On Thursday 11 February CRACL hosted a public seminar by Paul Collard, the Chief Executive of the education charity Creativity, Culture and Education. Paul is also a Special Professor in CRACL. Around sixty people – teachers, researchers, local artists, students – attended. Paul talked about the work of Creative Partnerships (2003-2011) and the ways in which CCE is now taking this work further in many other locations, including Wales, Scotland, Pakistan, Hungary, Austria, Norway and Germany.
Paul reported research undertaken in Hungary where three groups of students had very different responses to questions about how much they needed to be interested in something to learn it. The poorer the students, the more they said they only learnt when they were interested. The implications of this research present a challenge to teachers; we must think about how to make topics interesting for students, at the same time as getting them more accustomed to learning things that are not initially of interest, but may nevertheless be important.
Paul told the audience that CCE has developed a research informed heuristic for professional development activities with artists and teachers. The heuristic highlights the differences between ‘high and low functioning’ classrooms. High functioning classrooms are where teachers for example: offer challenging activities; have a flexible use of time; approach and manage the classroom as a workshop; and focus their pedagogy on building self-managing student practice.
We did record the lecture and this is an unedited version of it – note that it needs a quicktime plugin. The sound quality is pretty variable, but you can see the slides and video clips, and listen to Pauls’ two hour seminar.
Centre for Research in Arts, Creativity and Literacies 