A practitioner concept of contemporary creativity

This article reviews conceptualisations from three academic areas: the sociology of art, the psychology of creativity, and research on the cultural and creative industries. These are compared with findings from a critical discursive study with UK practitioners. The meanings and associations these ‘maker artists’ attach to creativity are discussed as a ‘practitioner concept’. For the practitioners, the association of creativity with art carries a promise of transcendence and escape from ordinary life, but also a potential challenge to their own entitlement and claims to a creative status. The article shows, first, that the academic areas utilise different and conflicting conceptualisations and, second, that the practitioner concept is not consistent with any one of these. The article argues that the contemporary celebration of creativity is based on different meanings and unacknowledged conflicts. The article proposes that future social psychological research on creativity requires a more critical approach to the concept

Seeking children's perspectives: a respectful layered research approach

This article discusses why researchers and educators might choose to seek children's perspectives. It also highlights some of the key considerations when seeing children as having the right to contribute to decisions that affect them. The article draws on findings from a study that used pedagogically oriented methods for researching three- and four-year-old children's perspectives about outdoor spaces in the early childhood setting they attended. The article discusses the possibilities and practicalities of this research approach for both research and pedagogy. Examples are provided for others who may be considering working/researching in these ways

The development of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Amnesia and Déjà Vu

Scotland’s new Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has been widely acknowledged as the most significant educational development in a generation, with the potential to transform learning and teaching in Scottish schools. In common with recent developments elsewhere, CfE seeks to re-engage teachers with processes of curriculum development, to place learning at the heart of the curriculum and to change engrained practices of schooling. This article draws upon well-established curriculum theory (notably the work of both Lawrence Stenhouse and A.V. Kelly) to analyse the new curriculum. We argue that by neglecting to take account of such theory, the curricular offering proposed by CfE is subject to a number of significant structural contradictions which may affect the impact that it ultimately exerts on learning and teaching; in effect, by ignoring the lessons of the past, CfE runs the risk of undermining the potential for real change

Early childhood pedagogies: spaces for young children to flourish

This paper introduces the Special Issue of Early Child Development and Care focused on Early Childhood Pedagogy. It opens by considering past and present discourses concerning early childhood pedagogy, and focus is given to established philosophical underpinnings in the field and their translation to contemporary guidance, alongside research and policy. It is argued that early childhood pedagogy is a contested, complex and diverse space, yet these factors are entirely appropriate for supporting young children to flourish as valued individuals in different contexts. Building on this argument, it is posited that it may be more appropriate to discuss early childhood pedagogies rather than early childhood pedagogy. The paper goes on to critique a range of established early childhood pedagogies, before introducing 18 papers from across the world that make exciting new contributions to the discourse. It is intended that this collection will inspire new debates and fresh endeavours concerning early childhood pedagogies

Virology Experts in the Boundary Zone Between Science, Policy and the Public: A Biographical Analysis

This article aims to open up the biographical black box of three experts working in the boundary zone between science, policy and public debate. A biographical-narrative approach is used to analyse the roles played by the virologists Albert Osterhaus, Roel Coutinho and Jaap Goudsmit in policy and public debate. These figures were among the few leading virologists visibly active in the Netherlands during the revival of infectious diseases in the 1980s. Osterhaus and Coutinho in particular are still the key figures today, as demonstrated during the outbreak of novel influenza A (H1N1). This article studies the various political and communicative challenges and dilemmas encountered by these three virologists, and discusses the way in which, strategically or not, they handled those challenges and dilemmas during the various stages of the field’s recent history. Important in this respect is their pursuit of a public role that is both effective and credible. We will conclude with a reflection on the H1N1 pandemic, and the historical and biographical ties between emerging governance arrangements and the experts involved in the development of such arrangements

Regulation in `progressivist' pedagogic discourse: individualized teacher-pupil talk

This paper examines some discursive practices of `progressivist' education, in order to investigate the forms of power and control which constitute pedagogic knowledges and institutional subjects in the context of the `progressivist' classroom. It draws on the work of Basil Bernstein (1990), so as to theorize the classroom as `pedagogic discourse' and to foreground classroom practices as regulative practices which `recontextualize' discourses and knowledges under a principle of institutional control, rather than under a principle of pedagogic experience and learning, for pupils. Simultaneously, it uses Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992, 1995) as a methodology which grounds the theoretical claims on the regulative practices of `progressivist' pedagogic discourse onto concrete data of individualized teacher-pupil interaction. By examining textual properties of such interactions (particularly the teacher's extensive use of modality), the article claims that `progressivist' practices work in a subtle way, so as to privilege `procedural' or `ritual' types of knowledge rather than `principled' ones (Edwards and Mercer, 1987) and to produce pedagogic subjects who are oriented towards executing secretarial tasks, rather than developing autonomy and creativity in their learning

Spirituality expressed in creative learning: young children's imagining play as space for mediating their spirituality

Historically underpinning principles of the English curriculum framework for children from birth to five years explicitly acknowledged a spiritual dimension to children's uniqueness and well-being. Yet spirituality receives scant reference in the discourse of creative learning and teaching. This paper considers the relationship of spirituality to creativity and argues for a greater attentiveness to children's spirituality in early childhood education that acknowledges its presence in expression of children's thinking, creating and imagining. Located within an interpretive paradigm, this ethnographic study of children aged two and three years in a day nursery in England, explores how they express spirituality. A hermeneutic approach underpins the analysis and interpretation of the data. Findings reveal how in imaginative play, most often recognised in the early years curriculum as part of creative development, young children show a capacity for expressing meaning-making and negotiating identity, key dimensions of the spiritual in childhood