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.

The aim of this workshop was to reflect on research methods used in descriptions and interpretations of learning especially those that explore the dynamics of social context and the role of inter – and intra- personal identities within the construction of the learning self.

We developed this workshop as part of our Learning Lives project to help us reflect on methods and theoretical approaches to our challenge.

We  invited colleagues to present on a series of questions mixing practical concerns exploring methods and research procedures and  more abstruse and methodological issues n considering questions of theoretical categorisation and definition as well those of interpretation and credibility.

We asked people to consider

1. What methods have you used in your research on learning in and across different social contexts? What is (are) the logics of inquiry that inform such work? What are some key methodological implications?
2. How have you captured multiple perspectives pertaining to ‘episodes’ or ‘moments’? How have you approached the problem of researching change over periods of time? What scales of time have you worked with and what are the key issues in this challenge?
3. How (and why) have you described and theorised the life-worlds of young people in your research?
4. What have been the main challenges in working intensely with individuals or small groups of people? How have you dealt with the challenge of generalisability, and up-scaling?
5. How useful has been your research ? to whom? What other kinds research (findings and/or methods) do you wish you could have also used or had access to?
6. What motivated your research and why? Have these motivations changed over time or are research agendas sable?
7. What future directions do you see for these kinds research challenges?

The workshop was provocative and will feed into the Learning Lives projects at the University of Oslo. I contributed a co-authored paper on exploring learner identity which I will post after revising.

This is the title of an interview  published in the National Argentinian Education magazine, El Monitor. According to friends at the Immigrant Press the interview covers the entry and place of media education in English schools, the balance between critical and production work, some thoughts on the impact of digital technology on teaching media production and general speculation about the value of media education in general. It was challenging talking about these questions with Inés Dussel and Pato Ferrante colleagues from Flacso as we tried to tease out the value of my experiences for a very different educational context like Argentina.

I gave a talk in Mikkeli, Finland called From ‘Othering’ to Incorporation: the dilemmas of crossing informal and formal learning boundaries’ at a conference called  A New School.

The talk will be published in a Finnish book later in the year. I suggest 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 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.

I am a ‘critical friend’ to a few schools of creativity around England. I recently visited Thomas Tallis in Greenwich, South London. They have a great web presence and are engaged in a range of innovative projects.

I have just completed a study as part of a European funded project : Supporting Talent into Employment.  The project has partners in London, Greece, Rome and Malaga and has the goal of developing a common European framework of competences for mentors and support workers in the non-formal learning sector (NFLS). STEP operates in the creative industries, including music, drama, visual arts, media production and design. I analysed how principles of CrossWorking – derived from an earlier project could be applied to the NFLS. CrossWorker was interested in the way that informal and non-formal educational experiences can create opportunities for young disadvantaged learners to become mentors, support workers and trainers both to the group that they are from and other groups. The study looked at how these principles were being translated into practice across the partnership.

Just back from Oslo working on methodologies to research learning lives and identity teasing out the  complications involved at both practical and theoretical levels trying to address the challenges we have set ourselves in the Learning Lives project, to log and describe the learning of around 60 young participants from 3 age cohorts ‘horizontally’ across different learning contexts thus allowing us to build up a picture of a learning life over a period of time. However, this challenge begs the deeper question about how we can identify and understand the role of different kinds of identity work within the process of learning itself.

I am working on an article about this and also preparing for a Methods seminar to be held in San Diego as part of this project in April 2010. More on this to follow as it unfolds

In December I spoke at a Colloquium of the Experts Group (OMC) managed by DG Education and CultureSynergies with education, in particular arts education on learning in different forms of media edcuation. The event took place  the Genshagen Castle

I edit a series of literature reviews for Creativity, Culture and Education. The latest report by Ken Jones offers an historical and theoretical overview of the idea of culture as it has permeated policy-making, public debate, practices in schools and in more academic writing by scholars and cultural commentators. The idea of culture has been central to the Creative Partnerships offer, and as Ken Jones explains here, this is not a simple idea that can be turned into programmes as it encompasses a range of beliefs about heritage, modernity, the role of schools in mediating national and formal cultures and the cultural experiences of the young themselves. It examines changes in the political landscape and shows how deep changes in English society since the Second World War have re-fashioned notions of public, elite and popular cultures in contested and complex ways.

This article explores the term ‘learning lives’ by reporting on three research projects conducted by members of the Oslo-based research group TransActions. By stressing the term ‘learning lives’ within a range of social ‘educational’ contexts, the article aims to look at learning within and across different learning sites exploring the positioning and re-positioning of learner identity across these different ‘locations’. We emphasise how the individual learner relates to other people and objects, drawing on deeper trajectories or narratives of the self as its exists within and outside the immediate learning contexts, where we pay attention to processes occurring between people which we find significant for the ‘individual’ identity, literacy and learning. By doing so we hope to make explicit the mobilisation of resources within and across specific contexts, in the ‘learning lives’ of Norwegian youngsters.