Early this century there were shifts in curricula, internationally, that called for education to engage young people in creativity and criticality in order to become more personally inquiring and more socially aware and responsible. EU identified  key competences needed to be successful in a constantly changing world (EU 2006). But downturn in economies led to reduced educational budgets and policies that frame education in more fundamentalist terms, with primary emphasis on literacy, numeracy and computer technologies in elementary schooling and examination results in secondary.  Yet there is still greater need for the development of critical awareness and understandings of ways to positively engage as a citizen at both socio-political and ecological levels. This paper is based on the premise that the development of effective literacy is a complementary rather than a competing goal with that of developing creativity and democratic competencies. Teachers simply need to learn strategies to achieve them all.

This paper reports the beginning of a third stage of a cross-national research project in which interactive, creative and aesthetic approaches to teaching and learning are applied to the development and improvement of literacy and to the evolving of democratic attitudes and consciousness. A paper presented at ECER in 2010 (Greenwood & Sæbø, 2010) examined the overarching theoretical framework and reported pilot classroom studies in Norway and New Zealand,  investigating the use of creative and interactive methodologies in the teaching of reading and writing, and related the initial findings to discussion of initial teacher education. A further paper (2011) reported further findings and developed a working model for aligning artistry with specific teaching goals. It applied findings to examination of the core skills needed in initial teacher education.
This stage of the project furthers the earlier investigations, but turns also to more specific exploration of how rich and critical, as well as functional, literacy can be developed through collaborative creative processes and how those processes themselves, as well as the development of critical literacy, can foster the development of democratic understandings and agency.

Two  research questions focus this phase:
1. How can creative, interactive and aesthetic-based processes be strategically developed and used to promote rich and critical literacy and democratic awareness?
2. What are the core skills teachers need to learn in order to effectively use such processes?

The wider conceptual framework of this study draws on conceptualisations of:

- literacy as a complex set of skills and understandings that are socially related (De Zutter 2007);

- literacy learning as serving a range of socio-political and economic goals (Gee 2012);

- learning though the aesthetic as engaging body and emotion as well as cognition (Greenwood 2010; Saebo 2009);

- the interactive strategies of process drama as rehearsal grounds for life (Boal 2006/1974; Heathcote & Bolton 1995; Greenwood & Saebo 2009; Greenwood 2005; Saebo 2010; Wagner 1999)

The critical approach to literacy and to its implications for teacher education discussed in this paper align with the conference themes of research that allows education to champion freedom and lead to development for all.

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