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.

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