Two education research topics, creativity and dialogic approaches to schooling, are brought together in this paper, to respond to the founding question raised in a third area: how can social justice and intercultural education be promoted in schools? Creativity is a concept that helps distinguish routine transferring of information from meaning-making and, more broadly, from ‘generative’ work in schools. This is set in policy contexts of creativity in education across the world, as in current UK policy (DfEE 1999, Roberts 2006, and see Craft et al 2001), and religious and philosophical issues related to creation, creativity, and human nature (Buber 2002, chapter 3). Creativity ‘involves the use of imagination and intellect to generate ideas, insights and solutions to problems and challenges’, and that, ‘[c]oupled with critical thinking, which involves evaluative reasoning, creative activity can produce outcomes that can be original, expressive and have value’ (QCA 2008). That is, there is reference to the agency of the person being creative (imagination, thinking, reasoning), the originality of the processes or products (generate, original, expressive), and the value of that generated (solutions, evaluative, value) (as in Stern 2007, p 124-126). Such policies can be challenged by high-stakes testing and other forms of ‘performativity’ in education. Ironically, music and other performance-based creative arts are themselves in danger from performative cultures in schools, where that is directed towards a narrow range of external measures. Going beyond performing arts (and music in particular) being seen as subject disciplines distinctively helping fulfil the need for pupils to be creative, this research investigates the dialogic role of music. More specifically, it investigates the possibilities of music as a form of cultural and religious understanding (a way of communicating religious and cultural diversity) and even more powerfully the possibilities of music as a method of resolving conflict, especially religiously-based conflict. Dialogue and educational creativity is theorised from the philosophy of Martin Buber (1958 and notably Buber 2002), and it is his approach to religious diversity and the creation of social justice through dialogue, that underpins the whole research. Working in Germany until 1938, and then in Jerusalem until his death in 1965, Buber was familiar with the challenges of religiously-based conflict and its resolution. The research question raised by his philosophy, is whether music-based pedagogy in schools is or can be dialogic, and whether this approach does or could be used to promote social justice.

The paper forms one strand of research on The Spirit of the School (Stern 2009), an international research project currently active in the UK, Hong Kong, and the USA, with published findings (in Stern 2009) generated from empirical research in 13 UK and Chinese schools, including in-depth interviews and other activities with 144 pupils, teachers and headteachers/principals. This investigated the nature of dialogue, community and learning in those schools, and it built on earlier research on the relationship between schools and religions (e.g. Stern 2007), and on the use of music in education as a form of educational inclusion (e.g. Stern 2004, and see Nesbitt 2004). The analysis of policy and curriculum documents related to music, religious education, and social justice, is complemented by how children and adults understand inclusion and opportunities to communicate with people within and beyond schools.

Results of this research are being developed into a series of strategy and pedagogic documents, promoting the pedagogic use of music, a ‘supremely a corporate activity’ (Bowker 1997, p 667), to promote the understanding of religion and the resolution of conflict (as music ‘draws people into an experience of community and togetherness’, Rüppell and Schreiner 2003, p 165), working with professional and university-based groups such as the national association for teachers of religious education, a diocesan education board, a centre for church schools, a religious education centre, and a centre for global education. It is hoped that the outcomes of this research and professional work will put music at the centre of debates on social justice in education, through its pedagogic use in intercultural dialogue.