This volume co-edited with Pat Thomson, Ken Jones and Liora Bresler has just been published by Routledge. The book develop the premise that the concept of creative learning extends far beyond Arts-based learning or the development of individual creativity. It covers a range of processes and initiatives throughout the world that share common values, systems and practices aimed at making learning more creative. This applies at individual, classroom, or whole school level, always with the aim of fully realising young people’s potential.

Until now there has been no single text bringing together the significant literature that explores the dimensions of creative learning, despite the work of artists in schools and the development of a cadre of creative teaching and learning specialists. Containing a mixture of newly commissioned chapters, reprints and updated versions of previous publications, this book brings together major theorists and current research.

Comprising of key readings in creative education, it will stand as a uniquely authoritative text that will appeal to those involved in initial and continuing teacher education, as well as research academics and policy specialists.

Sections include:

• a general introduction to the field of creative learning
• arts learning traditions, with sub sections on discrete art forms such as drama and visual art
• accounts of practice from artist-teacher partnerships
• whole school change and reforms
• curriculum change
• assessment
• evaluative case studies of impact and effect
• global studies of policy change around creative learning.

I have just added my thoughts to this collection. Its an interesting project – not just for the people who have contributed but I am intrigued by the question of why a manifesto now, at this point in time? What is different about this community form the media education cadres of fifteen to twenty years ago? How are their visions different from the radicalism of older reform agendas?

I have just been asked to be an adviser for the Connected Learning Network at the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California’s statewide Humanities Research Institute.

I have just returned from The New Literacies Conference, sponsored by The Department of Language and Literacy at UBC, and The Faculty of Education at The University of Victoria, and supported by SSHRC. It addressed themes of new and digital literacies in the 21st century.

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.