Researching Creative Learning

Methods and Approaches

Edited by Pat Thomson, Julian Sefton-Green

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About the Book

Teachers, governments and employers around the world all aspire to make young people more creative. These aspirations are motivated by two key concerns: to make experience at school more exciting, relevant, challenging and dynamic; and ensuring that young people are able and fit to leave education and contribute to the creative economy which will underpin growth in the twenty-first century.

Transforming these common aspirations into informed practice is not easy. It can mean making many changes:

There are programmes, projects and initiatives which have consistently attempted to offer such change and transformation. The English programme, Creative Partnerships, is the largest of these, but there are significant initiatives in many other parts of the world including France, Norway, Canada and the USA. This book not only draws on this body of expertise but also consolidates it, making it the first methodological text exploring creativity.

Creative teaching and learning is often used as a site for research and action research, and this volume is intended to act as a text book for this range of courses and initiatives. The book will be a key text for research in creative teaching and learning and is specifically directed at ITE, CPD, Masters and doctoral students.

Table of Contents

@contents: Selected Contents: Part 1: Understanding creativity and research into creativity 1. Understanding the field of creativity research 2. Interview conducted by editors with Maurice Galton (UK) about issues in researching in classrooms and schools Part 2: Methodological approaches to researching creativity 3. Ethnography – Geoff Troman and Bob Jeffrey, (UK) Editors of the T and F journal Ethnography and Education 4. Action research reflection dialogue - Morwenna Griffiths/Tony Cotton (UK) 5. Practitioner research - John Churchley (Canada) 6. Working with practitioners - Graham Jeffrey (UK) 7. Case study – Pat Thomson, Ken Jones and Christine Hall 8. Interview with Kathleen Gallagher (Canada) 9. Visual – Sara Bragg (UK) 10. Lissa Soep (USA) 11. Emily Pringle (UK) 12. Caroline Sharp (UK), researcher at NFER 13. Interview – USA: Elliot Eisner or Maxine Greene Part 3: Issues in researching creativity 14. David Parker, research director of Creative Partnerships 15. Interview with John Harland

About the Author(s)

Dr Pat Thomson is Professor of Education at The University of Nottingham. An ex headteacher of disadvantaged schools in South Australia, she has a particular interest in how schools can be changed to be more inclusive and enjoyable. She was commissioned by Creative Partnerships to produce a literature review on whole school change (available on the CP website) and is directing the largest CP national research project on how schools have taken up the offer made by CP (www.creativeschoolchange.org.uk). Her most recent publications include, with Barbara Kamler, Helping Doctoral Students Write: pedagogies for supervision (Routledge 2006) and an edited collection, Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People (Routledge 2008). School Leadership – heads on the block? will be published by Routledge in February 2009, and Changing Schools Through Systematic Inquiry: why and how school leaders do research with Jill Blackmore is due at end February, 2009. A two volume Routledge edited collection on doctoral education, with Melanie Walker, is due September 2009.


Dr. Julian Sefton-Green is an independent consultant and researcher working in Education and the Cultural and Creative Industries. He is a special Professor of Education at The University of Nottingham, UK, and an Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of South Australia, where he is developing a city-wide initiative to develop new kinds of spaces for learning. He is also working with the University of Oslo supporting research exploring learning across formal and informal domains. He has been the Head of Media Arts and Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media College - a centre for informal training and education - where he directed a range of digital media activities for young people and co-ordinated training for media artists and teachers. He worked as Media Studies teacher in an inner city comprehensive and in higher education teaching un