Doing it differently: youth leadership and the arts in a creative learning programme

Notions of youth ‘leadership’, partnership or collaborating with young people as ‘service users’, are currently being endorsed and elaborated across a very broad spectrum of thinking, policymaking and provision. This paper argues that if we want to understand this phenomenon, we should not look in the first instance to young people as the prime source of commentary or agency: instead, we need to understand it as a way of ‘doing’ – in this instance - the arts or education differently. The paper draws on research into how one organization, the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships run in schools between 2002 and 2011, attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. It argues that youth leadership should be analysed as it is enacted within and through specific sites and practices, and in terms of the subjectivities, capacities and narratives it offers to teachers, students, artists and others involved. The result is a more ambivalent account of participatory approaches, acknowledging their dilemmas as well as their achievements, and observing that they reconfigure power relations in sometimes unexpected, and sometimes all-too-familiar, ways

Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships

This report summarises the findings of an 18-month research project into ‘Youth Voice in the work of Creative Partnerships ‘, 2007-9, conducted by Sara Bragg, Helen Manchester, Dorothy Faulkner at the Open University, funded by the Arts Council England. Creative Partnerships (CP) was established in 2002 and is a ‘flagship creative learning programme’. It aims to foster innovative, long term collaborations between schools (often in areas of socio-economic deprivation) and creative practitioners. In particular CP states that it places young people ‘at the heart of what we do’ and claims that its programmes are most effective when young people are actively involved in leading and shaping them. CP highlights three key areas: involving young people in governance (the design, delivery and evaluation of the programme of work); building and maintaining ‘positive relationships’ with young people; working as ‘co-constructors of learning’ with them. The report maps existing youth voice initiatives in Creative Partnerships in those three areas. In addition, it considers the nature of the links between creativity and participation; explores issues of access to youth voice, such as patterns of inclusion and exclusion; explores what skills, experiences, identities and relationships are developed through participation. More broadly it attempts to understand, analyse and theorise youth voice, starting from the empirical but aiming to interpret the features of particular activities or projects to understand them more fully

Pedagogies of student voice

Whilst its precise definition varies, the concept of ‘student voice’ is endorsed and elaborated across a very broad spectrum of contemporary educational thinking, policymaking and provision. But if the popularity and near-ubiquity of voice now confound attempts to designate it as inherently emancipatory, a covert strategy of neoliberalism, or any other single ‘thing’, they also require careful, situated interpretation. The paper draws on research into how one organization – the flagship English ‘creative learning’ programme Creative Partnerships - attempted to ‘put young people at the heart’ of its work. It argues that voice should be understood as enacted within and through specific sites and practices, and in terms of the subjectivities and narratives it offers to teachers, students, artists and others involved. The contexts and embodied social positions through which students experience and negotiate voicing processes can, however, generate ambivalent effects and reconfigure power relations in schools in unexpected ways

Design for Dementia Care: Making a Difference

The paper discusses the growing role of design in dementia care and its power to enhance the wellbeing of people living with dementia, their carers and caregivers. It refers to three examples of recent design research focusing on creating environments, objects and technologies to support appropriate person-centred stimulation and activities in dementia care. The projects use interdisciplinary co-design approaches and ethnographic methods to establish new knowledge and develop user-centred design solutions to improve care. The authors debate that engaging end-users in the design process not only empowers the designer; the collaborative approach enables in particular the carer / caregiver to reflect on their important task and to mobilise their creativity

Considerate, convivial, capacious? Finding a language to capture ethos in ‘creative’ schools

Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another significant strand of educational thinking, however, has emphasised ethos for and as learning: how schools might prefigure alternative, more socially just, worlds. This article argues that accounting for such divergent notions of ethos demands greater attention to the intellectual resources mobilised in interpreting educational processes. We discuss schools that used their work with the English creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships, to develop what we describe as ‘considerate, convivial and capacious’ school ethos. We aim thereby to value their achievements, provide tools to contest dominant discourses around ethos, and advocate more critical, reflexive approaches to researching school cultures