other creative practitioners bring with them to their work in education.

The key aim of the research is to produce rich and nuanced descriptions of how such professionals work with young people in classroom in partnership with teachers. This will include:

• The introduction of the topic/outcome
• The ways in which new information is introduced, scaffolded and used
• The nature, scope, sequence, depth and pacing of activities
• The way in which ‘good work’ is conceptualised and communicated
• The conduct of classroom conversations, the language used, and the voices that are heard/not heard.
• The relationship between the ‘formal’ knowledge of the school and the knowledges/cultural experience of students
• The use of artefacts, spaces, texts, gestures, gaze and the significance of timing
• The opportunities for reflection, and the nature of formative and summative assessment
• The relationships at classroom level – between mandated policies, classroom management techniques and ‘creative’ practice, and between teacher, pupils and artist.

The project will run November 2010 – October 2011 and is based at the University of Nottingham and Goldsmith College, University of London The team will work in 12 classrooms and follow a number of artists and creative practitioners beginning, developing and reflecting on projects as well as looking at how they work alongside young people and teachers. It will show how creative classroom practices are inflected by the age of students, the creative practice on offer and the ways in which teachers work with creative practitioners/artists.

The team will film much of this observation and aim to produce practical outputs for teachers which will be disseminated at the end of the project.

The final report of this project has just been published. It can be downloaded here.

The STEP project works at the intersection of a number of complementary infinitives and policy developments. This paper offers a way of mapping its fields of operation in order that the project as whole can possess a more informed understanding of its work and to enable partners to situate themselves within the complex matrix of Cultural Marketplace and Training programmes, regulations and developments at both European and National levels.

STEP partners are on the margins of their sectors. They are frequently institutions working against the odds, without secure long-term funding. Some operate as social innovators concerned with the well being of local communities  helping the disadvantaged and excluded to develop employable skills and to become productive citizens. Other partners work as intermediaries or specialist agencies in the complex value chain of suppliers in the cultural industries. Usually the processes of accreditation and validation at the heart of STEP work against these constituents just as the cultural sector labour market often works to exclude those without access to high cultural capital networks.

This complicated weave of pressures, barriers and opportunities poses an analytic challenge as STEP activity crosses a number of terrains usually organised according to convention as discrete traditions. This paper attempts to disentangle this compound mixture of concepts and actions to show where progress is strong, where it is hampered by institutional, local or transnational constraints and where areas of co-operation may lead to greatest change.

I was invited to Chicago to talk at a meeting of the ‘Connected Learning ‘ network – part of the MacArthur funded , Digital Media Learning initiative in early November. This is an ambitious programme to reform Education in the US.

I explored the different ways I have been involved in Learning Change projects – from informal learning as a part of media education to working at WAC in the non-Formal learning secor, to helping a National reform programme, Creative Partnerships make a diference and also thinking about international comparisons through the Learning Lives project.

I visited YouMedia when I was there.

New Book edited with Pat Thomson out this month.

It is a common ambition in society and government to make young people more creative. These aspirations are motivated by two key concerns: to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and to ensure that young people are able and fit to leave education and contribute to the creative economy that will underpin growth in the twenty-first century.

Transforming these common aspirations into informed practice is not easy. It can mean making many changes:

• turning classrooms into more exciting experiences;
• introducing more thoughtful challenges into the curriculum;
• making teachers into different kinds of instructors;
• finding more authentic assessment processes;
• putting young people’s voices at the heart of learning.

There are programmes, projects and initiatives that have consistently attempted to offer such change and transformation. The UK programme Creative Partnerships is the largest of these, but there are significant initiatives in many other parts of the world today, including France, Norway, Canada and the United States. This book not only draws on this body of expertise but also consolidates it, making it the first methodological text exploring creativity.

Creative teaching and learning is often used as a site for research and action research, and this volume is intended to act as a textbook for this range of courses and initiatives. The book will be a key text for research in creative teaching and learning and is specifically directed at ITE, CPD, Masters and doctoral students.

The talk I gave in Santiago was covered in a national newspaper. I am not entirely convinced  this is what I said or indeed that what I had  to say was terribly newsworthy. I tried not to give advice – given I know very little about the Chilean education system and its practices – especially as technology is often constructed as offering a ‘solution’ to any range of problems, but in as much as I can understand the piece I don’t think this message really came across.

In late June and early July I  worked in Argentina and Chile. I was primarily there to support the evaluation of the Ford Foundation funded TRAMAS. TRAMAS has been funded by the Ford Foundation for three distinct periods from 2006 and concludes 2010. It was originally comprised of three partners from Chile, Argentina and Peru but in its third phase (2009-2010) only consists of a partnership from the first two of these countries.It is led by independent organisations in the civic or third sectors.The main aims of all three phases of the project were:

–       to develop a regional network to facilitate and develop an exchange of practice and materials

–       to advocate and exert influence at the national level to support the growth of forms of media education to underpin the growth of citizenship education

–       to work with teacher training and with institutions responsible for the production of curriculum materials (especially AV) to support the confidence, scope and capabilities of teachers to be more effective in these areas.

Whislt there I also spoke at two conferences, Educar la Mirada 5 in Buenos Aires and Modos de Ver en la Era Digital in Santiago de Chile. In both talks I argued that the past twenty years have seen a paradoxical attitude to the learning experienced by young people as consequence of their engagement and participation in digital culture. On the one hand research has underwritten a notion of the strangeness or otherness of digital culture characterising fundamentally new and different literacies, ways of comprehending and manipulating even understanding knowledge. The key here is an argument about an alleged deep structural difference between the digital world and the day-to-day mundanity of schooling. At the same time this otherness has been at the forefront of anxieties about changing childhoods, alienated youth, the penetration of consumerism into make-up of the young and a decline in fundamental education standards. Both of these (contradictory) aspects have, I suggest, been part of a deep process of differentiation from an assumed norm. We are now witnessing a period where the everyday, typified by a construct of average public schooling is now fighting back and the current period is characterised by a series of interventions where the difference is being recuperated and standardised in ‘normal’ schooling.

Finally  I led an interactive workshop for 350 teachers about creative media making and ‘media learning’ as part of a national teacher training innovation in Argentina CAIE

I am beginning a year long project commissioned by Creativity, Culture & Education to analyse the roles that ‘Creative Agents’ – para-professionals usually with an arts or creative industry experience working alongside schools – play and to evaluate the impact of their work on the success and sustainability of Creative Partnerships and future CCE programmes. Agents possess a diverse range of skills and abilities it is how they translate their experiences to a process of school change or curriculum innovation which makes them a unique resource for the Education system. They could be said to represent the core ‘capital’ of CCE programmes.

This research project will produce an analysis of the functions, scope, histories, development needs and possible future roles of Creative Agents. More specifically , this includes:

• a descriptive study of Creative Agents as a subset of both the Creative and Education workforces including quantitative analysis of employment and regional patterns. This will be situated in a strategic analysis of both Education and the Cultural sectors’ workforce development polices and practices.
• a typology of Creative Agent roles with analysis about core and specialist functions. This will be situated in a context of professional development and career trajectories exploring comparability of the role across Area Delivery Organisations.
• an analysis of Creative Agent pedagogy and effective practice from differing perspectives. This will be situated in a wider study of models of Creative curriculum and project development and pedagogies.

The project will take place April 2010 – March 2011. It will involve:

• investigating patterns of employment, the diversity of the workforce, regional comparison through a series of surveys and detailed studies of the use of Creative Agents in three contrasting Area Delivery Organisations.
• A series of semi structured open ended interviews in order to explore values, pedagogy, experience, career trajectories, prior histories and possible futures of individual Agents
• Collating existing research and literature to understand Workforce polices and issues about curriculum and pedagogy.

The key purpose of this work then is to offer CCE a single overarching review of the work of Creative Agents framed within an analysis of salient concerns driving the wider ecology of Educational provision across England.