Creativity and Literacy
 Creative
approaches to teaching and learning are strongly promoted in
recent government education policies such as Excellence and
Enjoyment (DfES), Creativity Find It, Promote
It! (QCA)
and Expecting the Unexpected (Ofsted). But how do
teachers carry out these initiatives in practice? What are the
implications for children’s learning and teacher professional
development?
CLPE has been supporting and
researching creativity in the classroom. Funded by Creative
Partnerships London South and CfBT Brixton-North Lambeth, we
have worked with teachers and children as they explore creative
approaches to literacy and the curriculum through creative arts
projects.
Animating Literacy: inspiring children’s learning
through teacher and artist partnerships
(eds Ellis & Safford, 2005) is our latest publication, the
result of a year-long teacher action research project supported
by CLPE. Teachers and children from the Nursery to Year 6 worked
with visual artists, dancers, drama specialists, storytellers
and filmmakers. The book collects their observations and
reflections on how creative partnerships positively influence
language and literacy learning. Children’s voices and writing
are heard loud and clear, and a letter from a parent testifies
to the positive impact of creative projects on learning:
For my son, his
attitude towards literacy has changed from a negative one to a
positive one. He came home and related tales of his literacy
classes with an enthusiasm that I’d never witnessed before. It
really turned things around for him.
The Imagined World: children’s language and
literacy learning in creative arts work
(Safford & Barrs, forthcoming) is a closer, more analytical look
at ten primary and nursery school creative partnerships. This
research report begins with a critical review of recent
initiatives to promote creativity in education. It goes on to
analyse the ways in which teachers and arts partners work
together effectively. The report shows how stories and
literature provide powerful and memorable pathways to work in
the creative arts, and we analyse a range of multimodal texts
arising from children’s work in creative projects. Children’s
talk in creative projects is more reflective and wide ranging
than in other curriculum contexts: their talk is practical and
speculative, social and companionable, imaginary and reflective.
We observe how children use these experiences to look inward to
imaginary worlds in drawing, painting, dance, drama and writing,
and outward to real worlds of creative professional and artistic
practice.
Click
here for full
research report
Many routes to meaning: children's language and literacy
learning in creative arts work
Click
here for The
Imagined World - Kimberly Safford's talk to the conference
on 20 July 2005 at CLPE.
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