Embedment – Maintaining Legacy through Language

Pupils were encouraged to adopt and understand Enderbys’ shared

language of creativity. This was an influential social action, part of sustaining creativity as a valued and valuable part of school culture. The bespoke lesson was a focused vehicle and controlled environment within which language could be embraced and collectively repeated, normalising associations and links between creativity and the mantra of skills, required attributes and the like. Jim spoke of this taking place.

From the students’ perspective for some of the phrases that we hear them using, and some of the language we hear them using, it’s becoming a shared language. We can see that the shared language of creativity, that we worked hard to get to, is now being used more and more often by the students and understood by them. (Jim)

In my observation of one lesson, I observed Jim embedding Enderbys’ rhetoric of creativity during a Creativity lesson with year seven students, the process described in my field note.

Pupils worked in pairs, groups or individually on their characters and stories.

As they did this Jim threw a question out to everyone in the room ‘How do we make creativity happen properly’? Pupils responded back verbally and spontaneously or chatted amongst themselves, saying ‘Well I think we use our imagination!’ ‘We ask questions sir’, ‘We like work together in teams’ ‘We like have to listen to each other Mr Smith’ ‘Sir, sir we work on our ideas’. Jim said ‘Yes, we are all getting it now’ and thanked the students for their contributions.

(Extract field note diary – 9th May 2013)

Creativity lessons involved members of the creative arts team specifically associating creativity with skills development and acquisition of personal attributes. I observed a Creativity lesson taught by Assistant Teacher Lucy to year nine students, where Lucy, like Jim, maintained the legacy of creativity through reiteration of Enderbys’ established rhetoric of creativity.

Year Nine Pupils entered and appeared to sit randomly. Lucy tasked the pupils to continue working in their established groups and progress their ideas. Pupils moved into their groups and engaged in a range of activities including model making, drawing and drama. During the lesson Lucy addressed the whole class saying ‘skills you are using today are transferrable to other subjects you are taking’. The environment was relaxed and lively pupils chose where they worked. I randomly spoke to a small number of pupils as they worked about their experience of taking part in the creativity lesson. One said ‘this is different to all our other lessons miss, more like being in primary school’. Another said ‘I have learnt that creativity is doing what you want to do’. Toward the end of the lesson Lucy called for all pupils to gather around in a circle at the front of the classroom on chairs. She asked pupils to ‘mentally’ reflect upon what they had achieved in the lesson and reiterated, (pointing to the wall where the creativity descriptor posters were displayed), that creativity had ‘four key features’. Lucy emphasised that creativity involved problem solving. Class members seemed reluctant to contribute to an open offer from Lucy to verbally feedback to the whole class so Lucy selected three pupils to report on why their activities were creative. They said they thought their activities were creative because they had been imaginative in their thinking, worked together as a group to problem solve and developed new ideas.

Extract field dairy – 27th June 2013

Visual Arts teacher Lottie was observed aligning attributes associated with business success or acumen to pupils own ‘creative work’ undertaken in creativity lessons.

Year nine pupils clustered around the whiteboard at the front of the room.

Lottie introduced the lesson by telling the story of entrepreneur and manufacturer James Dyson. She reiterated that Dyson believed his success was in part due to his capacity for creative ideas and personal resilience.

Lottie followed her story by screening Steven Johnson’s short film ‘Where do good ideas come from? Lottie followed the screening by saying to the class

‘our creative work has been about problem solving, working to a brief, original thought, and what it means to have a creative mind’. She tasked pupils to represent a creative idea of their own using arts materials made available in the classroom.

Extract - Field diary 28th May 2013

Drama teacher Lynda spoke of pushing key terminology during Creativity lessons, believing pupils ‘soaked up’ the ethos of creativity taught to them.

Year seven have been really positive, they have just soaked up the subject, the key words, the ethos behind it. They are like mini sponges and they’ve just soaked everything up. Year eight, responded really positively as well…..What I try to push is key terminology, such as words like stimulus, stimuli, imagination. (Lynda)

The notion that creativity was ‘required’ for pupils to successfully navigate in the wider world and succeed in life and employment was also reiterated by the Creative Arts team. Enderbys’ established ethos of creativity and value of creativity was embedded within lesson content in terms of the language used. Legacy was maintained through the continual reinforcement of links and associations. Such links and associations were posited as advantageous to pupils.

In one Creativity lesson observed with year seven pupils, Jim specifically linked creativity with their future employment choices and chances.

In the huddle Jim introduced the idea of employability and asked pupils to reflect on three questions to ask of themselves - Am I someone who would be employable? Do I have a chance of being employed? What do I need?

What do I not want to do? There was an enthusiastic show of hands and responses including - you need to be able to be part of a team (Alex), you need to be creative, I don’t want to be a sheep (Mae), I don’t just want to sit behind a desk. He tasked the class to spend some time in the lesson creating interesting ways of demonstrating their skills for possible future employers.

(Extract Field note diary – 16th May 2013

Drama teacher Lynda maintained the legacy of creativity in her belief there was an association between student success in employment and higher education and the ‘skills’ taught in Creativity lessons.

Creativity might not be the most demanding lesson in terms of academic thinking, but students are developing lots of other skills which are really useful in employment and higher education. (Lynda)

According to Visual Arts teacher, Diane creativity was influential in supporting pupils in creating a ‘different’ profile in the workplace, aligning creativity with the notion of personal enhancement and competitiveness.

You’re trying to say to students’ well hang on a minute, you need to be different, you need something that when you go out into the world people are going to say “those people from Enderby do something quite different, what’s this”? And hopefully there will be a big percentage of students who can say “well actually that means I am this type of person, I can, I can be in a meeting and I can listen to your ideas, but I can then come up with my own”… people are worried about getting jobs, aren’t they? And I think that for us and for the students, that’s really something that you look to for the future. (Diane)

Creative Arts team members appeared to want equip Enderbys’ pupils to become the ‘right’ employment candidate, meeting the needs of employers faced with the ‘personnel economics’ (Bandiera et al, 2015) of finding,

motivating and incentivising the ‘right’ employees. Enderbys’ external partner Jill, Arts Centre Officer, suggested Enderbys’ pupils were equipped and

advantaged in respect of future career prospects as a direct result of inclusion of creativity in the curriculum.

Students in Enderby….the opportunities that they’ve been given… I would love to see how many of them develop a job that doesn’t currently exist, and I think creativity is a major player in that and I think the school are giving them an excellent grounding to be able to develop that, have the confidence to take those risks, and try new things that haven’t been done before. And how many of them are going to have jobs in the creative industries? And it’s ever changing….I think that the young people they’re working with, they’re going to be those risk taking and problem solving young people, and they’re going to be, hopefully, at a different point than they necessarily would have been, had they not been supported by the school in taking those risks and learning to think in a different way, to learn in a new way that’s not necessarily prescribed, and I think that’s exciting, I think that’s really exciting.(Jill)

The notion of ‘different’ and ‘skilled up’ pupils emerging from Enderby through enactment of creativity in the curriculum, with a capacity to contribute to the success of society is an appealing and positive image.

Consideration was not given however to the nuances and complexities relating to workplaces, workers and employers in Enderbys’ rhetoric. More simplistically, Enderbys’ ambition was for pupils to develop ‘appropriate’ skills and characteristics to meet the needs of 21^st Century society and

employment.

The litany was influential in forming pupils’ opinions and associations between the attributes required for employability and the value of creativity.

This is illustrated by pupil Mae, a twelve-year-old member of Jim’s year seven Creativity class, who spoke about ‘learning skills for a job’ and developing and understanding of what this encompassed through ‘creativity’.

In creativity you learn skills for a job and stuff like that. If you want to be a teacher when you grow up, you have to get people involved, and Mr Smith shows you how to do that and you’re learning how to come up with your own mind and speak for yourself, so you’ve always got to speak for yourself….so when you’re in a job, whatever job it is, you’ve got to have your own mind about things, and you learn that in creativity. (Mae)

Pupil Lizzie, a twelve-year-old member of Jim’s year seven believed creativity and association with imagination was ‘good’ for her career.

Not many other schools do creativity, so it’s quite a good opportunity, because it’s quite good for your career stuff I guess, since it’s quite imaginative, so I think it’s quite good that we have Creativity lessons like this.

(Lizzie)

Pupils’ perspective on creativity in the context of their learning and what they valued from engagement in the lesson illuminates how legacy was

maintained and creativity embedded. I was fortunate to capture pupils’

opinions in an exercise undertaken with Jim’s class. In the following section, I discuss material captured from the exercise.