Choosing a methodological approach that could handle the remit of the research questions proved to be quite a serious challenge. The focus of the research questions that were generated from the Literature Review was broad in scope, inquiring into not only the
experience of the individual, but also the wider contexts in which they were located. Dealing with this breadth of scope required an approach that could consider all the identified areas simultaneously and evenly. Traditional perspectives on research define two paradigms, positivism and interpretivism, usually treating them as diametrically opposed in character (Robson, 1993). Though proponents of each approach have historically questioned the 'truth' of each other’s findings, current thinking suggests that the dichotomy between the two is artificial, that a combination of both is required in order to establish what a phenomenon is and how it works (Hartas, 2010b). Roberts-Holmes (2005) uses the analogy of photography, describing a positivist approach as the wide-angle or panorama and interpretivism as the close-up: this shows us that these qualities might be different, but they may also be complementary in nature. In order to address the full scale of the research questions, a different philosophy is called for: one which can incorporate the over-arching broad-brush approach with an appreciation of the fine detail.
This breadth of scope is a reflection of an important tenet of education research: the
treatment of the child both as a whole being, rather than the sum of its parts, and also as part of a wider whole: society. Such an approach can be traced back to the work of Friedrich
59 Froebel and his ideas about both the unity of the individual and its unity with the rest of the universe (Froebel, 1886). For Froebel (1886) it was necessary for the educator to understand this, how the development of the child is influenced by the actions of the generation before them and by the world around them, the educator must: '... make the individual and particular general; he must make the general individual and particular, and prove the existence of both.' (Froebel, 1886: p10).One of Froebel’s contemporaries, John Dewey (1897), also favoured this view, describing education as the participation of the child in the social consciousness.
Since that time, research undertaken around children and their education such as Urie
Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model of a child’s development and latter-day attempts to 'join-up' children’s services in England (HM Government, 2013) recognise the inter-
connectedness of all aspects of a child’s life and the potential for domino-like effects where an event in one area causes a reaction in another e.g. problems at home translating into issues with academic attainment. For these reasons, this study has tried to look at the wider picture of the child’s experience in order to understand how creativity is being fostered. If creativity is, as Froebel (1886) suggested, a human (or the human) attribute and not a simply a learned technique or a skill, then, like any other attribute such as sociability, its development and manifestation may be influenced by a range of factors from individual predisposition, modelled behaviour and physical circumstances, amongst others.
This study, through examining the literature, has raised questions regarding the experience of the individual children within each setting up through to policy decisions at a national level, as well as the interactions between these two poles. The preceding paragraph referenced the work of Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) into children’s development in the context of their environment and it would appear that the focus of this investigation mirrors the structure of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model of development, where each layer of social system surrounding the individual, from the immediate to the far removed, has an impact on how that individual develops. The following diagram illustrates how these layers interact.
60 This model is meant to illustrate the effects of context on a child’s overall development, but it could be adapted to look at a more specific effect: namely how context can foster the creative development of a child. At the centre of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecosystem is the individual, surrounded by the microsystem or the circle of immediate influences upon them. The
microsystem of interest for this project is the child’s educational setting and the practitioners within it. This is encircled by the mesosytem, consisting of the links between the immediate environment and the wider world, which in this study would be the training and experience of those practitioners. Beyond this is the exosystem, which affects the individual through
educational policy, legislation and even industry reports on the value of creativity (e.g. IBM Institute for Business Value, 2012). Further away still is the macrosystem, or the prevailing cultural and political backdrop in which the individual lives: recent history shows how crisis can precipitate a change in government whose ideology may impact on education policy. The ecosystem is embedded in the chronosystem, the moment in time in which the individual finds themselves: the literature explored in the previous chapter showed that attitudes towards
Child
Fam ily Peer s Setting C o m m un ity Contact Experience Training Services Indus tr y Policies Le gis lat ion Relationships CULTURE E GOVERNANCE TIME61 creativity can change over time. The boundaries between these layers are not clearly defined and there are overlaps, but to ignore one of these layers would be to present an incomplete or even distorted picture. There are well-documented implications of a range of factors on creative development and expression, including adult interaction and cultural practices (Bruce, 2011; Gardner, 2006). It is the contention of this study that you cannot separate these factors out; they are part of a whole, multi-layered picture: elements of a story.
The proposition of using a model of interconnectivity to understand phenomena can also be found in other areas of science. One such example is Gaia theory - as advanced by the chemist and environmentalist James Lovelock (1979). His view of Earth envisions every living thing on the planet as interlinked; each individual entity is inextricably part of, and embedded within, the über-organism, Gaia, each one affecting the whole, not necessarily as a consequence of direct action but by the simple reality of co-existence in a self-regulating system (Lovelock, 1979). There are certain microbes, the tiniest life form available on Earth, which have been shown to affect our climate, causing thermal updrafts, forming clouds and producing rain – even storms and monsoons (Hamilton & Lenton, 1998). This example is relevant to this study because it illustrates the law of unintended consequences acting within an ecological system: the effect was likely a by-product of chemical production to protect from ice-damage, though it has the benefit of enabling the microbes to disperse themselves (Hamilton & Lenton, 1998).
So, if we were to apply an ecological lens such as Lovelock's (1979) to unintended effects around creative expression in education, the story might unfold as follows: a practitioner evolves a disjuncture from creative expression as a result of cultural beliefs linking it to talent. She believes herself, therefore to 'not be a creative person'. The curriculum demands that she engender creativity in young children and she believes it to be beneficial for them, yet she unconsciously models awkwardness about creative expression and may even reproduce those cultural beliefs by rewarding manifestations of 'talent' such as drawing or painting, not
recognising creative thought. Thus the child’s creative development is moulded by culture and by the past, despite the conscious intentions of the practitioner. Just as Lovelock (1979) describes the biosphere as being so much more than the sum of its parts, this investigation aims to create a coherent narrative of how children’s creativity is being fostered in Catalonia and England from the disparate elements within each national system.
Educational research today is seen as transdisciplinary and necessarily engaged in capturing complexity: the links between education and learning, present practice and future society (Hartas, 2010a). Such complexities can mean that taking a single-track approach to research,
62 quantitative or qualitative, may capture phenomena accurately yet without taking into
account their context: a case study can illustrate practice in a setting, but may not tell you about the socio-cultural conditions that formed it; league tables can measure exam performance, but not how it has been achieved. It has therefore been argued that for educational research to become more relevant, artificial divides between methodological paradigms should be ignored (Hartas, 2010a) and many contemporary researchers advocate the use of mixed methods in order to strike a balance between breadth and depth of understanding (Schneider, 2007). Narrative methodology is such an approach as it has no specific method attached to it; rather it may employ a range of techniques from across the disciplines (Webster & Mertova, 2007). It is not, however, a particularly well-known one: finding out about narrative approaches was serendipitous: as a non- traditional approach it had not really appeared on my radar until I attended a series of talks by postgraduates on their research projects, one of which mentioned using narrative techniques with patients1.
In a project focusing on creativity, the idea of using stories had an undeniable attraction. Investigating further, its scope had real potential for the aims of this project: narrative methodology is an approach to inquiry that can use a mix of methods from either side of the paradigm divide in order to facilitate understanding of complex social phenomena such as education: it has been described as a 'cohering mechanism' for weaving together social context and individual experience (Erben, 1998: 13). Here was an approach that could run the scale from macro to micro in order to create a whole account. The term 'narrative' forms the bedrock of the methodology behind this project. Using the analogy of an unfolding story (where the characters, settings and context all have a part to play) provides a useful model of how best to present the web of different strands highlighted by the research questions. Barthes (1988), the literary theorist, says that within a narrative, everything signifies to a degree: the actions of the protagonists, the objects they find, the settings they appear in, which reflects the aim of this study to give credence to both the individual and the general. Placing the differing elements of the study within a narrative framework could help put them in perspective and enable understanding of their roles.
The narrative form has been irrevocably entwined with human culture and understanding since the beginning of history, it is a natural human impulse and a form that is present in every mode of human representation (Barthes, 1988; Sandelowski, 1991). Narrative structure is
1 Sadly, my notes for this event were mislaid so I am unable to provide any further information on this particular talk.
63 therefore the structure of how we think and process information and should offer both the researcher and the reader a coherent account of the situation. If you have ever worked with young children, you are aware of the prevalence of narrative in their play and its power to, according to one story-teller ‘Nettlefoot Kate’, focus attention and to address a range of complex issues in a simple way (Heinemeyer, 2013). In terms of its application to research, its particularly human nature is said to help reveal and find solutions for problems which may be overlooked by more traditional approaches and draw attention to what lies in front of us (Sandelowski, 1991). The universality of the narrative form will not only assist this project in making meaning from the areas of study, but will also provide a means to convey the findings in an accessible structure.
In order to quite literally illustrate this, this study has developed a visual allusion to an old fairy-tale. Part of the impetus for this project is a personal belief in the importance of creativity; therefore it seemed important to try to capture some of the research project in a creative way – perhaps this could even be of some benefit to the overall project. As explored in the previous chapter, Joe Winston (2009) writes on the role of beauty in education and offers the intriguing assertion that while latterly the concept of beauty is usually considered to be an irrelevance or even a hindrance to our present conceptions of education, traditionally it has always occupied a central position. Plato (Plato & Jowett, 2010) for example, returns
repeatedly to the concept of beauty: he wrote of beauty as having the power to improve us as beauty causes us to aspire to beauty. Winston (2009) explores such classical views alongside more modern theories and contends that rather than being a distraction from serious
education, beauty in itself can provide the teacher with a framework to enable the expression of the true values of their educational practice. In line with this, Bruner (1962) saw creative expression as how the human being reaches excellence. Drawing on my own experiences, I can imagine that if the teacher tries to take a creative approach towards lesson planning and then applies the ideal of beauty to this process too, the lesson should hopefully be highly pleasing to teacher and student, deepening engagement for both parties.
If such an effect might be perceived in the education process, there would seem to be an argument for beauty and creativity in research too. Firstly, Bazeley (2013) remarks that alongside sharp observation and clear thinking, 'a strong dash' of creativity has long been an important feature of qualitative data analysis owing to the complexity of the data that is often gathered. Thus a creative approach might in fact be necessary here to deal with the range of data that the research questions are interested in. Secondly, regarding the place of aesthetics
64 in this process, Plato (Plato & Jowett, 2010) describes beauty as either offering pleasure or utility. In choosing to illustrate my thesis with colour plates it is hoped that both of his ends might be achieved: the images have been created with the aim of providing a visual
representation of the scope of the project as an aid to the reader, yet by producing them in the most aesthetically pleasing manner I am able to it is hoped to engage the reader and indeed my own sense of pleasure in presentation. The following diagram uses said
illustrations, created from the traditional tale 'Little Red Riding Hood' and melded with the aforementioned ecological model of development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), in order to give an idea of the shape and structure of this research project.
65 This diagram encapsulates the importance of capturing the whole story: we can see that by subtracting just one of the elements, or altering it in some way, the story would change considerably and be unrecognisable as the version of Little Red Riding Hood that we have heard so many times. Without the historical setting, the sparsely populated, forested land becomes unlikely; without the forest, the likelihood of wolves and woodcutters decreases; without wolves, woodcutters and grandmothers, events would take a different turn; without paths, how can these settings connect; and without a village or family, Red Riding Hood would be a different person and maybe never sent on her journey at all. By extension, with reference to the ecological model of development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), in looking at the 'story' of early childhood education in England or Catalonia, to miss out one of these elements gives an incomplete picture: without understanding the politics, how can we understand the shape of the curriculum? As a result, this study has tried to address all of the areas laid out in the diagram above, from the historical context down to the individual child’s experiences.
Beyond providing a broad and coherent structure, the primacy of the narrative form to meaning-making and understanding manifests in several ways that are beneficial to the study of social, and in this case educational, phenomena. Ann-Marie Bathmaker (2010) regards narrative research as being particularly good at illuminating 'what troubles us' with regard to educational research (Bathmaker 2010: 1). It is hoped that the study's methods will allow this to surface as the participants describe or demonstrate their experiences: how do children and practitioners really feel about the early years education systems that they form a part of? Bathmaker (2010) also suggests that narrative research may be of particular relevance at this moment in history, citing a prevalence of personal narratives in present-day Western culture and politics. This could well be the case, taking into consideration the rise of reality television and photographs of politicians en famille, but it could be argued that such interests in the personal lives of people have always existed, certainly around such diverse figures as Lord Byron and Marie Antoinette. However, interest has certainly shifted from the minutia of the lives of the rich and famous to creation of a new rich and famous from people who have only the minutia of their lives to contribute. Perhaps it is simply that, as Barthes (1988) and so many others have pointed out, as a species we are interested in stories, though time and society may have an impact on the protagonists that we choose.
Regarding the personal quality of this approach, narrative inquiry can also be highly concerned with giving voice to the individual. Hammond & Wellington (2012) affirm that narrative
66 from within the system or observations from the outside - or indeed may combine the two viewpoints. Clough (2002) used narrative methodology extensively in his endeavours to represent his research, though his stories go further towards mimicking literary art forms than this study intends to (he uses fictionalisation to explore some of his data), he also describes the virtues of the form as being able to 'turn up the volume' on voices that may otherwise not be heard (Clough, 2002: 67). This quality is important to this study for reasons of both ideology and veracity. Sikes & Nixon (2003) say that educational research is epistemologically grounded in the moral foundations of educational practice; it is not simply about education, but should have an educational quality in itself – methods are not simply a means to an end. Clark & Moss (2001), who developed the Mosaic Approach for listening to young children state that using a participatory approach for collecting data from young children is not simply about collecting their perspectives, but about respecting their rights to expression on the subject of their lives,