A Critical Review Of The Creative Partnerships Archive. How Was Cultural Value Understood, Researched And Evidenced?

Author(s):

Pat Thomson(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 06, Institutional partnerships and arts education

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

15:30-17:00

Room:

557.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Tiago Assis

Contribution

There has been an upsurge of interest in creative learning in schools. Governments in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Norway and Lithuania, for example, are all funding programmes which bring creative practitioners, mainly artists, to work with teachers and students. Their aim is not simply to make schooling more engaging and inviting, but also to introduce learning in what are understood as 21^st century knowledge and creative economy dispositions and practices. The English charity Creativity Culture and Education (CCE) is involved in most of these European initiatives, taking particular responsibility for the professional development of ‘creative agents’, artists who work with schools and broker the participation of other artists.

CCE is the parent organisation of Creative Partnerships (CP). From 2002-2011 CP funded creative practitioners to work with teachers and schools in England. The most ambitious, biggest and longest running arts education intervention in the world, CP aimed to transform students' experiences of schooling, expand teachers' classroom approaches and dramatically improve the ways in which schools functioned and performed. Its focus was on 'creative learning' and whole school change. In its lifetime, CP worked intensively with over 5,000 schools across England, 90,000 teachers and over 1 million young people. It touched 1 in 4 schools in the country, from nurseries and Pupil Referral Units to sixth form colleges. It supported 54 national schools of creativity, and some 1500 change schools, all of which exhibited exemplary creative learning practices. Over 6,500 national arts and creativity organisations were involved in CP.

Unlike many educational reform initiatives, CP took research and evaluation very seriously. It commissioned 12 literature reviews on topics ranging from discourses of creativity to definitions of the creative industries. It commissioned ongoing research projects designed to inform the national and regional CP organisation, the teaching profession, arts sector and the scholarly community. All schools receiving funding were expected to operate through an inquiry approach, and every project was evaluated. In 2007 CP adopted a national evaluation framework and all schools were required to submit annual plans and summative reports of their activities, investigations and findings. While there were summary reports made of each year's activity, there was no attempt within the programme to bring together research project reports other than as short and separate public summaries and headline findings on its website.

This paper draws on a research project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council which aimed to interrogate the published research on the CP archive to ascertain what it might have to offer understandings about cultural value, and how cultural value might be defined, researched and evidenced. Its objective was to conduct a critical review of CP research reports, literature reviews, programme materials and a representative sample of national and regional evaluation reports to investigate:

(1) what definitions of creativity might the CP archive have to offer about 'cultural value'

(2) what methodologies and methods were used in creativity research by academics and by school practitioner-inquirers

(3) what kinds of evidence were generated through these methods

and therefore to

(4) offer some evaluation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches, and

(5) identify any potential areas for further investigation using the cultural value rubric.

The results of this archive analysis have implications for the ways in which evaluations of, and research into, the various European initiatives now going on. While these do not focus on cultural value per se, I argue that there are important implications for the arts and creativity researchers in Europe in taking an informed and historical perspective on these activities in England.

Method

The research team consisted of three people. The first stage of the project was to map out the materials that were publicly available on the two websites: The CCE online archive of research reports contains 146 documents. These include: 11 summary documents with exemplars; 12 literature reviews; and 46 research reports. The other 82 texts, which have been added to the archive but are not CP or CCE commissioned or published documents, are academic papers, think-tank reports, political manifestos, or policy documents. These were subject to a content analysis to see what was considered important enough to add to the corpus. All documents were tagged by CCE to make them searchable. We used these tags but also sorted the papers by type and by date of publication to place the research in the context of changes in the programme’s organisation. The second stage of the project was to critically analyse the public texts. In a first pass through the data two of the research team closely read and analysed each of the 64 commissioned research documents asking the following questions: (1) how is the value of the CP offer understood? (2) what benefits is the CP offer said to produce and how is this defined? (3) what methods are used to investigate this benefit? (4) what evidence is produced? Our data was produced as textual extracts and then coded and thematised using NVivo. A separate second stage of analysis, using the same processes of close reading, coding and thematising, was undertaken for key categories: wellbeing, student voice, teachers’ learning and school change, and vocational and work related learning. We also examined the research methods used across the programme, looking not only for what was done, but also what was not. A third stage of the project took the pages of CP and CCE website and, using a discourse analytic approach, examined the ways in which the cultural offer of CP was represented. All work was always read by at least two of the team and subject to discussion in order to arrive at agreed themes and interpretations.

Expected Outcomes

Our analysis showed that: (1) CP did not operate in with either/or mission: its cultural offer was understood as having both extrinsic and intrinsic values. Like schooling more generally, CP always understood its mandate to be wide-ranging. Because of its focus on creativity, CP did not see its outcomes as being about arts learning, but about learning more generally. It thus missed an opportunity to track arts learning per se and to develop ways to investigate arts learning (2) There is some research evidence in the archive for CP supporting modest gains in learning within formal school curriculum areas, as measured by tests and exams. There is stronger evidence for it encouraging enjoyment and engagement in school: this evidence ranges from improvements in attendance to increased motivation. Our analysis of the publicly available research in the CP archive suggests that overall the programme did produce considerable benefits for young people in the areas of wellbeing, citizenship and work-related skills and habits, areas of interest to the AHRC cultural value programme. However there was often conflation of these areas in the design and results of commissioned research leading to somewhat circuitous claims. There were also learning gains for teachers through the professional development opportunities on offer. CP’s commissioned research was designed to provide ‘evidence’ of impact, but also to inform the development of the programme through theory building and the provision of heuristics for teacher and school learning. This is an approach of interest to future arts and creativity initiatives. However, CP did not develop a longitudinal study tracking students and teachers learning over time: this is something any future national arts based or cultural programme needs to do. These results presents a research challenge for current European creativity initiatives.

References

Thomson, P; Coles, R and Hallewell, M ( 2014) A Critical Review Of The Creative Partnerships Archive. How Was Cultural Value Understood, Researched And Evidenced? Swindon: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Author Information

Pat Thomson (presenting / submitting)

The University of Nottingham

Nottingham

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