Creative Practitioners Research Articles

Creativity in social work education and practice: reflections on a Survivor Arts Project

This article, written by survivor artists, practitioners and academics (each moving between these different identities and associated voices), will explore a creative arts approach to social work (SW) education within the context of service user and carer involvement. In addition to building upon a developing literature base, the writers will draw upon their own experience and the experience of other service user and carer contributors as well as student and practitioner feedback. In doing so, this article will seek to analyse some of the ways the creative arts can be harnessed as a tool for a more radical, creative and critical approach to professional education and how this in turn can help develop more empathic, critically self-reflective and creative (in the broadest sense of the word) practitioners. In critiquing the more traditional service user and carer involvement approach, this article will attempt to show how the more innovative approach of the Survivor Arts Project can move us beyond an arguably more limiting ‘expertise through experience’ model. In outlining an emancipatory model which recognises the relevance of lived experience and places this within the context of survivor movements, focusing also on the skills and insights survivors bring to SW education, this article will detail the ways we can work towards developing a more vibrant and dynamic learning environment which values our life stories and recognises our strengths as well as the many different and overlapping identities which place us along a continuum that connects our lives and informs our practice.

How does arts practice engage with narratives of migration from refugees? Lessons from ‘utopia’

Abstract In this article we draw on data from a co-produced transdisciplinary arts and language practice and research project. In this project, researchers, artists and creative practitioners worked with refugees and people seeking asylum. Together we developed and led arts-based workshops, which aimed to explore what it means to be ‘welcome’, how we ‘welcome’ and how we want to be ‘welcomed’. As researchers we approached the project from different disciplinary spaces: Sam from applied theatre and Jessica from sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. Through analysis of our co-produced artistic outputs, through ethnographic writing and through our reflections on the processes of collaborating, we consider how arts practices engage with narratives of migration in refugee communities. We take three elements of the project: visual arts products in the form of silk paintings, community voices in the form of vignettes and media documentation in the form of a project film. We suggest how these examples embody the processes and the community developed around the project and the different ways of working across sectors with displaced communities to engage with and enable spaces for voices to be made audible. We use ‘refugee’ throughout this article to refer to people who have been granted asylum, people who are in the process of granting asylum, and people whose asylum claims have been rejected. We choose not to use the phrase ‘asylum seekers’ due to its often negative connotations in the British press.

Broadband and the creative industries in rural Scotland

The creative industries potentially contribute much to the social and economic viability of rural regions. This paper explores the role that broadband connectivity plays in the development of professional and creative practices. In particular, we explore the extent to which broadband connectivity can reduce the penalty of distance for rural creative practitioners, and equally, how a lack of connectivity impacts upon the development of the rural creative economy. Our findings suggest that access to broadband of at least 2 megabits per second, download speed, had become crucial for those working in the creative sector at the time of the fieldwork (this minimum critical speed is now likely to be faster). A lack of adequate access may have a negative impact upon rural communities through prompting out-migration to areas with better digital connectivity.

Urban Humanities and the Creative Practitioner

Creative practices are needed to address the range of issues that confront contemporary cities—issues of social justice, economic development, and environmental quality. Urban humanities emphasize innovative methods and practices, which evolve along with shifting epistemologies in multidisciplinary confluence, standing in contrast to a current dominant narrative that contemporary cities depend upon attracting a creative group of citizens. Recent efforts the LA River, driven by a motley crew of people set out to reimagine new possibilities for the river, illustrating that the city as an object of study intrinsically carries implications about action and about the future. This manifesto offers a call to action for scholars to become engaged, creative urban practitioners.

Painting the town red: the impact of Anglo-Soviet exchange on the visual arts in Britain in the 1930s

ABSTRACTAt its peak in the mid-1930s, the society for cultural relations with the Soviet Union (SCRs) could count among its membership some of the most influential creative practitioners working in Britain at the time. This article will examine the various organisations and initiatives that emerged as a result of the activities of SCR members working in the visual and performing arts, including the Artists International Association, Marx House, and Kino Films, and their role in promoting Anglo-Soviet cultural exchange in the visual arts in the 1930s. In doing so, I will consider the extent to which these activities transcended the cultural sphere, leading to the emergence of a cadre of politically engaged artists including the muralist Viscount Hastings, the illustrator Pearl Binder, and the film-maker Ivor Montagu who, inspired by Soviet models, became active across a range of left-wing and anti-fascist organisations and initiatives.

Exploring the intersections of creative and academic life among Australian academic creative writing practitioners

ABSTRACTRecent literature on the activities of creative practitioners within the academy has focused on their roles as cultural workers within the higher education sector – contributing to the so-called ‘creative economy’ as skills-based practitioners with ‘real world’ experience – or it has considered the role of the academic teacher in shaping the creative life and careers of their students. Relatively little has been done, however, to specifically examine the lived experience of creative writers in the Australian academy as they attend to the professional requirements of their work as teaching and research academics on the one hand, and their linked professional activities as creative writers, on the other. This paper reports on the findings from a preliminary survey conducted between July and August 2013 which aimed to explore the career trajectories, expectations and experiences of work at the nexus of creative and academic labour. It identifies a number of key tensions between academic and creative aspirations of academics who are creative writers, along with institutional benefits that in some cases aided the production of their creative work.

Developing the Rural Creative Economy ‘from Below’: Exploring Practices of Market-Building amongst Creative Entrepreneurs in Rural and Remote Scotland

The article draws on material gathered as part of three research projects, the first, ‘Supporting Creative Business’ was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the second, ‘Towards a model of support for the rural creative industries’ was funded by the University of Glasgow’s Knowledge Exchange fund and the third, ‘The effects of improved communications technology of rural creative entrepreneurs’ funded by CREATe, the Research Councils UK Centre for the Study of Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at a range of sites around the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, this paper argues that despite recent attempts to develop the creative economy in remote and rural Scotland, the current institutional infrastructure is lacking. The paper explores creative practitioners’ responses to the opportunities and challenges posed by ‘place’. Therefore, the paper documents the tactics that creative entrepreneurs employ to aid the development of the creative economy ‘from below’, focusing in particular on the opportunities posed by improved communications technologies.

Place

Place

From Reluctant Online Contributor to Mentor: Facilitating Student Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Online

From Reluctant Online Contributor to Mentor: Facilitating Student Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Online

Riots and a blank canvas: young people creating texts, creating spaces

AbstractThis article draws on research into the work of Greenshoots, a small company of creative practitioners who provide opportunities for young people to work on projects involving visual and creative practices with a strong link to local heritage. Two specific projects form the focus of the paper: Riot and Blank Canvas. Both aimed to provide opportunities for young people to work with professional artists and performers to create a site‐specific exhibition and performance in a disused warehouse space on the edge of the developing Creative Quarter in Nottingham. The projects took place out of school, and the research focused on the creative processes and practices involved in the production of texts created by the young people as they inhabited the space and developed, within a community of peers and artists, representations of that urban space. This article explores the ways in which the projects open up the potential for young people to engage with literacy practices, which traverse the boundaries of space, of art forms and of notions of culture and heritage. Two theoretical frames are used in the paper: Lave and Wenger's “legitimate peripheral participation” (1991) and various scholars' explorations of place‐based approaches. In this way, the article aims to contribute to understandings of the diverse roles and potentials of young peoples' creative practices and literacies in and out of school contexts.

Re-imagine

Re-imagine

Reflections on Sculptural Thinking in Fashion

What does it mean to think sculpturally in fashion practice? This paper explores some of the philosophical and practical aspects of three-dimensional thinking in fashion design; it does this by engaging with theories, concepts and philosophies related to thought and the experience of creating three-dimensional artifacts, which are common to both sculpture and fashion. Central to this relationship is the employment of the senses with respect to perception and cognition. Of particular interest is the sense of touch, and how sensory experience encounters notions of empathy and mimicry in a phenomenological encounter with others: whether animate or inanimate. The research emerged through conversations between a fashion designer, Kevin Almond, and a contemporary artist, Stephen Swindells. The sensibility of the paper, and much of the analysis and debates, thus explore these issues from a creative practitioner’s perspective. A conceptual current running through the conversation, and subsequently the paper, touched upon whether following a line of thought becomes analogous to visually and mentally tracing a human form in a psychological space—and what is the significance for fashion of the interrelationships between sculptural thinking and phenomenological encounters with others within urban environments.

Music: an exception to Creole exceptionalism? Cape Verdean national identity and creativity post-independence

This article focuses on the interrelationship between the Cape Verdean Creole (CVC) language and music as it has developed over time in literature, composition and performance experience. The written record demonstrates that, over time, a blend of scholar-practitioners, trained academics who often engaged in both the study and composition of lyrics and music, blurred the lines of the oral and written hierarchy in CVC, ultimately co-fashioning the relationship between language and music as essential to identity alongside the many existing creative practitioners working exclusively in the oral realm. Since independence, too, a major intellectual project of Cape Verdean writers has been to celebrate the work of practitioners in a scholarly fashion. Simultaneously, many practitioners have worked to reclaim and reinvigorate traditional music genres. This has contributed immensely to both the understanding and creative expression of Cape Verdean national identity, or caboverdianidade. This article also takes on an ethnographic inquiry into the creative process and aesthetic preferences that bring together CVC and Cape Verdean music. It becomes clear that CVC is widely considered by Cape Verdean songwriters to be the best language for composition and performance on a number of grounds – sonic, aesthetic, linguistic and sociopolitical reasons among them.

Afterword: Objects in the Theater

Afterword: Objects in the Theater Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece and Stephen Groening The field of film studies has often considered excess as a way to understand the cinema.1 Neither self-contained sphere nor object entirely of the world, cinema and its powers have been explained through dichotomies and ambivalences.2 This can be illustrated through a series of questions: Is cinema dream, phantasmagoria, parallel universe? Is the image on the screen a doorway to another place, a window onto the world, an inspiration for dreams and fantasies, a culmination of ideologies and discourses? How should spectators interact with the cinematic object: through absorption, transportation, or distraction? Are the viewer’s senses engaged equally, in turn, or hierarchically; are they disciplined, controlled, or directed? Does film teach spectators how to see, experience, or feel? What constitutes the cinema’s primary goal: sensation, thought, contemplation, or reaction? Any suggestion that film studies has arrived at satisfactory answers to these questions stifles lively debates within the discipline, not to mention ongoing attempts by filmmakers, moving-image artists, and other creative practitioners. But if film studies generally accepts its ties to ambiguity and paradox, it too frequently ignores cinema’s physical excess: the spaces of exhibition where image and sound meet the messiness of the world. That particular moment of encounter and the multiplicity of things therein that misshape, reenact, and reconsider the relationship between film and spectator bear a historical and theoretical urgency. In response, this special issue has pondered many of these questions that currently animate the discipline from the perspective of exhibition studies. The approach of the authors here has been to demonstrate how attention to the objects that populate the spaces of cinematic exhibition illuminates the importance of environments beyond the screen for a more incisive understanding of the film experience. As theorists of cinema, we insist that the untangling of relationships between objects, bodies, and image evinces some of the most essential questions film theory seeks to address. As historians of cinema, we argue that the presence of these objects in cinematic spaces speaks to the discourse of ideal spectatorship; in other words, we can extrapolate what [End Page 139] exhibitors, theater patrons, and film producers thought spectatorship should, could, or might be. The implications extend past the smaller niche of exhibition studies into film studies in general. In attending to manifold times and places of exhibition, the scholars gathered here have considered the space of aesthetic encounter as well as the physical objects within that space as potential directives or distractions for spectatorship. Such detailed and careful exploration of the influence of objects requires a broader definition of exhibition and suggests ways to develop bridges between the theatrical and nontheatrical. We have argued that objects between viewer and image must be considered in addition to, alongside, or in concert with the screen. Our approach is, of course, thoroughly congruous with current understandings of spectatorship as a multifaceted process that can be alternately or simultaneously stable and mobile, individual and communal, seamless and chaotic. Yet we also seek to push the boundaries of exhibition studies and insist on its position not as an addendum to film aesthetics but a necessity for the construction of a thorough history of film. Traditionally, and for good reason, the screen and its relationship to the eye hold central importance in the study of spectatorship. From Sergei Eisen-stein and Dziga Vertov to André Bazin, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey, film theory often tacitly assumes that the aesthetic encounter takes place at the moment of conjuncture between screen and eye.3 Even scholars operating on the margins of film theory, such as Jonathan Crary, Giuliana Bruno, Anthony Vidler, and Beatriz Colomina, treat the cinema as image-centric;4 while studies of film sound by scholars such as Emily Thompson and Jacob Smith have gained considerable traction in the field,5 the primacy of the eye and the screen frequently goes unquestioned. Recently, Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers have proposed the term new cinema history as a category that articulates conditions of production, exhibition, and reception through examinations of audiences, sociality, technology, law, markets, and global circulation.6 In keeping with this...

Creating Creative Learning Environments by Creative Partnerships Programme—Evaluation of the Creative Partnerships Pilot Mathematics Programme in Pécs

A Creative Partnerships programme is focused on the long-term relationship between creative practitioners and schools. Creative professionals from various branches (of arts) help students master different types of knowledge and skills. Creative practitioners bring new expectations, which clearly challenge students. But it is not only students that are jerked out of the rut of daily routine by the new learning process—schools as a whole and mainly teachers are highly affected. Creative Partnerships has developed a pedagogical approach known as the “high functioning classroom” which encourages teachers to change their classroom practice so that lessons are replete with challenges that relate learning to real-life situations; where students are engaged physically and socially, as well as emotionally and intellectually; and where students’ own experiences, observations and questions take centre stage. The transformation of teaching and learning is based on creative processes which are channelled into classrooms and school life. Techniques applied in the methodologies of teaching various subjects are derived from artistic practices. Whilst working in the classroom with the students, the artist remains an artist, and the teacher remains a teacher. The programme does not offer arts education. What the Creative Partnerships programme does is to prepare artists to work with teachers and students to bring about sustainable changes in teachers’ teaching practice. The aim of the present paper is to present the main results of qualitative and quantitative research measuring the impact of the Creative Partnerships pilot programme on certain competencies, reading skills development and maths knowledge of the participating (socially disadvantaged) students.

Creative practice – finding the right mentor

ABSTRACTI am currently the third PhD student of creative writing in the history of my university. I do not think we have a graduate yet … It's a bit of a lonely journey. (2014, pers. comm. December 10)This paper argues the importance to the creative practitioner in finding the right mentor as an axis for growth. The discussion interchanges the terms ‘artist’ and ‘practitioner’, not to denote broad scopes of diverse disciplines but to mean the creative writer in a research setting. It applies the term ‘creative practice’ to mean the duality of artist and scholar in action research. The personal communication from the Australasian PhD student is witness to the solitary milieu in which artists in doctoral settings find themselves. The right mentor can trigger or catalyse insight to the solitary artist to whom isolation is not an optimal setting; collaboration and participation are vital elements providing important tensions that add value to a work. Wings from the artist’s isolation, runways to the ‘leap’, may emerge in the form of another author, a supervisor, a peer reviewer, an editor—all seemingly non-collaborative participants—whose association is crucial to locating and asserting the best form of the artist’s work.

Becoming Stories : Creating narrative spaces in initial teacher education

Initial Teacher Education (ITE) occurs in a predominantly analytic space, in common with most higher education provision. Creating and legitimising narrative learning community spaces would result in the foregrounding of professional identity formation across the ITE curriculum. The resulting systematic attention to the impact of teacher identity on professional practice will develop teachers who are more resilient and better able to negotiate the theory-to-practice shifts required of classroom-ready teachers (Johnson, Down, Le Cornu, Peters, Sullivan, Pearce & Hunter, 2010; Hooley, 2007). I present this case for narrative pedagogies by offering two stories from my own journey of increasing commitment to narrative pedagogies. Each story is paired with a preservice teacher narrative from a significant stage in their identity development. And each pair is followed by an analytic interlude that frames the accounts in the literature on narrative ways of knowing and professional identity development. I contend that three things need to occur to establish effective and sustainable narrative learning community spaces. First, teacher educators need to embrace the use of narrative ways of knowing in our pedagogical practice. Second, we need to recognise the embodied complexity of the teaching context, and how narrative can be used to develop preservice teachers’ capacity to navigate these ‘swampy lowlands’ of practice (Schon, 1983, p. 42). Third, we need to teach the skills of narrative writing and interpretation across the ITE curriculum to equip preservice teachers to negotiate their teacher identity and become resilient and creative practitioners. In presenting this series of vignettes about storying in teacher learning, I intend to offer new insights and raise new questions about how narrative can respond to the current needs of initial teacher education (Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, 2014; Sellars, 2014).

Out in the open: locating new vernacular practices with smartphone cameras

ABSTRACTWe are living in a moment where new types of visuality and vernaculars are emerging. For many of us sharing of objects such as photos and video has become a part of our daily routines. The sheer volume of videos and photos uploaded to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provide ample evidence of our desire to document and share our most ordinary moments. Details of our lives are out in the open through the entangled zones of smartphones, networks and geography. In this paper, I explore some of the entanglements of video and photography have with life our lives, both physically and through social media, and how these might be understood within a broader context of emplaced visualities through a short and sharp digital ethnography of how creative practitioners who participate in social media groups use photographs and video.

THE CHALLENGE OF SUPPORTING CREATIVE INDUSTRIES—SCOTTISH EXAMPLE

This article aims to explore the idea of the supporting system for creative industries, which plays a pivotal role in today’s economy. Creative businesses, which range from individual musicians to companies dealing with publications, demand special attention and tailor-made support services. Therefore, in this article, the analysis is carried out based on the information gained in an in-depth interview and the supporting system for creative industries, which have been functioning in Scotland and the main barriers in providing support services.As shown by the research, a problem exists regarding a proper classification of creative industries, which causes difficulties in measuring them. Moreover, lumping creative businesses with artists to the same group results in criticism from artist communities as they feel that art is no longer being supported, only invested. This piece of research is a part of a research project, which aims at comparing the systems for supporting creative industries in Szczecin and in Glasgow. The empirical approach will be enriched by the theoretical discourse on policies shaping the environment of creative industries. This article, therefore, provides important knowledge concerning building effective system for supporting creative industries, both for scholars and practitioners (managers of business support organizations and policy makers). This knowledge and experience are especially needed in central and east European countries, where the awareness about creative industries is very low.

Teaching art and design: Communicating creative practice through embodied and tacit knowledge

How do artists and designers teaching in universities communicate creative practice as they teach art/design? There is much discussion about the ‘mystery’ of creativity, but little understanding of how teaching occurs in creative contexts. Understanding this topic better will develop greater knowledge within the academy of how art and design is communicated by the creative practitioners who teach it, and could benefit other academic disciplines. In this article, I draw on data from a recent Australian study with artist/designer-academics. It provides rich qualitative data to explore in detail how artists and designers teaching in universities communicate creative practice as they teach art/design. Tacit and embodied knowledge theories are used to provide frameworks for explaining this phenomenon. I argue that artist/designer-academics embody their creative practices and communicate these through teaching in both tacit and explicit forms, and that they do this through modelling knowledge, skills and practice.