Role of the teacher

6.4.4.1 Teaching creatively and teaching for creativity

In this section I add some considerations to those made in 5.2.6, which regard the teacher's role in the enhancement of effective collaborative creative processes.

An important distinction introduced by the NACCCE report (1999) is the one between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity. 'Teaching creatively' consists in devising materials and imaginative approaches that result in children's motivation, interest, attention, and effective learning and, actually, does not necessarily imply that children themselves are being creative. 'Teaching for creativity', instead, goes beyond that by focussing on the learners' activity. It is realised by encouraging children's positive self- image and potential as creative learners, assisting children in identifying their creative inclinations, and fostering children's active and creative involvement. In order to acknowledge the central role of the learner as a knowledgeable expert of their own creative learning processes, Jeffrey and Craft (2004) argue that a redefinition of the distinction might be of help, in terms of the teacher's creative teaching on the one hand and the learner's creative learning on the other.

With regard to teaching creatively, Sawyer (2004a, 2004b) makes the case for an

improvisational approach to teaching, where scripted activities and curricular contents are balanced with the flexible yet 'disciplined' co-construction with students of an improvised dialogue which is collaborative and emergent in nature. In particular when 'orchestrating' children's creative collaboration, the main issue for the teacher is how to combine design and improvisation (Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011), i.e. how to pre-structure the learning process and concurrently maintain a space of freedom for adjusting it in real time according to the flow of interaction in the classroom. In the field of music teacher

education, Abramo and Reynolds (2014) distinguish creative musicianship from creative pedagogy and argue that creative music pedagogues are responsive, flexible, and improvisatory while meeting the needs of different learning circumstances; have the ability to experiment with possibilities, deal with ambiguous and dynamic learning

situations, and avoid cognitive closure while remaining open to multiple perspectives; are able to associate disparate and seemingly incongruent ideas in novel ways by using metaphorical and analogical thinking; and, finally, they can embrace and integrate multiple identities – professional, social, and personal – in order to connect with students and devise innovative learning pathways.

In relation to teaching for creativity, the pedagogical approaches of creative practitioners (Denmead, 2011) have been described as encouraging in learners basic dispositions or ways of being-in-the-world such as not-knowing, open-endedness, playing like a child, and becoming, i.e. attitudes of acceptance of uncertainty, freedom from fixed

expectations, playfulness, uninhibitedness, and being-in-flux while being involved in creative processes. In the line of research about 'possibility thinking' as the core of

creative learning in early childhood and primary contexts (Craft, 2002; Cremin, Burnard, & Craft, 2006), the model of creative pedagogy which is proposed focuses on question- posing and question-responding (Chappell, Craft, Burnard, & Cremin, 2008), play,

innovation, risk-taking, being imaginative, self-determination, and intentionality. Nurturing possibility thinking, especially in relation to arts-based education, primarily relies on three main characteristics of a pedagogy for creativity, namely: supporting co-constructive processes with children and among children which emphasise real-life experiences and personal relevance; placing high value on children's agency, ownership, and control over their learning; and holding high expectations with respect to children's ability and

motivation to learn how to engage creatively with materials and ideas (Craft, Cremin, Hay, & Clack, 2014). Thus, the teacher serves here as a catalyst for creativity, facilitating, activating, initiating, stimulating, accelerating, and bringing about transformative learning processes and the emergence of creative ideas and behaviours.

Finally, with regard to fostering creativity and collaborative learning, Hämäläinen and Vähäsantanen (2011) highlight the important role of the teacher in providing guidance for students as to how to interact productively, setting appropriate task structures which involve a real need for collaboration within the group, finding the right balance between the children's domain-related and creativity-related skills and the challenges entailed in the task, giving sufficient instructional support and offering relevant strategies particularly in relation to generating and working on ideas, and establishing an overall emotional atmosphere which is conducive to a critical yet constructive engagement within the group creative activity.

6.4.4.2 Tensions in creative pedagogies

Due to the radical openness of creative processes for which by definition there is no clear-cut and convergent solution, creative work in education implies circumstances in which there is no right or single way to solve a pedagogical problem, and a challenging decision must be taken between contrasting principles of action. In educational literature on creativity (Craft, 2003b; Chappell, 2005, 2007a, 2007b) various tensions and

dilemmas have been identified. In the following I concentrate on the tensions which I regard as most relevant in relation to this study.

Freedom vs Structure

This is the fundamental tension in all creative activity. Creativity consists of "innovation within constraints" (Sawyer, 2008, p.54), where some shared knowledge, rules, and conventions give the boundaries and concurrently the enabling stimuli for the production

of ideas. With regard to the teacher's choices, the basic questions are 'how

open/constrained is at each point in time the process of inventing music? and 'how open/constrained is the resulting product?' In relation to dance education, but applicable to music as well, Chappell (2005, 2007b) terms "spectrum of task structures" (p.51) the continuum of teacher's choices extending from the purposeful play of largely free tasks, to the scaffolding and tight apprenticeship of 'narrower' tasks. This tension can also be interpreted as the degree of control that is imposed either by the teacher or by the children on the creative process (see below).

Process vs Product

The contrasting positions are here on the one hand creative experience as a dynamic and exploratory process – i.e. a focus on the activity of composing – and on the other the pressure to accomplish and perform products which are socially acknowledged as

valuable – which implies a focus on the creative outcome as the main goal of the process (Winters, 2012). A balance must be found or a choice made between taking the risk of keeping the process vital, evolving, and improvisational and, alternatively, rehearsing, refining and polishing the performance to meet the expectations of the audience to whom the resulting composition is meant to be performed (Chappell, 2007b). From the learners' point of view, this tension concerns creativity as experience vs creativity as product, i.e. being engaged creatively vs achieving aesthetic quality (or conformity with the given task). In a wider educational perspective, the tension process/product ultimately leads to the opposition between creativity and performativity agendas (Craft, 2003b).

Being creative vs Acquiring knowledge and expertise

This tension refers to the knowledge-base issue, i.e. to the largely held opinion that in order to be creative a person needs some kind of expertise to operate with. Indeed, children need in some way to internalise some music-relevant contents, motor skills, or working procedures before tackling a creative task, otherwise the resulting music might have limited substance (Koutsoupidou, 2008; Winters, 2012). The critical point is the extent to and the ways in which children can be 'prepared' by adequate training and vocabulary building as a precondition for the creative communication of their own ideas, and how these different learning trajectories can proceed parallel to and intertwining with each other. This distinction between instruction/acquisition and creative externalisation relates to different conceptualisations of creativity (Chappell, 2007b) either as using techniques and building domain knowledge (which broadly has to do with curriculum questions, see Craft 2003b), or as allowing free expression, unfolding children's latent creative potential and unlocking what 'is already there'. Chappell (2007b) defines this tension as 'personal/collective voice vs craft/compositional knowledge', whereby the

source of creative ideas is either 'inside out', as expression of the self from within the person, or 'outside in', as enculturation and creative appropriation of existing sociocultural practices.

Children's agency vs Teacher's guidance

This is a fundamental tension in creative work in education. Koutsoupidou (2008)

distinguishes between two opposing teaching styles, the didactic/teacher-led one and the creative/child-centred one, as having differing objectives and outcomes. In relation to primary school children he claims that age (in terms of maturation and previous

experience) is an important factor in determining the level of guidance that the teacher has to provide to the group. In his view, younger children who have not yet developed a repertoire of ideas and skills to improvise and compose will probably need some

guidelines, which might lead to a more directive approach. This would sound like 'the less experienced they are, the more guidance they need'. In accordance with the early

childhood pedagogical models presented above (e.g. Wood, 2010 – see 4.3.1), however, I would argue that it is possible to balance in different and flexible ways the degree of guidance on part of the teacher, irrespective of the age and expertise of the group. Indeed, the contrasting poles between which the teacher's choices may be positioned according to the circumstances can be described as follows: leading the group vs following children's contributions, directing the activity vs fostering autonomy, having control vs sharing responsibility (this also has to do with classroom management, authority, and power relations), and scaffolding vs fading (as in the cognitive apprenticeship approach, see Collins & Kapur, 2014). The teacher can proactively support, guide, give indications, even play along with the children – in order to scaffold from inside the music making process – or rather they can step back, just watch, and let children self-direct their own creative process. Chappell (2007b) defines this tension in terms of varying degrees of proximity and intervention, ranging from close proactivity to distanced reactivity. Whether the teacher's guidance really facilitates children's creative involvement depends on how it is contextualised in the learning situation; in itself it is neither 'good' nor 'bad'. The fundamental principle underpinning the teacher's action is the centrality of the learner. Children do not need to be guided in order to be (just) encultured into practices and to enact the adults' plans for them. They need the opportunity to act back on their learning contexts and to create their own contexts for learning and development. Asking them to be creative means wanting them as powerful agents (Wood & Attfield, 2005).

Individual learning vs Group learning

A last tension regards the focus on the individual vs on the group, and concerns the extent to which learning should take place as an individual, small group, or whole group activity, the assessment of creative learning, and in an 'inclusive' perspective the

differentiation and personalisation of learning opportunities for children with different abilities. Ideally, effective creative group activities should allow all children to participate each at their own pace, accommodating different learning styles and developmental levels (Sawyer, 2006a). Also relevant seems to be the role of conflict in group creativity – when appropriately dealt with – as a potentially positive stimulus for creative learning even for primary age children (Chappell, 2007a). As a last remark, an interesting observation of Sawyer (2006b) is that many educators, in a restrictive application of sociocultural theory, mistakenly believe that it is the teacher that scaffolds the child. Yet, one should also take into account the role of the collective practice itself in scaffolding the individual member's learning. The teacher's task is to favour these interactive, reciprocally supportive behaviours amongst children and, as an attitude, to trust the self-

organisational skills of the group as such.

Concluding, these tensions constitute 'pedagogical spectra' (Chappell, 2005, 2007b) along which the teacher has to situate their decisions, not based on the application of a set of established rules as in a technical rationality approach, but relying on critically questioning their own practice by reflecting-in-action and reflecting-on-action (Schön, 1983, 1987). In this sense teaching for collaborative creativity is a form of reflective practice in which the teacher has to act flexibly, sensitively and responsively, according to the unique circumstances in which each creative act takes place. It requires theoretical knowledge and continuing professional development, pedagogic expertise, a sufficiently wide repertoire of teaching routines, and the skills to evaluate where and when to appropriately interject the right strategy in relation to the pedagogical goals and the improvisational flow of the learning process (Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011).