Training teachers for twenty-first century creative and critical thinking: Australian implications from an international study

Creativity in education is currently dominated by discourses pertaining to both a neo-liberalisation of arts education and a more widespread attention to the economic potential of diverse creativities. This study applies new thinking regarding creative educational advancement that is adaptive and critically reflexive to the tasks of reconciling the need for safe, ethical and empathetic learning environments and the production of adaptive and innovative twenty-first century workforces. This study of Australian secondary schools analyses perceptions, understandings and actions, and impediments to creativity in classrooms. This study asserts significant implications for the need to foster effective environmental and ecological approaches to engaging in creative practices in Australian secondary schools. It establishes a creativity index through which school leaders and teachers can routinely measure, develop and adjust their school environment’s, students’ and teachers’ creative skills and capacities, pedagogic practices and assessment of creativity across the ‘education lifespan’.     

Education for future-oriented citizenship: implications for the education of twenty-first century competencies

Globalization and the knowledge economy have opened up worldwide agendas for national development. Following this is the emphasis on the social dimension, otherwise known as social capital. Much of social capital includes “soft skills” and “twenty-first century skills”, which broadly cover critical, creative and inventive thinking; information, interactive and communication skills; civic literacy, global awareness and cross-cultural skills. Proactively, the Singapore government is preparing for Curriculum 2015, a new curriculum that would develop student attributes, embedded in the “confident person”, “self-directed learner”, “active contributor”, and “concerned citizen”. Significantly, a new curricular initiative, Character and Citizenship Education, emphasizes the integrative nature of citizenship and twenty-first century competencies and has been implemented in all schools in Singapore from 2011. This future-oriented approach to citizenship education emphasizes the significance of individual initiatives and the intellectual capital of citizens. This paper analyses features of this particular approach to citizenship education, and its strengths and significance, which may be viewed as an integrative “total curriculum approach” with a “whole-society” perspective. In addition, the challenges of teaching twenty-first century skills will also be highlighted. This departs from the conventional paradigm of socialization, but to help students develop attributes for a future society to come.     

Broadening the horizons of research on discovery-based learning

In reviewing the six articles within this Instructional Science special issue, we are reminded of Schoenfeld’s (Educ Res 45(2):105–111, 2016) review of American Educational Research Association president-authored papers for the centennial celebration of AERA. There, he succinctly unveiled the content focus of AERA research in the first half of the twentieth century: “there is content to be mastered; it is the schools’ job to help students master it” (p. 106). Yet, like Schoenfeld says, “A century later, we hear the echoes of this functionality in the calls for ‘21st-century skills,’” (p. 106), and the “skills” of the twentieth and twenty-first century would hardly know each other. Twentieth century skills, as represented in the accounts from past AERA presidents, were product-oriented, like accurate copying and precise handwriting. Twenty-first century skills are focused on creativity, ingenuity, critical thinking, and the like. In our primary research space, mathematics education, problem solving, sense making, and conceptual understanding dominates in the twenty-first century, whereas procedures dominated teaching and learning mathematics in the twentieth century.     

Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.     

Nurturing Creativity in Education

Across continents, creativity is a priority for education and is central to the discourse on 21^st century learning. In this article, we explore how a greater focus on ‘everyday creativity’ in schools changes the dynamics of teaching and learning. We look briefly at the main concepts in the literature on creativity in education. We then focus on examples from the Centre for Creative Education's creative partnerships, which bring together educators, learners and creative professionals. This is followed by a discussion on how teachers assess learners’ creative dispositions, as well as the quality of creative processes and products. We conclude with recommendations for school-level strategies and policy and research to support learner and teacher creativity.     

Carnival in the Curriculum

This article focuses on a carnival in the curriculum project designed to revitalise the arts in the experience of students in Higher Education preparing to become primary school teachers. It argues the relevance of a combined arts or trans‐disciplinary artform in the remit of a visual arts education journal and explores carnival as a complex, inclusive, multifaceted and multidimensional cultural practice with deep historical and social roots. It locates carnival within theory and the debate about the arts in schools in the UK from the early 1980s. Drawing on the analysis of interviews with students and teachers in carnival project schools, issues and themes such as student involvement, creativity, artists in schools, and cross‐curricular learning are explored, concluding that carnival in the curriculum provides an opportunity for agency within the regulated official curriculum.     

What do professional learning policies say about purposes of teacher education?

Enhancing teacher learning is acknowledged globally as a key route to improving student outcomes, thereby contributing to nation states’ economic competitiveness. This globally accepted policy “hypernarrative” is driving reform of teacher education policy internationally. This article seeks to analyse some key features of contemporary teacher professional learning policies in terms of the underpinning purposes of education, in an attempt to make more explicit the purposes and potential implications of particular policy choices. The analysis draws on literature related to the fundamental purposes of school education, highlighting three broad, but distinct categories of “purpose”: the socialisation function; the development of human capital; and “subjectification” which focuses on individual creativity. While principally conceptual in nature, the article draws on the Scottish policy context in exemplifying the analysis, concluding that there is a tendency towards socialisation and human capital functions, at the expense of subjectification purposes.     

Negotiating contrad(ICT)ions: teachers and students making multimedia in the secondary school

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the use of multimedia information and communication technologies (ICTs) in integrated arts projects in two secondary schools. The ways in which teachers and students make sense of the technologies in relation to the dominant discourses of education/technology policy and educational research are explored before considering the implications for curriculum and teacher development. The ICT in the word contrad(ICT)ions is emphasised to represent the ways in which teachers and students' use of multimedia exposes and makes visible problematic issues in relation to literacy, school subjects and pedagogy.     

Transcending the Nature of Refinement: The Policy Development on Liberal Arts Education in China

Abstract

Liberal arts education is based on a philosophy that uses an interdisciplinary curriculum to cultivate critical thinking, creativity, moral reasoning, analytical skills, and a sense of social responsibility. As China continues to invest in higher education, faculty, administrators and policy makers are aware that a narrow focus on professional and scientific training is insufficient to enable students to meet today’s global needs and challenges. Through qualitative and quantitative research and document analysis, this article examines Chinese policy development and transformation regarding higher education and liberal arts education in general, and the current state of liberal arts education in three universities in Shanghai in particular.     

The enactment of literacy curriculum policy by early childhood teachers in two Australian schools

Since the early 2000s, literacy education has become an area of intense focus in Australian education policy, positioned to have a role in Australia's pursuit of enhanced international competitiveness in the “global knowledge economy”. Policy called for improvements in literacy outcomes, monitored by mandated annual assessments, and policy statements recognised the need to establish solid literacy foundations in early childhood to facilitate learning, and desired improvements, in later years. This article is derived from a larger study that investigated the production and enactment of literacy curriculum policy by early childhood teachers in Australian schools. It focuses on the school level within the State of Western Australia, presenting findings derived from thematic and critical discourse analysis of participant interview and documentary data collected in two case‐study schools. Comparative analysis revealed that literacy curriculum policy processes in both case‐study schools were focused on achieving improved test results in mandated testing regimes. This was impacting upon literacy curriculum in the early childhood years of schooling, in Australia deemed to involve children up to 8 years of age, in many, possibly adverse, ways. These findings may offer insights in other contexts about literacy curriculum policy processes that are focused on enhancing competitive positioning.     

“Back to the Backlash?” Primary Practitioner Discourses of Resistance to Gender-inclusive Policies

In this article I discuss how observed discourses of resistance indicate the exclusion of the standpoint of primary school practitioners from feminist theorization, as well as the exclusion of feminist perspectives from primary school practice. I do so from a feminist position which sees the modernist policy framework of the gender-inclusive curriculum as still having transformative potential in the postmodern era, whilst also perceiving the need for much more specific analysis of the varied discourses of resistance. The data is selected from a wider longitudinal case study that investigated the conceptualization and enactment of a gender-inclusive curriculum policy in the state of Victoria in Australia since 1975. I focus this discussion on interviewed “exemplars” who observed primary practitioner resistance to gender inclusive curriculum policy. I conclude that this case study empirically demonstrates the failure of “backlash” in accounting for the significant specificities of primary practitioner discourses of resistance.     

The Rehabilitative Role of Arts Education in Prison: Accommodation or Enlightenment?

The prisoner constituency is one of the most excluded in society. Addressing recidivism requires amongst other considerations, an enabling of these individuals to fulfil rehabilitative intent. The article argues that this necessitates an educational discourse and methodology that is embedded in concepts of emancipation and empowerment, where creativity and heuristic learning enable personal transformation. The arts are one of the agents that can naturally encourage spontaneous and participatory learning, enabling a more liberating and self‐directed rehabilitative process. Notwithstanding, arts education in prison illuminates the struggle between individual creative needs and social accommodation. Historically the shifting paradigm of penal policy has reflected a wider political intention. But there is an irony as the New Labour government that champions social inclusion has overseen the reduction of opportunity in prison to engage with the arts, replaced by an instrumental agenda concerning basic, key and cognitive skills. Furthermore, this has arguably been costly and ineffectual, hence the need to accommodate a more creative and expressive curriculum. The article has been divided into two parts. The first examines competing discourses of penal educational provision in order to assess the role of the arts. The second part examines a radical educational agenda of inclusion based on emancipatory theory, as a conduit for personal transformation, in which the creative arts have a central role.     

The Contested Curriculum: Academic learning and employability in higher education

This article explores the discourse of employability in higher education by investigating the understanding of different stakeholder groups (students, staff, employers) of the University of Nottingham (UK and China), and their fit to each other and to the educational literature. It finds that, while theories of life-long or life-wide learning position employability as an outcome of a holistic curriculum embracing both discipline and employability, stakeholders perceive learning for employability as a threat to disciplinary learning. The results suggest that to progress significant curriculum development in support of employability, a greater consensus of stakeholder views is needed with a deeper sympathy towards the integration of academic learning and employability. The article concludes with an assessment of the re-envisioning needed by Nottingham and other universities as they prepare students for an “employability” fit for purpose in a twenty-first century characterized by change and challenge.     

Betwixt and Between: Working Through the Aesthetic in Philosophy of Education: George F. Kneller Lecture,Conference of the American Educational Studies Association Savannah,Georgia, October 30, 2008

At a time when both philosophy of education and the arts are under threat within education, this article inquires into interdisciplinarity as one way of approaching the disciplines of philosophy of education and aesthetics. The article offers a retrospective autobiographical intellectual history and phenomenology of the author's own learning and scholarship within Higher Education in three main areas—philosophy of literature education, women's studies, and philosophy of music education, areas paralleling the three periods of her academic career. One sub-theme of this narrative about the balancing act of working in literature and music through philosophy of education is the author's ongoing resistance to professionalization or disciplinary academic control—of literature, philosophy, and music—while being a critical student of educational theory and practice in these areas—philosophy, literature and music within philosophy of education—of thus being “betwixt and between.” Two other themes comprising the article's subtext are “praxis” and “embodiment.” The double entendre of the phrase “working through” entails, first, using the arts of literature and music to practise philosophy of education; and secondly, embracing the psychological, ethical, and spiritual introspection that comes with critical engagement of the arts and its discourses. In short, the article aims to reprise some burning philosophical educational questions that have preoccupied its author over the years, questions deemed especially pertinent to the current increasingly diverse membership in the discipline of educational studies.     

Bits,Bytes and Dinosaurs: using Levinas and Freire to address the concept of ‘twenty-first century learning’

Abstract

The discourse of twenty-first century learning argues that education should prepare students for successful living in the twenty-first century workplace and society. It challenges all educators with the idea that contemporary education is unable to do so, as it is designed to replicate an industrial age model, essentially rear-focused, rather than future-focused. Future-focused preparation takes account of the startling effect on economy and society caused by rapid technological change, to the extent that the future cannot be accurately predicted. It is a discourse that effectively renders knowledge obsolete, and which relies increasingly on communication technologies and online pedagogies. This is however an education which in some respects deepens the loss of identity characteristic of contemporary times. Thus, it has negative implications for face-to-face interactions in community which underpins the development of democratic practices. This article challenges these futuristic discourses by appealing to two philosophers of the twentieth century, namely Emmanuel Levinas and Paulo Freire. It considers the Levinasian concepts of the Other and the face, and the Freirean concepts of humanisation and critical education to argue that they offer a discourse of possibility and hope. These thinkers enable the argument that, despite rapid change, there are certain attributes and dispositions that transcend time and place, which schools have not only a right, but an obligation to develop.     

Creative tensions? Creativity and basic skills in recent educational policy

Recently, in response to sustained criticism about the standards driven curriculum, UK government agencies have been promoting creativity in schools. In this article we explore how creativity is being defined in current national educational policy statements; how these definitions relate to other theoretical work on creativity, and the implications for the curriculum and pedagogies.     

日本高中数学教育课程的改革

本文介绍了当前日本数学教育课程的改革方针,指出其突出的特点在于强调培养学生“创造性的基础”,并对日本高中教学课程的目标和内容进行了评析。     

Constructing National Identity in a Changing World: Perspectives in Japanese education

This article explores some of the alternative perspectives on national identity which exist within the current Japanese education system. Analysis of official Japanese Ministry of Education policy is juxtaposed with presentation of the voices of junior high school students and pre-service student teachers to highlight the issue of the role of education in developing national identity in schools. It is argued that a wide discrepancy exists between Ministry of Education ideology, and the opinions of Japanese students and student teachers, and that these conflicting discourses raise questions about the definition, form, importance and even the very existence of education for national identity in the twenty-first century.     

Creativity in Artistic Education: Introducing Artists into Primary Schools

Despite a more prominent role of arts education in the school curriculum, artistic creativity does not occur to a great extent in primary school practice. More opportunities for teachers to strengthen their know‐how in the field of artistic creativity can therefore be considered important. Arts education projects focus on pupils' development of creativity by means of introducing artists with their divergent working methods into primary schools. Beside fostering pupils' creative openness and skills, arts education organisations aim to transfer artistic enthusiasm to teachers in each project. Collaboration with artists can encourage teachers' artistic creative work. New working methods, techniques or ways of experimenting are more likely to be adopted in daily teaching practice when the project duration consists of several years. However, most projects are short‐lived and the means for a long‐term project policy are limited. Consequently, results in the area of sustainable outcomes concerning artistic creative work with teachers are limited. To create a long‐term view, the availability of financial resources is an important condition in order to realise a mentality change towards artistic creativity in education. Finally, continuing debate with several participants about making artistic creative work sustainable remains necessary.     

A Race to the Top From the Bottom of the Well? The Paradox of Race and U.S. Education Reform

Abstract

This article explores the paradox of “race” and U.S. education reform in the 21st century. I consider how the invisible ontology of race and its entangled relationship with class divert our attention from economic inequality and undermine policies intended to redress racial inequality in schools. I conclude that the education research community must unpack its use of “race” and focus on the role of racism in the maintenance of racial caste in America's schools.