Creativity and performativity: Counterpoints in British and Australian education

This article explores the complex interplay of power between performativity and creativity agendas—a mutual tension that resides in British and Australian education. Accountability constraints and conflicting policy debates are problematised against the wider imperatives of similar government agendas. This ‘counterpoint’ of freedom and control has significant implications for pedagogy and, through accommodating performativity, teacher agency and professionalism are under threat. The authors propose a ‘rebalancing’ where pedagogy transforms from a site of struggle for control, to one where a higher trust is placed in teacher professionalism. The idea of ‘rebalancing pedagogy’ offers a way for teachers to navigate and be supported through the opposing demands of performativity and creativity. It acknowledges the importance of teacher agency and where teaching is judged against the characteristics of a systemic approach that facilitates the building of creative learning communities capable of supporting any curricula or content‐focused programmes in and beyond schools.     

A contested profession: employability,performativity and professionalism in Irish further education

Further education typically represents the vocational, technical and practice-based forms of education, but this is now being repositioned in a neo-liberal era that is driving a performance-based and market-orientated vision of education in the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere. The implacable drive of neo-liberal economics in everyday practice is evident in the current economic and training discourses of further education, which aim to upgrade the employability of low-skilled and marginalised sectors of the population. The article provides an overview of shifts in educational policy and practices that align Irish further education with what has occurred in the UK and elsewhere through processes of professionalisation and performativity. Analysis of the potential impact on notions of professional identity in the sector helps to articulate the principles, pedagogies and philosophies that will be vital when contesting the performance cultures of New Managerialism that seem likely to ensue. We explore the implications in terms of the policy discourses, organisational structure and professional practices of further education. We contend that changes in these areas have profound impacts on the learning and knowledge base of further education, constraining its social justice and transformative capacity for the learners at the heart of further education.     

Beyond performativity: reflections on activist professionalism and the labour process in further education

The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of further education in 1993, when colleges of further education were removed from local authority control and placed under aegis of the Further Education Funding Council. This is followed by an examination of changes to the management regime following incorporation. It considers suggestions that bullying forms of management have been superseded and that there has been some feminization of senior management. This discussion is set alongside one addressing the socio‐economic context as well as hegemonic understandings of the economy. The final part of the paper examines claims made for the development of an ‘activist’ or transformative professionalism. However the key difficulty with these potentially progressive arguments is that analyses operate at the level of ideology accepting the way in which the knowledge economy is constructed thereby failing to seriously consider and work through the patterns of antagonistic relations that exist within capitalism. In a similar manner they play down education as site of struggle. Whilst the paper is orientated towards English further education the argument has a wider purchase, applying to education in particular and the welfare state in general.     

Creativity and performativity policies in primary school cultures

Cultures of performativity in English primary schools refer to systems and relationships of: target‐setting; Ofsted inspections; school league tables constructed from pupil test scores; performance management; performance related pay; threshold assessment; and advanced skills teachers. Systems which demand that teachers ‘perform’ and in which individuals are made accountable. These policy measures, introduced to improve levels of achievement and increased international economic competitiveness, have, potentially, profound implications for the meaning and experience of primary teachers’ work; their identities; their commitment to teaching; and how they view their careers. At the same time as policies of performativity are being implemented there is now increasing advocacy for the adoption and advancement of ‘creativity’ policies within primary education. These major developments are being introduced in the context of a wide range of social/educational policies also aimed at the introduction of creativity initiatives into schools and teaching. This complex policy context has major implications for the implementation process and also primary teachers’ work and how they experience it. The ethnographic research reported in this article has been conducted over a school year in six English primary schools in order to analyse the effects of creativity and performativity policy initiatives at the implementation stage. The article concludes by arguing that in the schools of our research the drive to raise pupil test scores involves both performative and creative strategies and that this critical mediation goes beyond amelioration toward a more complex view of professional practice. Implementing creativity and performativity policies provided important contextual influencing factors on teacher commitment. These were: curriculum coverage and task completion; and providing psychic rewards of teaching.     

The education deanship: A further analysis

This article expands and extends the analysis of data previously reported in a study of the education deanship. The data were collected from national samples of deans, central administrators, department chairpersons, and faculty. Multivariate statistical procedures used were factor analysis with rotations, multivariate analysis of variance, and canonical discriminant analysis. The purposes of the retreatment of the data were to: (1) identify factors that were produced from the responses and compare them with the semantic factors described in the original analysis; (2) compare differences among respondent groups; and (3) assess commonality of responses within each group. New and unique factors, relationships, and group differences were found. Perceptions and acceptances of the dean's role were not uniform, with department chairpersons being the most heterogeneous.     

Managing collaboration across further and higher education: a case in practice

The Dearing Report highlighted the need for HE programmes to enhance students' basic skills, and one of these is numeracy skill. There is a history of low confidence and negative attitudes to learning about numbers and 'maths anxiety' in undergraduates which means that delivering 'numerate graduates' may be something of a challenge to HE institutions. This college surveyed attitudes to numeracy and learning about numbers in all first-year students (over 1000 students). Over 40% of students returned their questionnaires. This survey found considerable negative attitudes and low confidence among respondents as a whole (25% of those who returned the questionnaire), and anxiety was highest (over 40%) in students taking a Humanities programme. This raises considerable concern about how we can deliver numeracy to students in HE. The findings of the survey, gender issues and the individualised concept of 'maths anxiety' are discussed in relation to the social and cultural construction of attitudes to maths and maths confidence as empowerment (Benn, 1997). The main conclusion is that HE institutions need to consider carefully how to provide good educational opportunities for individuals with low motivation to engage in maths-related activity. There is also an urgent need to challenge cultural myths and stereotyping relating to maths learning if we want the next generation of graduates to have more confidence in their maths skills.     

Creativity and higher education: A review

Some recent literature is reviewed to argue that institutions of higher education have made little adjustments to either their admission practices or their curricula to help nurture varied talents among their students. Diversity seems to be lacking throughout the academic community from the undergraduate level to the professional circles. The need for renewed spirit of experimentation and of tolerance of pluralism is pointed out.     

Style and substance in education leadership: further education (FE) as a case in point

As governments worldwide articulate the rhetoric of a ‘knowledge economy’ traditional cultures of education management and leadership are found to be wanting. At the same time, growing recognition that market and managerial reforms have not improved levels of educational performance has increased government interest in the transformative powers of business and charismatic leadership. This paper considers this phenomenon with reference to the changing conditions of corporate leadership taking place in the further education (FE) sector. Whilst ostensibly a ‘very English’ case study, the paper draws attention to the wider implications of managing and socializing others in the self surveillance rules of corporate education culture. Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project the paper analyses the shifting discourse of leadership as it is experienced by principals and senior managers involved in the study. In so doing the paper seeks to examine how principals and senior managers mediate changing education policy agendas in a sector recovering from an intense period of financial crisis, industrial action and low staff morale.     

Teaching and learning in further education: The Ofsted factor

The further education (FE) sector in the UK, or post-compulsory education as it is often referred to, has undergone some radical changes in recent years. Historically, FE is synonymous with vocational education and training, providing communities with courses that tended to be in practical, non-academic subjects. Many FE lecturers came from industries such as construction and engineering and were vital in providing the subject knowledge needed by colleges to enable them to offer a wide provision of courses. However, FE had not undergone the regime of teacher qualifications, regulation and inspection to the extent experienced by schools. In 2001, the New Labour government began a series of reforms that would overhaul post-compulsory education with the objective of making the sector more effective, and thereby meeting the wider objective of creating a more productive workforce. One of the many reforms was to introduce a system of inspection by placing FE into Ofsted’s remit. The new reform prompted FE colleges, for the first time, to implement their own institutional policies of observing teaching and learning (OTL) in order to prepare for impending inspection by Ofsted. This article examines the implementation of the policy of OTL, with a focus on one college of FE, and scrutinises its effects on the sector.     

Structural and pedagogic change in further and higher education: a case study approach

The article reports on case study research carried out in two education institutions introducing information learning technology (ILT) as an enhancement to the learning experience. The approaches to change in each institution, described as structural and pedagogic, represent different strategies emanating from what might be polar opposites in the organizational structure. The research focuses on a university, where change is promoted by the lecturing staff interested in pedagogic developments, and a college of further education, where the Senior Management Team drive through structural changes which impact on traditional methods of course delivery. A range of leadership theories are employed to discuss the two cases and a leadership model proposed which, within the context of pedagogic and structural domains of interest, encourages staff in education institutions to develop better understandings of the parameters, interests and issues impacting on their respective roles.     

Creativity in education

Currently considerable interest is being shown in creativity by the government and bodies such as QCA and Ofsted. A ‘creativity agenda’ has emerged with important implications for teaching and learning in schools. Drawing on research literature, as well as work completed by Secondary PGCE English and Drama trainees, this paper aims to provoke discussion about how creativity in education is defined and the impact of more explicit understandings of creativity in classrooms.     

Employability,managerialism, and performativity in higher education: a relational perspective

This article combines Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and cultural capital with Lyotard’s account of performativity to construct a three-tiered framework in order to explore how managerialism has affected the academic habitus. Specifically, this article examines the adoption of group assignments as a means of developing teamwork skills in one Australian case study organisation. On a macrolevel, by viewing the employability imperative as one manifestation of managerialism in the higher education field, we argue that managerialism has created a performative culture in the case study organisation evidenced by an increasing emphasis on performance indicators. On a mesolevel, by examining how academics use group assessments to respond to demands made by governments and employers for ‘employable graduates’, we highlight the continuity of academic habitus. Finally, on a microlevel by drawing on alumni reflections regarding their experiences of group assessments at university, we are able to shed some light on their evaluation of this pedagogical tool.     

创造力的培养与物理学科教育

本文从物理教育的特殊性出发,探索物理教育对学生创造力培养的作用和策略,以期为教育理论研究和实践提供依据。