This paper reports on a part of a larger, cross-nationally funded, research project examining the role of creativity in learning. As part of a series of international collaborations Aud Sæbo, of Norway, and Janinka Greenwood, of New Zealand, are working together to explore how a range of interactive creative group processes might be used by classroom teachers to make routine learning tasks richer, more meaningful and more effective in facilitating desired learning outcomes. In this paper we report a sequence of lessons with a group of 8year olds in an elementary school in Stavanger. The class is an English class and the students work with a standard text book. The teacher is a young woman who is respected by her students and is willing to try new methods. As she explained to us, the textbook lesson, despite the bright colours on its pages, was relatively dreary, seemed to encourage a rote-learning approach to language, and was not engaging many of her students. She wanted to explore a more motivating approach to language learning. We looked for ways to bring the grammar structures and new vocabulary in the lesson to life. An important consideration in our design of a more imaginative approach was that we wanted to keep the process simple, something the teachers and others like her could do without extensive further training and without feeling she/they would be taking undue risks in their overall classroom management. In our paper we report the processes we used, the resulting engagement of the students in the lessons, and open a discussion about the elements of the processes that invoke students’ creativity and promote learning. In particular we further examine some of the constructs of ‘role’ ‘play’ ‘framing’ and explore how they relate to creativity, to embodiment and to student empowerment. In terms of the conference theme – the debate and interplay between theory and evidence – this paper is positioned at the cusp of the interplay. We look for evidence of changes in motivation and learning. However, we also play with the grounded theory that arises from the episode and hope that such theoretical discussion will help us understand the nature of children’s learning more fully and so be more aware of where we should look for evidence and what the nature of that evidence might be.

Our methodological approach is a qualitative one, drawing on the epistemologies of reflective practitioner (Taylor 1996) and classroom ethnography (Donelan 2005) to record, analyse and report the decisions concerning didactic design, the critical episodes in the development of a interactive and engaged learning situation and the progression of engagement in the learning. Our conceptual framework draws on a wide body of research and theory in fields of arts and learning including O’Farrell, Sæbø, McCammon, Heap (2009), Heathcote (2008), Millar and Saxton (20040, Greenwood (2005), Greenwood and Wilson (2006), Greenwood (2002; Greenwood & McCammon (2008; Sutherlin & Greenwood (2008)

The contribution to knowledge is twofold. On the one hand it offers a platform for examining the learning that occurs in the arts and aligning it with the learning processes and expected outcomes of a number of ‘new’ curricula. On the other it allows us to consider how the processes used in the arts may be adapted and utilised in other curriculum learning areas in order to facilitate the goals of the curriculum and also to provide ways of approaching cross- curricular learning. In both these ways the paper contributes to the broader debate that considers the value of education as the building (bildung) of a whole person within the demands of accountability through assessment