I have recently completed a project with a class of 13 year old boys exploring how conceptual art practices can help young boys learn and raise the profile of art with the school as a thinking subject. This was a very rewarding project in many ways raising all sorts of questions about what is an acceptable work ethic in a school context when learning something very demanding and new and how to handle behaviour when opening up creative freedom. Difficult questions to answer in the current secondary school context.
With many years experience in business transformation and experience of working at the cutting edge of creativity in some primary schools, it is becoming clear that our secondary school structures are outmoded and out of sync with primary and workplace needs.
For our country to realise its dream of a creative economy approaches to transforming secondary schools need to be developed. A good starting point is to open up a dialogue to explore how our secondary schools can be changed to meet a creative agenda (rather than squeeze creativity into the wrong structure). Demos have recently published a report MAKING GOOD WORK which concludes what we know needs to be done. Making this happen in practice is very difficult for pupils, practitioners and teachers, if we can recognise that we have to start the difficult journey somewhere we need all the support we can get from head teachers of our secondary schools to allow for the time and patience for this to happen. It is too important not to do - but understandable given the current structures and pressures why it all too often doesn't.
Making good Work (Demos Report)
Making Good Work
The projects that worked particularly well, like
Mary Lou and the Ice Cream Pirates, were those in
which practitioners and teachers working with
young people were conscious to respect and
ensure the integrity of the young people’s
authorship: work should be a matter of negotiation.
This is particularly important because, for
young people to recognise the value of the
product in their own terms, realising its potential
Recommendations as a way of articulating meaning in wider social
and democratic contexts, the end product must
reflect their purpose and ends.
To reinforce this, the methods of the teacher
and the practitioner should also encourage the
young people to see their work in relation to the
creative learning model of knowing, doing,
showing and reflecting, and encourage them to
see the product as reflecting their purpose, and as
a means of making public the intentions that lie
behind the work. In this way, there is an
obligation on practitioners and teachers working
with young people to open the young people’s
work to critique beyond the curriculum. This can
lead to greater expectations on the part of the
young people, and also provide recognition in the
form of respect paid to their work.
Finally, and in line with the move to a Creative
Portfolio, means should be used to maintain the
biography of product and artefact after the
‘project’ has finished. One such could be a
portfolio or place to ‘hold’ work, first as a
memento and touchstone to the product,
providing the stimulus for subsequent
development and learning, and second as a record
that could be valuable to the young person in the
sense of being useful as a record of achievement.
