In our second year we built on our understandings of teaching for creativity, expanded our range of creative activities and practitioners in school and pursued the exploration of how Creativity Collaboratives could inform our quest of how do we nurture our children’s innate creative capacity and sustain their curiosity about the world? Sharper focus was on our four key areas of interest, steering our work.
Can we improve the way our schools nurture children’s creativity and sustain their curiosity through:
Complementarity, by creating effective communities of practice that include teachers, creative practitioners and cultural education partners.
Sustainability, by building networks of events, support and school governance that sustains teaching for creativity.
Place, by building strong school connections to local cultures and heritage and supporting the development of children’s sense of place.
By the end of the second year of the project, schools successfully completed their first and second Creativity Collaboratives residencies. The steering group pooled their talents and collectively took over leadership and management of the project due to project lead illness and a new coordinator was identified for year three. In the creation of residencies, partnerships, community of practice meetings and information on ChalleNGe’s website, we sought to explore and identify in greater depth how teaching for creativity can be a powerful means of supporting teaching and learning for teachers and children.
The importance of prioritising teachers’ professional learning about teaching for creativity throughout the school, led to the development of an in-service training days programme for all the staff in all the project schools, placed in the cultural venues of our city. We brought together 500 teachers, senior leadership teams and teaching assistants to Nottingham Playhouse, The Albert Hall, Nottingham Castle and St Barnabas Cathedral, for a continuing professional development programme of key note speakers, including the inspirational Wolfgang Buttress and a choice of more than 40 practical, creative workshops led by Nottingham based creative practitioners and cultural organisations. Everyone took part in a workshop led by Bill Lucas on some of the theory and models behind creative educational pedagogies. Collaborative teachers and their practitioner partners, led workshops for their peers and connections were made with key city initiatives such as Nottingham designated a child friendly city, a UNESCO city of literature and our commitment to our Cultural Rucksack. The reflective practice at the end of the day, in whole school groups, provided staff with a chance to consider how they wanted to move on collectively with the project in the third year; informed by practical and theoretical understanding and experiences of teaching for creativity.