Picture a small Welsh Hotel in late February, fresh with glimmers of early spring sunshine reflecting optimistically off the grey Menai Straits. Thirty Primary Head Teachers, Education Action Zone Directors and LEA officers converge on the small town of Beaumaris for three days of discussing, planning, evaluating and reminding ourselves of the local nightlife. And Learning about Creativity.
The sessions start promptly and we dutifully sit through workshops on the Extended School, School Leadership, Teaching and Learning, Special Educational Needs and a myriad of other agenda items which seem to flood into Head Teacher's offices daily from on high. The tide of initiatives is unrelenting. Social Exclusion, Gifted and Talented, Learning Mentors, Accelerated Learning, E-credits, The Primary Strategy and now Creativity is on the agenda.
The message from up the food chain is that Creativity in the Classroom is now officially important. Word has passed down to all of us in the way that much communication is processed in education: people deliver monologues and soliloquies at each other. Government at the LEAs and Head Teachers, Head Teachers at teachers, and teachers at pupils. Monologues which like to think they're dialogues, but in fact are rules and instructions dressed up as advice and 'good practice'.
But first, before the creative potential of the Classroom can be released, it is our turn to participate in a Creative Workshop. We face the impending session with a mix of suspicion, interest and hangover. In some quarters there is a distinct unease about what is about to unfold.
We are presented with a creative task. We have been told we are going to listen to some music and then, in response to this stimulus, we are to create a poem, make some music, prepare some movement and put the whole thing together into a presentation for the end of the afternoon. The music is Liadov's Enchanted Island and Holst's Mars from the Planet Suite, two too-obviously contrasting pieces of 'classical' canon fodder which instruct you to think 'ooh, peaceful' on the one hand or 'cor, angry' on the other. We set out to magic up a piece of creativity in the wake of this piece of emotional and psychological manipulation, doing as we are asked in a well-behaved-group sort of way and having a lot of fun and discussion whilst preparing our various contributions. One of us opens up frankly about her unease about being asked to write a poem. Another, mightily irritated with how the original sources of music has been applied so didactically, writes a free-flowing rant in the Seething of Tunbridge Wells style of old which uses the f-word in a novel and liberating style. This makes lots of us laugh heartily. We like to hear the f-word very much, so that the author is encouraged to repeat it in rehearsals as often as possible. Quite whether we would be happy to hear it in our classrooms is another matter entirely. Whilst we can be as creative as we like as responsible adults, allowing that old Anglo-Saxon English the free run of the modern classroom with a group of excitable and hormonally-drenched pubescents is quite another matter.
One of us notes that some kids in schools are like of bottles of Coke - you do not know if they have been shaken up before they come into the classroom or not, and if your efforts at unleashing their creativity are going to make them explode. That is one of the problems of creativity: how do you ever replace the top on the bottle once it has been opened?
Given that pupils' experiences of schools these days is driven by the need to comply and meet targets... Given that it is about responding to and adapting to the hierarchy; listening (or pretending to listen) to the monologue being talked at you, about formulating your own version of that monologue and then delivering your take on it at someone else (a phenomenon also known as bullying)... Given all that, how is it possible - and is it even desirable - for creativity to flourish?
The tension generated when creativity is placed up alongside learning in schools is that the former is fundamentally about dialogue and collaboration. It is not about talking to yourself or foisting your own monologues on others. Whilst some Head Teachers stress that more enlightened teachers are teaching creatively by acknowledging their pupils' differing learning styles and recognising multiple intelligences, the act of creativity itself is a process which demands a physical, psychological and metaphorical wrestling with demons, unpleasant and unwelcome impulses, significant others, parents, partners, neighbours, the hell of the past and visions and delusions of the future. It is, crucially, as much an act of destruction and chaos as it is about vision and creation - as much about killing your babies as it is about bringing them up.
Are we serious about enhancing creativity in our classrooms and our pupils' learning experiences? If so, what is to be done in a climate which views creativity solely as a one-way 'making' process, is terrified of the correlatived yet essential 'breaking' process, and continues to rain down monologues day upon day?
Education Action Zones (or EAZs) are another example of educational precipitation set up by central government. Funded on a 3-year, fixed-term basis in order to enhance achievement and attainment in specific school clusters across the country, they require schools to work collaboratively to achieve targets. Given their origins, intentions and ongoing budgetary struggles, however, the process of developing a culture of collaboration, dialogue and creativity is always in danger of being undermined by the schools' own agendas and survival instincts.
Here at the Aspire Education Action Zone in Wallasey, Merseyside we have taken some tentative first steps towards establishing a culture of dialogue. This is the crucial prerequisite for creativity to blossom in the classroom (and in the staff room, the community and our own homes). We have established a new company and registered charity, the Aspire Trust, which is run by and for local schools themselves. The Board of Directors is composed solely of local Head Teachers, but in the coming months will be opened up to parents and the community. The board is responsible for the vision, direction and control of the company's activities. Funding comes from a number of sources, including New Wallasey Single Regeneration and the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts EQUAL programme, which support as opposed to drive the delivery of the Trust's vision.
One of our first projects has been the development of an Adult Learning Project entitled NVR 2 L8, as in It's Never Too Late to Learn. The initial results were presented by Somerville Primary School with its partner secondary school, the Oldershaw School, in early July. With support from the Trust in the shape of a professional production team, Somerville has developed its first-ever adult drama group. It presented a 55-strong cast of parents, children and teachers performing a musical, The Pied Piper, to an audience of over 600. The project was an ambitious undertaking for everybody involved. The sight of that number of performers onstage is overwhelming anywhere. At our schools, with parents, children and teachers all mutually learning, creating and performing, it was a nerve-tingling spectacle.
The group is determined to continue from September and will be involved in the process of deciding what it does next, whether that means workshops, training or future performances. Parents have already commented on the benefits of their children learning together with their teachers and themselves. They have recognised that their youngsters are talking more about school, showing more interest in different activities beside the drama group, have increased self-confidence, express more interest in doing homework and in finding things out for themselves. They simpley ask more questions, a sure sign of creativity at work in the learning environment.
It is still early days, but we are looking forward to developing more projects which plant the dialogue of learning and creativity back into all of our schools. As long as that planting process can be nurtured by teachers, parents and pupils together, then we may well be able to blow this impending winter's storms of yet more central government monologues back out of the Menai Straits and help them rain themselves out harmlessly in the Irish Sea. Only by doing this can we permit a true culture of dialogue and creativity to flourish and thrive in our schools and in our children.
Nick Owen is director of Aspire Education Action Zone, Wallasey CH45 4RJ. Telephone 0151 639 9231 or email n.owen@aspirewallasey.com