The promise of ethnography for exploring creative learning

Abstract

Teachers, governments and employers around the world all aspire 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 ensuring that young people are able and fit to leave education and contribute to the creative economy which 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 curriculum making teachers into different kinds of instructors finding more authentic assessment processes putting young people's voice at the heart of learning. There are programmes, projects and initiatives which have consistently attempted to offer such change and transformation. The English programme, Creative Partnerships, is the largest of these, but there are significant initiatives in many other parts of the world including France, Norway, Canada and the USA. 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 text book 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.