Susan Davis

Building creative futures from the powerful stories and voice of First Nations peoples

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Australia Day this year was marked by thousands of people marching against holding our national celebration on 26th January. It is a day that represents the start of invasion, pain and dispossession for First Nations peoples. The pain was compounded this year by the refusal of the Australian Government to embrace the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and its call for the establishment of a ‘First Nations Voice’ in the Australian Constitution.

So I believe it is important to share the stories of great creative work that celebrates partnerships with First Nations peoples. First Nation knowledge and creativity could be playing a vital role in helping educate our children and can help us achieve the productive futures we want, where innovation and creativity are basic to growing our national economy.

There are important stories to be told about how we can realise creative futures, where creative, technical and business skills combine, which can draw upon the most ancient of traditions of our First Nation peoples. These include approaches that value kinship and connections, and artforms that combine ancient stories and knowing with contemporary creative technologies and performance art.

First Nation remarkable heritage can be part of our innovation and creativity agenda

Whether it be examples of Aboriginal dances adapted and created to tell the stories of first sightings of ships or white man, to a breakthrough musical theatre production like Bran Nue Dae that disrupted popular stereotypes of Indigenous peoples to recent new works such as ‘My name is Jimi’ featuring Torres Strait Islander stories from Jimi Bani, and Nakkiah Lui’s ‘Black is the new white’, First Nation theatre and performances serve as performative acts of protest and agency. Such actions and work demonstrate that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have always had to devise, adapt, create and remake to achieve equal rights and recognition, and arts and creative forms have been important vehicles for this.

Recently at our national capital our Arts Education, Practice and Research group along with the AARE community of educational researchers acknowledged this remarkable heritage. It was especially pertinent with 2017 being the 50-year anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, 25 years since the Mabo decision and the 20-year anniversary of the ‘Bringing them Home’ Report.

We heard from Traditional Owners such as Dr Matilda House and from Indigenous artists such as Dennis Golding and were inspired by First Nation voices, stories, resilience and creativity. Matilda House believes that “you must have stories of your country. If you don’t, you don’t belong, no matter where you come from’.

These stories, these histories and contemporary arts practices should be more appropriately recognised within various national innovation and creativity agendas. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contributions are rarely considered within the innovation agenda, apart from deficit discourse about Indigenous performance and outcomes. However, Indigenous creativity, endemic to traditional cultural practices, is also an inspiration to contemporary arts and innovation practice. As Noonuccal Nuugi director, writer Wesley Enoch said:

‘The facility for change is also built into Indigenous traditional meaning-making structures. A dance from Bathurst Island depicting the gunning turrets stationed on the islands during WWII shows interpretive traditional enacting as a more modern experience, or the creation of explanatory myth-like structured stories for the coming of alcohol or money or AIDS or the Nissan four-wheel drive bespeaks a flexibility to accept and explain environmental changes through a facility of ‘New Dreaming.’

Our research project

I am currently engaged in a new research project that reminds me of the power of story and voice for helping provide insight into the human experience, but also for enabling us to realise new visions and ‘New Dreamings’.

Working in partnership with JUTE Theatre in Cairns, our research with the ‘Dare to Dream’ project will seek to investigate the short and longer-term impacts of a participatory program whereby new theatre works are being created that tell Indigenous stories, that are also generated in collaboration with local Indigenous leaders and feature Indigenous artists as key creatives on the projects. Each year as well as the performance of the work in schools, a one week workshop program is conducted within 10 schools in far-North Queensland. During the week young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people (from grades 6-10) participate in drama and storytelling workshops and at the end of the week they are invited to share what they have created with the community. The theatre and workshop experience provides direct contact for the young Indigenous people to positive professional role models and positive stories about a range of possible futures.

The first work of the series was ‘Proppa Solid’ by Steven Oliver (of ABC Black Comedy fame). The play begins with a great creative premise: in 2044 Australia has its first Aboriginal president of the republic. He has moved the centre of power (the Black House) to Brisbane and unlike his wife, the President Paul Toppy has little knowledge and connection to his country or people. Throughout the course of the play he comes to understand who he is, where he comes from and the importance of his kinship with family and country.

This week a creative development process is being hosted in Cairns which profiles the life of Henrietta Marrie, a Traditional Owner whose great-grandfather was known as ‘King Ye-i-nie’ of the Yidinji. Henrietta has been a tireless advocate for Aboriginal culture and heritage. This includes Henrietta’s work as the first Aboriginal Australian to work for the United Nations and draws attention to Australia’s obligations to its Indigenous communities under various UN Articles of the Convention of Biological Diversity.

The 2018 work being developed for the ‘Dare to Dream’ project is known as ‘Bukal’, named for Henrietta and also the black lawyer vine which grows in the rainforest and is used for weaving and other purposes. The goal for this new show is that it will inspire and educate young people, particularly young Indigenous women.

 

Nurturing an innovative and creative future through drama, theatre and arts education

This type of project and the related research is important for a number of reasons. It works in the short term to help Indigenous students feel valued and to see their cultures and stories represented on stage, but it also can have significant longer term benefits. For example, recent work from ANU reported on the Australian Council site reports:

‘One in ten First Nations people in remote Australia earn income from arts, “remote creative arts participation rates declined between 2008 and 2014-15 driven by declines in remote NT and Queensland – a concerning trend given the importance of First Nations arts to cultural and economic sustainability, and community wellbeing’.

Drama and theatre are often not regarded as particularly innovative art forms or crucial for realising ‘New Dreamings’ within digital worlds. However dramatic learning affirms the fact we still inhabit human bodies, which enable us to take action within the world. Through drama and performance players can learn. They are using dramatic forms of storytelling, but they are also bearing witness, inventing and affirming new voices and identities, and discovering new career pathways and life roles.

Through theatre we have seen the emergence of a strong body of work by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and writers. They have documented their experiences, perceptions and imaginings through embracing, adapting and innovating upon western theatre forms of performance and scriptwriting.

From the Kevin Gilbert in 1971 with the ‘Cherry Pickers’, Bob Maza, Robert Merritt’s ‘Cake Man’, Eva Johnson’s ‘Murras’, Jack Davis’ ‘The Dreamers’, to Enoch and Mailman’s ‘Seven Stages of Grieving”, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander playwrights have provided us with insights into what has often been hidden and not spoken about in the lives of Indigenous peoples.Women’s experiences have been shared through personal histories revealed in works by Lingali Lawford, Leah Purcell, Sally Morgan, and Jane Harrison. Different insights on major historical events have also been documented, including through works such as ‘Black Diggers’ which highlighted the experiences of Indigenous soldiers during WWI. These play texts contain great sources of insight that can be brought into any classroom, not only theatre or drama classes.

The contribution of the drama, theatre and arts education for cultivating the skills of communication and expression, of experimentation and innovation, reflection and creativity required for productive futures seems to be undervalued by the government bodies, even though in this past year they claimed to value the importance of creativity and innovation for our future national prosperity (see the 2017 House of Representatives Federal Parliamentary inquiry).

However projects such as the ‘Dare to Dream’ project are demonstrating that creative work and processes are able to generate innovative work and life options for young people and arts professionals. As Mark Sheppard, ‘Proppa Solid’ actor said in 2017:

‘I think what enables them to have that breakthrough is a different way of learning. There is no right or wrong, it’s actually about participating. … it can be empowering and give a different perspective about what is out there in a wider world… not only in being a performer, but that the tools of theatre and creating and creativity can bring to everyday life tools of empowerment, of feeling good about yourself, and hopefully we’re able to make an impact that way.’

So much more to be done

While it is early days for the program and research, so far students and teachers have all noted the positive outcomes of the program with reports of high levels of student engagement, increased levels of confidence and the young people having expanded notions of opportunities and life pathways. The actor/facilitators have spoken of how for many of the students, the experience has opened up their sense of what might be possible (beyond sport, teaching, nursing or in some communities the military). Plans for future work will also focus on ways to capitalise on the possible connections across the school and wider communities where the shows tour, and to firm up the strategies for building and extending learning through the kinship and connection networks.

It is time to recognise that creativity and innovation relies on people and very human forms of creativity and expression, it is also time to more fully recognise the contributions, strengths, creativity and innovations of our First Nations peoples, and that their ingenuity, resilience and creative endeavours are quite extraordinary and should be more explicitly celebrated in ways that are respectful and appropriate.

 

Susan Davis is Deputy Dean Research for the School of Education & the Arts at CQ University, Australia. Her research has focused on drama, arts-education, engagement and digital technologies. She is one of the Co-Convenors of the Arts Education Research SIG of AARE and a Board member for Drama Australia and the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Sue was previously a drama teacher and performing arts Head of Department and has created and managed many arts-based projects in collaboration with various education, arts industry and community groups. Susan was one of the convenors of a Creative Education Summit held at ACMI in 2016, with summit outcomes contributing to an Arts Education, Practice and Research group submission to the “The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into innovation and creativity: workforce for the new economy”. She was also invited to present further evidence at a roundtable for the inquiry. 

 

 

Photo by Grant Sparkes-Carroll

Arts-based approaches to teaching literacy: stop all the testing and do this

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Millions of dollars have been spent on targeted programs to improve literacy and numeracy learning outcomes around Australia. However this year’s NAPLAN data shows stagnation in terms of data improvement, with a downward shift in performance levels for writing.

We don’t believe this lack of movement in data is matched by a lack of impact in the classroom. On the contrary, we believe the current focus on formal, regulated programs in reading and writing, including in early childhood education, is having an enormous negative impact. As we see it, there has been a narrowing of focus and a preoccupation with test results. The unfortunate flow on effect is increased anxiety and behavioural issues as children are labeled as ‘difficult’ or ‘slow learners’ and disenfranchised from their learning. There are huge increases in exclusions of children from the earliest ages. According to media reports more than 1,000 prep year students in Queensland were suspended for bad behaviour last year.

Adding to narrowing of what happens in the classroom is the current obsession with certain types of ‘evidence-based’ practice such as targeted programs in direct instruction, phonics, and atomised, decontextualized approaches to teaching writing as lists of grammatical features and structure. Schools are spending thousands of dollars on literacy and writing programs as well as systems to measure and monitor children weekly, even daily. However, these programs rarely translate to children becoming more confident communicators and ‘meaning makers’ who feel in control of the forms and means of their expression.

We are not claiming there are no literacy and writing programs out there making a difference. There would be many. But we are blogging to tell you about some we call arts-based approaches.

What is an arts-based approach?

Within education, the arts incorporate the five areas of Dance, Drama, Media, Music and Visual Arts. Each have specific processes, skill bases and disciplines that they draw on. These different arts areas have some similar elements and approaches, including knowing through doing and creating, with children learning to express ideas and emotions through voice, movement, actions and different expressive forms. The arts can be taught as discrete single discipline areas, or in combination with other learning areas or arts areas. So we can talk about arts learning but also ‘learning through the arts’. In primary schools, teachers may use arts processes and strategies to teach content in other learning areas and this often helps create more engaged and experiential learning.

Examples of arts-based approaches we have implemented include using drama to support learning in English, History, Geography and Science. In one example Sue Davis created a program where year 5 students were enrolled as ‘spacetroopers’ who have to research various planets to locate one where water might be found. They then had to prepare for a space trip to that chosen planet. Throughout the unit children were involved in writing in a diverse range of forms including written reports, letters and diary entries. At the end of drama sessions when children had ‘experienced’ the content and learning, they were sometimes running to their desks to pull out their books to write.

Positive impacts of working with an arts-based approach

There is a range of research that consistently demonstrates the positive impact of arts-based approaches for improved academic and social outcomes for students in schools. The international research includes Critical Links, an important compendium of findings from numerous studies on student academic and social learning through the arts. There are consistent positive associations between dramatic enactment with reading comprehension, oral story understanding and written story understanding.

More recent research from the US includes meta-analysis work that found Drama and arts-based learning programs can have a significant impact on improving language arts and academic learning programs. Another study with students who had learning difficulties indicated the use of drama strategies improved student motivation, narrative cohesion and language acquisition. A growing body of Australian research supports the international work ranging from the impact of arts programs, including research for the Songroom through to classroom based work with a focus on literacy development in the early years. This and other work in secondary schools by University of Sydney researchers shows the impact of arts-based programs can be substantial.

Sydney Theatre Company’s work with an arts-based approach in Australian schools

An example of an arts-based approach with positive results for student literacy and writing is the Sydney Theatre Company’s School Drama™ project. This program was pioneered by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, who were Co-artistic Directors of the Sydney Theatre Company at the time, with Professor Robyn Ewing from the University of Sydney. School Drama™ teams teaching artists (with performance and/or applied theatre background with an acting background) with a classroom teacher. They work together with primary school classes to use drama strategies and children’s literature to make English and literacy learning come alive.

A key feature of the program is to help build the participating primary school teacher’s capacity to use arts-based strategies. Each school and teacher begins the program with a particular literacy area they want to improve and they engage in careful benchmarking of pre and post literacy data.

John Saunders, Education Manager at Sydney Theatre Company, was an experienced secondary drama teacher when he then took on managing the School Drama program. He believes something very special happens when children are having so much fun with drama they forget they are learning. As they are busy enjoying themselves they are increasing their ability to visualise, comprehend and write. He tells a story about how, after working with the children’s book about the Stolen Generation called The Burnt Stick by Anthony Hill, children said they felt like they didn’t do any writing at all because they had had been ‘learning in our way, a fun way’. In fact they had been writing every lesson, but it hadn’t felt like ‘work’. Such programs are successful across whatever area of literacy is in focus, however children who are behind usually show the biggest improvement.

In his research John found that while the program leads to improvements in academic areas including literacy it also impacts on so-called ‘soft skills’ or ‘non-academic’ areas such as empathy building, confidence, motivation and engagement. Research by independent evaluator Robyn Gibson supports these findings.

When learning approaches such as these focus on experience and active learning, children become confident in using language and literacies within real and imagined contexts. Data on impact is growing and is providing insight into more innovative, transferrable approaches to teaching literacy.

Unfortunately politicians and policy makers rarely recognise our projects, including professional learning models we have piloted and researched, or any other arts-based approach. Arts-based programs are simply not acknowledged as vehicles for improving valued academic outcomes.

We believe if governments invested just some of the millions they invest in improving NAPLAN scores into arts-based programs, such as School Drama and related professional learning, the results would be astounding.

 

John Nicholas Saunders is a former secondary school teacher and the current Education Manager at Sydney Theatre Company.  He holds a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Drama), Bachelor of Education (Secondary), Masters of Research and is currently studying for a PhD.  John’s classroom work together with his research has focused on Drama as pedagogy and its benefits for student literacy, engagement, motivation and empathy.  John has extensive experience in Arts Education and has held positions as a senior curriculum writer, head of department; Board member of Playlab Press, President of Drama NSW and Drama QLD.  He currently holds positions as: President, Drama Australia; Honorary Associate, The University of Sydney; Chair, Australian Major Performing Arts Group (AMPAG) Education Network; and Drama representative, National Advocates for Arts Education.  In 2014 he was awarded the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (CHASS)  prize for future leader  in the field and in 2016 he published ‘The School Drama Book: Drama, Literature & Literacy In The Creative Classroom’ with is colleague, Professor Robyn Ewing. 

 

Susan Davis is Deputy Dean Research for the School of Education & the Arts at CQ University, Australia. Her research has focused on drama, arts-education, engagement and  digital technologies. She is one of the Co-Convenors of the Arts Education Research SIG of AARE and a Board member for Drama Australia and the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Sue was previously a drama teacher and performing arts Head of Department and has created and managed many arts-based projects in collaboration with various education, arts industry and community groups. Susan was one of the convenors of a Creative Education Summit held at ACMI in 2016, with summit outcomes contributing to an Arts Education, Practice and Research group submission to the “The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into innovation and creativity: workforce for the new economy”. She was also invited to present further evidence at a roundtable for the inquiry. 

(Featured photo by Grant Sparkes-Carroll)

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Harry Potter’s world: keeping spaces for magic making in our schools

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If you are a Harry Potter fan you probably celebrated last month, the twentieth anniversary of the first Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Millions of us did, all around the world, and for me it gave rise to reflecting upon the economic and imaginative impact possible through creative works. I also wondered about how such creative writing is supported through our curriculum programs as my son set out to write yet another ‘analysis of aesthetic elements and conventions’ essay on a novel for year 12 English. In 18 months of assessment in English he has not once been asked to complete a piece of creative writing.

The recent report from the Parliamentary Inquiry into Innovation and Creativity yet again reinforced the privileging of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) subjects as the key to prosperous economic futures. However while rare, it is clear that creative ‘inventions’ such as the Harry Potter series can have enormous economic impacts as well as social, creative and cultural.

The Harry Potter series is well and truly the biggest selling literary series of all time having sold over 500 millions copies. It is the second most popular film series as well (after The Marvel Cinematic Universe films). However this is a series that has also become part of the folk culture of a generation.

J.K Rowling didn’t just create a publishing phenomenon she created a cultural phenomenon. New readers then and now continue to connect with the familiarity of the characters, their trials and dilemmas but are also inspired by the fantasy and magic of the Harry Potter story world.

Powerful creative worlds where children are powerful

The creativity of the Harry Potter series has been both celebrated but also critiqued. Following in the league of such imaginative world creators as Tolkien with ‘Lord of the Rings’, George Lucas with ‘Star Wars’, Rowling drew upon ancient mythologies, character types and creatures with her creation. This highlights a key aspect of creative work and issues of using ‘originality’ as the mark of true creativity. We can see that in the Harry Potter books there is much that has been borrowed. There are familiar figures of warlocks, wizards and goblins but then there are the original creations. There are dementors – dark creatures that absorb the happiness of the creatures around them and the mysteries of the horcrux, hidden objects which contain the fragment of a split soul.

The series has borrowed, selected and combined many of the story tropes identified by those who’ve analysed the mythology of the eons, from Propp’s morphology of the folktale to Joseph Campbell analysis of the hero’s journey and Robert McKee’s principles of story in film. It’s a tale of good versus evil, the extraordinary existing within the ordinary, of jealousies, love and loss, of mythic searches and hard won triumphs.

Rowling’s gift was to combine all of this with her own inventiveness and creations to envision a new world of the imagination. This occurred at a time when young people were looking not for self identification in teen fiction that was just a reflection of their every day lives, but were ready for a new form of escape into the world of fantasy and magic. This is a world where a boy is bullied and confined to a bedroom under the stairs, but who is then able to defeat  ‘Voldemort, the Lord of darkness’. The resonances for children and young people are not so hard to understand. This is a world where children are powerful, can take life and death risks and become masters of not only their own destiny but their entire universe.

Creative inventions such as Muggles and Quidditch are now part of our lexicon

What is always so amazing with these kinds of inventions is that they begin as works of the imagination, but become actual touchstones and reference points for people’s real life worlds and experiences. Muggles as a word has passed into the common lexicon, there are actual sporting teams that now play a game called ‘Quidditch’ and characters from the series have inspired scientific names of organisms, including the the crab Harryplax severus.

But beyond that the events, creatures, and characters become shortcuts, similes and metaphors in people’s lives. Harry Potter references can be the means to describe and give relevance and meaning, the mixed identity and sense of not belonging of the half-blood child, the threat of a Voldemort, the wisdom of a Dumbledore.

The phenomenon of the participatory communities

What is also significant about the Harry Potter series is its emergence and development during the age of the Internet and the rise of participatory cultures. In his work Henry Jenkins has described the phenomenon of the participatory communities that coalesce around certain book and movie series, such as Harry Potter and Star Wars. Creative agency and self-expression is realised by many within these communities as they draw on aspects of the invented narratives, characters and storylines but elaborate upon such to extend, write and rewrite their own. Reporting on the rise of a fan fiction community of children and young people, Jenkins shows how Rowling’s work enabled many entry points for creative imaginings, from imagining themselves as key characters such as Harry or Hermione to minor figures, distant relations or agents.

Fan fiction as an entry point for creativity

The sparks for new creations and creativity can begin through such character identification and involvement in creative fan fiction communities and narrative worlds. These can provide the pivots and imaginative and conceptual tools to help initiate children and young people’ creativity, using borrowed tales to imitate, but then extend upon to create new work.

Creativity in schools

That brings me back to thinking about how the opportunities for new and inventive creative writing might currently be cultivated in our schools, and the concern I have for my son (and thousands of other young people).

Academics such as Sawyer, and Frawley have researched the teaching of English in schools in Australia and have identified the difficulties many teachers now face in developing student creative writing and creativity. The rise of increasingly high-stakes assessment environments and ‘atomised’ approaches to teaching textual features, grammatical conventions, devices, structures and genres often leads to highly prescriptive writing curricula.

Concerns about such were highlighted to me when I interviewed students as part of my doctoral studies and asked them about the subjects where they could be creative in schools. I was somewhat surprised when many students said they did more creative work, and creative writing as well, in Drama rather than English. They also bemoaned the fact that English (for them) was always about analysing and deconstructing. I acknowledge this was by no means a broad sample and that, as Gannon argues, many schools and teachers continue to negotiate the mandates to engage in exemplary pedagogy to support student practice.

We need to ensure that the spaces for creative writing and creative learning are not squeezed out of formal education and that the inspiration of Harry Potter and friends can continue to provide the means for young (and not so young people) to become immersed in real/non-real, familiar/strange and magical worlds that can become the gateway to new forms of creating understanding, being and becoming.

 

Susan Davis is Deputy Dean Research for the School of Education & the Arts at CQ University, Australia. Her research has focused on drama, arts-education, engagement and  digital technologies. She is one of the Co-Convenors of the Arts Education Research SIG of AARE and a Board member for Drama Australia and the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Sue was previously a drama teacher and performing arts Head of Department and has created and managed many arts-based projects in collaboration with various education, arts industry and community groups. Susan was one of the convenors of a Creative Education Summit held at ACMI in 2016, with summit outcomes contributing to an Arts Education, Practice and Research group submission to the “The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into innovation and creativity: workforce for the new economy”. She was also invited to present further evidence at a roundtable for the inquiry. 

 

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Creativity in Australian schools suppressed by onerous testing regime and crushing teacher restrictions

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Once upon a time early childhood teachers used to learn singing and playing the piano, primary school teachers could study electives (and even majors) in areas such as drama and art, and universities could add new courses (such as ones in teacher as entrepreneur or global citizenship) through putting in a course variation form to a university committee.

Teaching was seen by many as a truly creative profession.

Not anymore. You would be hard pressed to find examples of any of the above anymore.

As a teacher educator this is distressing to me, not because I am longing for some ‘golden age’ past but because I am deeply worried about our future.

If we want creative futures, we need creative teachers, and we need systems that enable them to thrive and not be crushed by mountains of paper work and regulation.

Teacher education is a field which is absent from innovation discourses. However teachers are the ones working with children and young adults and helping to shape their perspectives and capacities. So I argue it is imperative that creativity and innovation be taught and supported as part of teacher preparation. This includes both creative teaching, but also teaching for creativity and cultivating critical and creative thinking for our students.

However teacher education, like schooling itself has been taken over by regulation and standardization requirements and instrumentalities, much of this through the rhetoric of raising teaching standards.

Teacher education standards have become a crushing set of regulations

 The increased levels of regulation and requirements for teacher education programs means there has been a reduction in the scope for approaches that cultivate creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation for pre-service teachers. Opportunities for elective studies or minors in areas such as the arts have also been reduced, with more mandated units having to be included in generalist teacher education programs, and new specialisations for primary teachers being targeted in Math/numeracy and Science.

Furthermore, there is no mention of creativity and innovation in our teaching standards, not teaching for it, or teachers themselves demonstrating it.

Teacher education standards were developed to articulate the key features of the profession. Their development and first phase of implementation proved useful for providing a common language for talking about teaching and to student teachers about what the profession entailed and how to get there.

However their initial conceptualization has now been turned into sets of regulations and checklists that are in danger of killing off rather than nurturing creativity and innovation.

While in the current version of national standards developed by AITLS (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) used in Australia there are 7 professional standards, underneath that are 37 focus areas and teacher education students must demonstrate evidence collected across all of these.

To be able to offer teacher education courses, teacher education providers must likewise provide evidence across a set of similarly numbered program standards.

In fact the instructions of what needs to be included takes up 42 pages in a guidelines document, which also emphasises that once a program is accredited no changes can be made to that progam. This type of approach encourages a compliance and tick box mentality.

It also means enormous energies and person power are devoted towards generating mountains of paperwork and which other poor reviewers must then wade their way through. While a so-called ‘light touch’ regulatory model was to be used for the re-accreditation of programs, one university education faculty recently reported that their accreditation submission amounted to over 1000 pages of documentation.

While consistency and regulation are important it does tend to stifle the ability for educators to respond to changes in industry and the economy. Systems that are being built around certification and compliance make it impossible to be nimble and flexible and reduces the capacity of course designers and teachers to be creative and responsive.

Where is creativity, improvisation, flexibility, risk-taking, productive failure in such models and approaches?

Of further concern to me are some of the comments emerging from a senior member of the AITSL staff, who when asked at a forum about how she saw creativity and educating for the future being promoted through the professional standards, the audience was somewhat surprised to hear her say she did not believe in a futures oriented curriculum, that she has no problem with the existing curriculum but with how it is taught.

Furthermore when discussing projects on their horizon for assisting teachers, mention was made of more psychometrically calibrated assessment instruments developed to use across the curriculum. Audible gasps of horror could not be contained from teacher educators around the room. AITSL staff have since assured me that the intention is to create banks of formative assessment tools and the intention is that that teachers will find them helpful. This proves the point that terminology and language really matter, and psychometrically calibrated assessment instruments does not say formative assessment to most teachers.

I can understand that much of what AITSL may be tasked to do is driven by political agendas (with AITSL being entirely owned by the Australian government with the federal Education Minister its only member) but what teachers want is not more psychometrically calibrated assessments. What they want is to be trusted to make professional judgements and design learning and assessment strategies that support their students. As I see it, our current interest in certain types of ‘evidence’ is becoming an obsession, at great cost to the students we teach.

If we believe our future requires creative and critical thinkers, we need to cultivate the conditions where creativity can be nurtured by teachers and teacher educators. We need to make sure this is not drowned in regulation, distrust of teachers and lack of belief in their capacity to be professional as well as creative.

 

Susan Davis is Deputy Dean Research for the School of Education & the Arts at CQ University, Australia. Her research has focused on drama, arts-education, engagement and  digital technologies. She is one of the Co-Convenors of the Arts Education Research SIG of AARE and a Board member for Drama Australia and the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Sue was previously a drama teacher and performing arts Head of Department and has created and managed many arts-based projects in collaboration with various education, arts industry and community groups. Susan was one of the convenors of a Creative Education Summit held at ACMI in 2016, with summit outcomes contributing to an Arts Education, Practice and Research group submission to the “The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into innovation and creativity: workforce for the new economy”. She was also invited to present further evidence at a roundtable for the inquiry. 

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Arts education is vital to help foster creativity and innovation

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I have a dream that this nation will achieve its full creative and economic potential and that Arts education will rightfully be seen as central to making this happen. It worries me that current thinking and policymaking around national innovation concentrates on increasing participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects while the teaching of the Arts (dance, drama, music, media arts and visual arts,) is rarely even on the innovation agenda.

It is not that I begrudge the attention STEM is getting, it is just that I believe if we want to be a truly innovative and creative nation we need to put the Arts, very firmly, back in the mix. We should be talking about STEAM in schools and universities with the Arts very much in the centre of it all.

There exists a popular narrative, used to drive the STEM education agenda in Australia (and elsewhere), that says there are significantly declining enrolments in the Sciences and other STEM disciplines. However I question this narrative as justification for major initiatives. I will come back to that later.

First up what are we talking about, when we talk about innovation and creativity?

Innovation and creativity

Creativity and innovation involves putting things together in new ways, it involves risk-taking, experimenting and refining, valuing the role of productive failure, it involves making and doing, and is often collaborative and co-creative. While creativity is about the capacity to putting things together in new, novel and different ways, innovation is often seen as putting them to work and out into the world so that they meet a need, want or interest.

However these capacities don’t get switched on when people hit the world of work, they need to be cultivated across the education lifespan in all subjects in as many ways as possible.

Unfortunately the nurturing of creativity and innovation often seems to be at odds with the direction of many current initiatives in education. I have concerns about mandated curriculum and standards and everyone doing the same thing, the same tests, meeting the same benchmarks. I am particularly concerned about certain subjects or areas of learning being valued as more essential or more important than others.

Why the Arts subjects are important when it comes to innovation and creativity

The focus on STEM, without similar focus being turned to the Arts and Humanities does not appear to be justified by recent research about the impact of technologies on our lives. It is hard to deny that all aspects of life and the world of work are undergoing rapid transformations, many brought about by developments in technologies across nearly all fields of endeavour. Recent research from Oxford University notes however, that while robots will assume the role of many people in many sectors, growth continues in those that rely on creative capacity and social interactions, people, services and experiences. They are not optional areas of focus for education, but essential for opening up future study and work opportunities.

The importance of valuing other areas of learning and related industry sectors is also evident when examining economic development within various industry sectors. Industry growth and projection reports identify that education itself is one of Australia’s major export industries. Other projected growth areas identified by the Reserve Bank include household and business services, food, arts and recreation.

A Deloitte report also identifies industry sectors such as agribusiness, tourism, international education and wealth management as ones that are growth sectors for the Australian economy.

To do well in these sectors may require knowledge and skills in some or all of the STEM areas, but also relies on understanding people, design, experience and communications: the Arts subjects.

Is there really a crisis in the uptake of STEM subjects?

A review of senior secondary enrolments in several states over the past 20 years reveals that in most cases all students have to/or tend to study an English and a Math subject. When it comes to the sciences, Biology is the top or near top elective subject and while there is some drop in the percentage of Physics and Chemistry enrolments it is not perhaps as extreme as we have been lead to believe, and in fact in recent times in Queensland, for example, there has been an increase in the numbers for Chemistry enrolments.

Enrolments in sciences have not been dropping more substantially than other subjects over the last 20 years using Queensland data as an example. While percentages of total year 12 enrolments might be 5-10% lower, this has to be considered in the context of increased subject choices including vocational training courses. It is clear that the pattern of enrolment of the Arts and Humanities also shows similar decreases in percentages too. When it comes to the most dramatic drop in enrolments over the past 20 years it is actually Accounting (20% to 7%) and Economics (19% to 5%) that have seen the most dramatic declines.

Similar trends can be identified in New South Wales and Victorian data, though the strength of Chemistry seen in Queensland is not necessarily reflected in other state data.

While there is no doubt that there are still issues with enrolments in STEM by different target groups, including girls and students from low SES backgrounds, regional areas and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, these are not new issues. However a focus on increased enrolments in STEM per se is not likely to change that. Other strategies that focus more on pedagogy, combining STEM and arts based approaches are more likely to have impact (and have been the basis for strategies in places such as Korea).

So what should we be doing?

It is important that capacity building in creativity and innovation be supported across the years of formal education (including early childhood, primary and secondary education) and tertiary study, including teacher education. This requires a shift beyond STEM and the ongoing focus on ‘basic skills’ in major educational drives, and to look at the cultivation of ideas and passions, calculated risk taking, how to work through failure, problem-finding and problem-solving and resolution of ideas into products and forms.

This requires an approach that recognizes that creativity and innovation can be cultivated across diverse learning and industry fields. If the current obsession with STEM is to continue, as I said previously, it should be converted to STEAM, with the Arts at its centre, at the very least, or perhaps ESTEAM to recognize the importance of Entrepreneurship as well.

Other key points

Here is my list of other key points and issues we need to tackle.

  • We need to see the arts, education and teacher education as being integral to a national innovation agenda
  • We should be specifically teaching teachers and children about innovation and creativity and to value the different knowledges and skills that can contribute to innovation
  • Include scope for more specialisations in primary education degrees, including in the arts and humanities
  • Recognise that there needs to be space for people to develop different interests, depth of knowledge and experience. Some of this can be supported through formal learning programs, but can also be supported through after school programs, partnerships and informal learning
  • Reduce the focus in educational agendas on NAPLAN and standardized test instruments and reports. We can’t mandate that everyone learns the same things in the same ways for 10 years of schooling and then expect them to do things ‘differently’. We need room for people to develop interests and expertise in diverse areas, so room for electives, special projects and enterprises.

If our governments recognize the importance of creativity and innovation for our future national prosperity (as the current parliamentary inquiry would indicate), attention must be paid to learning that promotes problem-solving and inventiveness, social innovation and entrepreneurship, and multiple forms of communication and expression. To do this effectively Australia needs to give just as much attention to the Arts as it is currently to the teaching of and participation in STEM. These areas are all fundamental to cultivating innovation for the future of our economy and our world.

 

Susan Davis is Deputy Dean Research for the School of Education & the Arts at CQ University, Australia. Her research has focused on drama, arts-education, engagement and  digital technologies. She is one of the Co-Convenors of the Arts Education Research SIG of AARE and a Board member for Drama Australia and the Sunshine Coast Creative Alliance. Sue was previously a drama teacher and performing arts Head of Department and has created and managed many arts-based projects in collaboration with various education, arts industry and community groups. Susan was one of the convenors of a Creative Education Summit held at ACMI in 2016, with summit outcomes contributing to an Arts Education, Practice and Research group submission to the “The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training Inquiry into innovation and creativity: workforce for the new economy”. She was also invited to present further evidence at a roundtable for the inquiry. 

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