Creative practice, entanglements and complex emergence: Teaching in the arts

Abstract

Creative practice inspires exploration, personal expression, and learning, and can be understood from a variety of perspectives. Traditionally, these perspectives have been through the process of learning where doing is important, and through the product of learning where practice has outcomes serving a diversity of purposes. In recognising these critical links between practice and learning, we consider this entanglement of process and product through complexity theory as more than binary opposites where the key ideas of ‘knower and knowledge’ helps to untangle a multiplicity of understandings. Identifying complexity practice as developmental, transactional, and organisational, we outline how in Australia, this complexity produces tension in schools as teachers grapple with developing arts process skills as a significant achievement themselves, the production of arts works as important outcomes of arts learning, and broader social outcomes as elements of change. In helping to make these interactions clear it is possible to see complexity as both enabling and constraining change, providing direction and focus for future creative practice in both teaching and learning.