Janinka Greenwood :
University of Canterbury
Change is a constant in our lives, whether we welcome it or resist it, whether we seek to shape it or simply plan to survive it. This chapter argues that the development of creativity in our classrooms and in our educational research is a vital component in enabling students, teachers and researchers to address and influence the direction of change. It further argues that while creativity provides vision and energy, criticality is also required to examine, analyse and evaluate direction and outcomes. The discussion of change, criticality and creativity is a discursive and exploratory one that seeks to complement the field work offered by other writers. Particular attention is given to collaborative and creative approaches to learning and to participatory and reflective research strategies.
This book is one that addresses research and educational change in Bangladesh. It has come into being because of the initiatives of the Bangladesh government and particularly TQI (Teaching Quality Improvement) in sending some of its promising educators overseas for further study. A number of those educators have not only used the opportunity for that study to advance their own knowledge but also to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing education in Bangladesh and to share to their developing understandings with others in their country working to improve education.
Each of the succeeding chapters involves the work of an emergent researcher who is using his or her research to examine and critique existing educational practices in Bangladesh. This should lead to better understanding of existing possibilities and shortcomings and so contribute to building of knowledge foundations for a strong and effective educational system. Individually, each chapter reports a small part of the creative venture that each developing scholar is undertaking by journeying into western scholarship in order to find tools, both methodological and conceptual, that may serve education in Bangladesh. Collectively, the collation of reports and selected findings into a single book, drawing on western scholarship but grounded in the concerns and practices of Bangladesh and developed primarily for use in Bangladesh, is also a significant creative undertaking. It is an initial venture and contains the seeds of further growth.
Yet creativity though it brings the energy of new thinking and offers new ways to look at the world, needs an accompanying criticality to harness its energy so that it can be directed at changes that have been carefully examined and considered to be desirable. The work of the emergent researchers also brings elements of that criticality as the authors scrutinise not only the planned direction of educational innovations but also factors that still interfere with their attainment. The notion of criticality is also an integral element in the book as a whole as it proposes that positive educational initiatives at the national level need to be accompanied by strategic and critical research. The platform of research that the authors have been able to build at this stage of their on-going study is still acknowledgedly small, but it is an important affirmation of the importance of such research and of their collective commitment to continue to develop the methodologies, conceptual frameworks and epistemologies needed to provide positive change in education.
As someone who is an outsider to Bangladesh and therefore much less well equipped than the other authors in this book to research specific aspects of local education, I am taking the privilege of my role as an editor to look at the concepts of creativity, criticality and change more generally in the hope that such a discussion will both complement the field work reported by the others and provoke further thinking about the role of research and the forms it might take.
Creativity as a curriculum goal and as a global need : Creativity is a complex and diverse activity. At its simplest it might be defined as a process of exploring new ways of working or discovering new solutions. It is in terms of such broad definitions that I have used it in describing the projects that have lead to this book. More specifically we often talk of creativity in terms of engaging in a particular art or craft, or of specifically structuring problems that provoke innovative strategies for their resolution. In the discussion that follows I will focus particularly on the ways of structuring learning situations and collaborative projects that provoke participants to play with possibilities and to experiment with new ways of understanding, and perhaps resolving issues.
Creativity is often lauded in our national curriculum statements as a tool for redressing economic woes and for creating responsible and imaginative citizens. The New Zealand Curriculum, for example, stresses the importance of innovation, curiosity and inquiry (Ministry of Education, 2007), the Norwegian highlights the responsibility to develop students as creative human beings (Norwegian Board of Education, 1997), the Bangladeshi policy for education sets out to make education creative as well as pragmatic and productive (Ministry of Education, 2010). In international forums, such as the UNESCO endorsed World Creativity Summits in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and the European Union’s recent release of its strategic funding priorities for research in the coming decades (European Commission, 2012), creativity is hailed as a means of technological and entrepreneurial innovation and, sometimes, as a means of social renewal and of the kinds of problem-solving that might heal sectarian rifts and avert ecological catastrophe.
Our schools, and even our tertiary institutions, however, often find it hard to prioritise creativity in practice. Alongside the apparently idealist mandates of curriculum are dragons of reporting and measurement, such as the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and PIRLS (Progress In International Reading Literacy) league tables that rank test scores of countries against each other, and in procedures of reporting individuals’ progress against national benchmarks, such as the National Standards introduced in New Zealand in 2010 (Ministry of Education. 2009). In our tertiary institutes, cutbacks of contact time and emphasis on Grade Point Averages often preclude the risk-taking and evolving understandings involved in developing creative approaches to learning. So, in our practice, creativity often takes a back seat to teaching that is geared towards assessment ..
Nevertheless, it is through strategies that invoke creativity that we can break existing modes of social behaviours and challenge the boundaries of knowledge; that we can find new instead of just more. For example, Gee, the socio-linguist, draws our attention to the way that discourses frame our thinking, and contends that the teaching of literacy is often a form of social construction that prepares our people for efficient but compliant citizenship and upholds the existing social order (Gee, 2012). Literacy, and its contemporary accompaniment computer literacy, develops a population as capable consumers and producers within existing social and economic orders. It is only those who learn to think differently and critically who can be agents of change.
So how can our schools teach literacies (of every kind) in ways that provoke learners to think differently and creatively? There is a wide range of options. What they have in common is that learners are taught to question, to speculate, to play with a range of possibilities and to use each other as collaborators and critics. My own research and practice has focused on collaborative and imaginative strategies drawn from drama and visual arts and on participatory action research. I will, therefore, discuss possibilities within both of these areas later in the chapter. However, in the broader discussion, the focus remains on creativity in its broad sense of trying out new ways of doing and thinking, rejecting existing limitations, imagining and planning for new and different possibilities.
Criticality and the value of reflective lenses and mirrors : It is self evident that not everything that is new is good and that not all change is desirable. Criticality is the function that allows us to examine our creative ventures. We might look at how they match our goals, how they relate to what has already been explored, how they are perceived by others, how they relate to a particular theory or view of the world, and what the consequences might be.
Scholars and researchers who work within the paradigm of critical theory (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994) are very aware of the importance of aligning their initiatives and findings with a framework of social justice and the interrogation of how power operates. Classroom teachers can also usefully examine their curriculum and their practice through these lenses to unpack the content of what they are teaching and its embedded values and the ways they are enabling their students to receive and experiment with knowledge.
However, there are many other useful tools for developing criticality. In simplest form criticality is a process by which we consider our experience and evaluative judgement of things against some other external yardstick. That yardstick might be a theory or an example of practice from literature, as it is in most of the chapters in this book. It might be a different imaginary experience through a work of fiction, a documentary or an art work. It might be feedback from a collaborator or outside viewer. It can even be our own deliberately distanced self-evaluation as we step out and look back at what we are making in terms of how well we think it works, where we want to go, what the consequences might be. In a classroom the yardstick may be the competencies in a particular subject that students need to achieve for examination or for life, and students and teachers can critically reflect on the degree to which they are achieved. Of course, that implies that the competencies have been openly examined and discussed in class, and that students are not just been directed to a page in a text book.
As the figure (Figure I) below suggests, the process is interactive and continuous: as we bring our experienced realities (be they personal or through social teaching) and the outside lens into dialogue with each other, our experience changes and, if we share our new insights through an art form or a scholarly output, then we add to the body of literature and shared practice that can be drawn on. Moreover in the process, our capability for energetic and incisive reflection also develops.
The first and obvious value of critical reflection is that it asks us to carefully’ consider the design, value and impact of the innovations we undertake. This is its primary role in the processes of collaborative investigation; action and leaning that are often called participatory action research, a process I will discuss in more detail later. Similar consideration could occur regularly in classrooms if teachers involve their students in collaborating in the delivery of the curriculum.
In classrooms around the world that use creative processes strategically to provoke particular kinds of learning, deliberate and critical reflection at various stages of the work encourages students to align their creative flights of fancy with appropriate constraints. These might be checks against pragmatic realities, ethical values, possible consequences, or they might be considerations of cohesion, clarity, or style. They may be an evocation of the possible and multiple interpretations of the work as it stands and consideration of ways to refine it so that unwanted interpretations are eliminated.
A further value is that critical reflection can prompt an active engagement with making meaning (and perhaps with un-making existing meanings and framing new ones). This might occur in a classroom, for example, as result of a strategically planned activity that has enabled learners to imaginatively take on roles quite different from those in their normal lives or through working collaborativcly in a group to examine a situation through multiple view points.
In these cases the layering of the different perceptions might produce a clash of realities and that would itself be a catalyst for critical reflection, but the best value comes from making time for explicit and deliberate consideration of the changes in understanding that are occurring. An example of this kind of work is offered later in the chapter.
Collaborative work brings another potential value to reflection. The various participants bring different insights, and sometimes different values, to the discussion and decision making. As they learn the skills of honest and direct contribution at the same time as they search for consensus, they develop the skil1s of negotiation and conflict resolution and develop their capacity for engaged and democratic citizenship.
We engage with change in two ways. One is that we plan to create it; the other is that it comes at us from the outside and we need to strategise to benefit from it, resist it, adapt it or simply survive it. Here I want to focus on the changes we want to initiate or be part of, though it is important to recognise the fact that we live within constantly pressing and often rapidly altering tides of local and global change.
At our more idealistic, perhaps, we might wish for, and want to work to achieve, a society in which people are accepting of differences, where they are equipped to thrive in their own lives and compete, when needed, internationally, and where social justice prevails. And indeed I believe we should always thrive for all those things. However, our spheres of influence, whether we are national project managers or individual teachers, are usually more limited and external forces of change grind on, regardless of our aspirations. So in our work we usually need to settle for small changes, always keeping the bigger goals in sight.
Valuable change can happen at many levels. An action research project in a school might be considered successful if it results in changes in teachers’ individual awareness of the needs of their students. A classroom teacher could well celebrate success if the students in the class feel empowered to freely ask questions and contribute to the group’s collaborative learning. So the changes in education that we work for might include achievements such as individual and group changes in awareness, in motivation and in action; more interactive, student-engaging teaching in a classroom; improvement of communication within a school; better knowledge of how curriculum can adapted to capture learning opportunities and crystallise emergent understandings; development of emergent leaders among the teachers in a school. They might also include creating opportunities for explorations of the problems we and other people face, of the different histories, beliefs, fears and aspirations that others have, of the ways we can unpack the surface messages that are pressed on us by media, advertisers, politicians and economists, of the ways we can dissect problems and resolve conflicts without violence, of how we can col1aborate without losing our individuality and agency. And perhaps such explorations could be of a kind that involves the participants emotionally and physically, as well as intellectually, because that may well be how integrated and enduring learning occurs.
From my practice: creative and collaborative approaches to learning : In the section that follows I offer an example from my practice, using a story book, The Silence Seeker by Bob Morley. I have used the work with a number of different groups of learners, including a group of immigrant children who were learners of English. In that case I led the workshop, working in collaboration with my doctoral student Abdullah Mohd Nawi and we worked with Korean children in a New Zealand school’ I here draw on the details of that project that have been reported elsewhere (Greenwood, 2012). The primary objective of the work is to develop language skills and both functional and critical literacy.
(To be continued)
University of Canterbury
Change is a constant in our lives, whether we welcome it or resist it, whether we seek to shape it or simply plan to survive it. This chapter argues that the development of creativity in our classrooms and in our educational research is a vital component in enabling students, teachers and researchers to address and influence the direction of change. It further argues that while creativity provides vision and energy, criticality is also required to examine, analyse and evaluate direction and outcomes. The discussion of change, criticality and creativity is a discursive and exploratory one that seeks to complement the field work offered by other writers. Particular attention is given to collaborative and creative approaches to learning and to participatory and reflective research strategies.
This book is one that addresses research and educational change in Bangladesh. It has come into being because of the initiatives of the Bangladesh government and particularly TQI (Teaching Quality Improvement) in sending some of its promising educators overseas for further study. A number of those educators have not only used the opportunity for that study to advance their own knowledge but also to better understand the challenges and opportunities facing education in Bangladesh and to share to their developing understandings with others in their country working to improve education.
Each of the succeeding chapters involves the work of an emergent researcher who is using his or her research to examine and critique existing educational practices in Bangladesh. This should lead to better understanding of existing possibilities and shortcomings and so contribute to building of knowledge foundations for a strong and effective educational system. Individually, each chapter reports a small part of the creative venture that each developing scholar is undertaking by journeying into western scholarship in order to find tools, both methodological and conceptual, that may serve education in Bangladesh. Collectively, the collation of reports and selected findings into a single book, drawing on western scholarship but grounded in the concerns and practices of Bangladesh and developed primarily for use in Bangladesh, is also a significant creative undertaking. It is an initial venture and contains the seeds of further growth.
Yet creativity though it brings the energy of new thinking and offers new ways to look at the world, needs an accompanying criticality to harness its energy so that it can be directed at changes that have been carefully examined and considered to be desirable. The work of the emergent researchers also brings elements of that criticality as the authors scrutinise not only the planned direction of educational innovations but also factors that still interfere with their attainment. The notion of criticality is also an integral element in the book as a whole as it proposes that positive educational initiatives at the national level need to be accompanied by strategic and critical research. The platform of research that the authors have been able to build at this stage of their on-going study is still acknowledgedly small, but it is an important affirmation of the importance of such research and of their collective commitment to continue to develop the methodologies, conceptual frameworks and epistemologies needed to provide positive change in education.
As someone who is an outsider to Bangladesh and therefore much less well equipped than the other authors in this book to research specific aspects of local education, I am taking the privilege of my role as an editor to look at the concepts of creativity, criticality and change more generally in the hope that such a discussion will both complement the field work reported by the others and provoke further thinking about the role of research and the forms it might take.
Creativity as a curriculum goal and as a global need : Creativity is a complex and diverse activity. At its simplest it might be defined as a process of exploring new ways of working or discovering new solutions. It is in terms of such broad definitions that I have used it in describing the projects that have lead to this book. More specifically we often talk of creativity in terms of engaging in a particular art or craft, or of specifically structuring problems that provoke innovative strategies for their resolution. In the discussion that follows I will focus particularly on the ways of structuring learning situations and collaborative projects that provoke participants to play with possibilities and to experiment with new ways of understanding, and perhaps resolving issues.
Creativity is often lauded in our national curriculum statements as a tool for redressing economic woes and for creating responsible and imaginative citizens. The New Zealand Curriculum, for example, stresses the importance of innovation, curiosity and inquiry (Ministry of Education, 2007), the Norwegian highlights the responsibility to develop students as creative human beings (Norwegian Board of Education, 1997), the Bangladeshi policy for education sets out to make education creative as well as pragmatic and productive (Ministry of Education, 2010). In international forums, such as the UNESCO endorsed World Creativity Summits in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and the European Union’s recent release of its strategic funding priorities for research in the coming decades (European Commission, 2012), creativity is hailed as a means of technological and entrepreneurial innovation and, sometimes, as a means of social renewal and of the kinds of problem-solving that might heal sectarian rifts and avert ecological catastrophe.
Our schools, and even our tertiary institutions, however, often find it hard to prioritise creativity in practice. Alongside the apparently idealist mandates of curriculum are dragons of reporting and measurement, such as the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and PIRLS (Progress In International Reading Literacy) league tables that rank test scores of countries against each other, and in procedures of reporting individuals’ progress against national benchmarks, such as the National Standards introduced in New Zealand in 2010 (Ministry of Education. 2009). In our tertiary institutes, cutbacks of contact time and emphasis on Grade Point Averages often preclude the risk-taking and evolving understandings involved in developing creative approaches to learning. So, in our practice, creativity often takes a back seat to teaching that is geared towards assessment ..
Nevertheless, it is through strategies that invoke creativity that we can break existing modes of social behaviours and challenge the boundaries of knowledge; that we can find new instead of just more. For example, Gee, the socio-linguist, draws our attention to the way that discourses frame our thinking, and contends that the teaching of literacy is often a form of social construction that prepares our people for efficient but compliant citizenship and upholds the existing social order (Gee, 2012). Literacy, and its contemporary accompaniment computer literacy, develops a population as capable consumers and producers within existing social and economic orders. It is only those who learn to think differently and critically who can be agents of change.
So how can our schools teach literacies (of every kind) in ways that provoke learners to think differently and creatively? There is a wide range of options. What they have in common is that learners are taught to question, to speculate, to play with a range of possibilities and to use each other as collaborators and critics. My own research and practice has focused on collaborative and imaginative strategies drawn from drama and visual arts and on participatory action research. I will, therefore, discuss possibilities within both of these areas later in the chapter. However, in the broader discussion, the focus remains on creativity in its broad sense of trying out new ways of doing and thinking, rejecting existing limitations, imagining and planning for new and different possibilities.
Criticality and the value of reflective lenses and mirrors : It is self evident that not everything that is new is good and that not all change is desirable. Criticality is the function that allows us to examine our creative ventures. We might look at how they match our goals, how they relate to what has already been explored, how they are perceived by others, how they relate to a particular theory or view of the world, and what the consequences might be.
Scholars and researchers who work within the paradigm of critical theory (Kincheloe & McLaren, 1994) are very aware of the importance of aligning their initiatives and findings with a framework of social justice and the interrogation of how power operates. Classroom teachers can also usefully examine their curriculum and their practice through these lenses to unpack the content of what they are teaching and its embedded values and the ways they are enabling their students to receive and experiment with knowledge.
However, there are many other useful tools for developing criticality. In simplest form criticality is a process by which we consider our experience and evaluative judgement of things against some other external yardstick. That yardstick might be a theory or an example of practice from literature, as it is in most of the chapters in this book. It might be a different imaginary experience through a work of fiction, a documentary or an art work. It might be feedback from a collaborator or outside viewer. It can even be our own deliberately distanced self-evaluation as we step out and look back at what we are making in terms of how well we think it works, where we want to go, what the consequences might be. In a classroom the yardstick may be the competencies in a particular subject that students need to achieve for examination or for life, and students and teachers can critically reflect on the degree to which they are achieved. Of course, that implies that the competencies have been openly examined and discussed in class, and that students are not just been directed to a page in a text book.
As the figure (Figure I) below suggests, the process is interactive and continuous: as we bring our experienced realities (be they personal or through social teaching) and the outside lens into dialogue with each other, our experience changes and, if we share our new insights through an art form or a scholarly output, then we add to the body of literature and shared practice that can be drawn on. Moreover in the process, our capability for energetic and incisive reflection also develops.
The first and obvious value of critical reflection is that it asks us to carefully’ consider the design, value and impact of the innovations we undertake. This is its primary role in the processes of collaborative investigation; action and leaning that are often called participatory action research, a process I will discuss in more detail later. Similar consideration could occur regularly in classrooms if teachers involve their students in collaborating in the delivery of the curriculum.
In classrooms around the world that use creative processes strategically to provoke particular kinds of learning, deliberate and critical reflection at various stages of the work encourages students to align their creative flights of fancy with appropriate constraints. These might be checks against pragmatic realities, ethical values, possible consequences, or they might be considerations of cohesion, clarity, or style. They may be an evocation of the possible and multiple interpretations of the work as it stands and consideration of ways to refine it so that unwanted interpretations are eliminated.
A further value is that critical reflection can prompt an active engagement with making meaning (and perhaps with un-making existing meanings and framing new ones). This might occur in a classroom, for example, as result of a strategically planned activity that has enabled learners to imaginatively take on roles quite different from those in their normal lives or through working collaborativcly in a group to examine a situation through multiple view points.
In these cases the layering of the different perceptions might produce a clash of realities and that would itself be a catalyst for critical reflection, but the best value comes from making time for explicit and deliberate consideration of the changes in understanding that are occurring. An example of this kind of work is offered later in the chapter.
Collaborative work brings another potential value to reflection. The various participants bring different insights, and sometimes different values, to the discussion and decision making. As they learn the skills of honest and direct contribution at the same time as they search for consensus, they develop the skil1s of negotiation and conflict resolution and develop their capacity for engaged and democratic citizenship.
We engage with change in two ways. One is that we plan to create it; the other is that it comes at us from the outside and we need to strategise to benefit from it, resist it, adapt it or simply survive it. Here I want to focus on the changes we want to initiate or be part of, though it is important to recognise the fact that we live within constantly pressing and often rapidly altering tides of local and global change.
At our more idealistic, perhaps, we might wish for, and want to work to achieve, a society in which people are accepting of differences, where they are equipped to thrive in their own lives and compete, when needed, internationally, and where social justice prevails. And indeed I believe we should always thrive for all those things. However, our spheres of influence, whether we are national project managers or individual teachers, are usually more limited and external forces of change grind on, regardless of our aspirations. So in our work we usually need to settle for small changes, always keeping the bigger goals in sight.
Valuable change can happen at many levels. An action research project in a school might be considered successful if it results in changes in teachers’ individual awareness of the needs of their students. A classroom teacher could well celebrate success if the students in the class feel empowered to freely ask questions and contribute to the group’s collaborative learning. So the changes in education that we work for might include achievements such as individual and group changes in awareness, in motivation and in action; more interactive, student-engaging teaching in a classroom; improvement of communication within a school; better knowledge of how curriculum can adapted to capture learning opportunities and crystallise emergent understandings; development of emergent leaders among the teachers in a school. They might also include creating opportunities for explorations of the problems we and other people face, of the different histories, beliefs, fears and aspirations that others have, of the ways we can unpack the surface messages that are pressed on us by media, advertisers, politicians and economists, of the ways we can dissect problems and resolve conflicts without violence, of how we can col1aborate without losing our individuality and agency. And perhaps such explorations could be of a kind that involves the participants emotionally and physically, as well as intellectually, because that may well be how integrated and enduring learning occurs.
From my practice: creative and collaborative approaches to learning : In the section that follows I offer an example from my practice, using a story book, The Silence Seeker by Bob Morley. I have used the work with a number of different groups of learners, including a group of immigrant children who were learners of English. In that case I led the workshop, working in collaboration with my doctoral student Abdullah Mohd Nawi and we worked with Korean children in a New Zealand school’ I here draw on the details of that project that have been reported elsewhere (Greenwood, 2012). The primary objective of the work is to develop language skills and both functional and critical literacy.
(To be continued)
