Creative Activism – learning everywhere with children and young people

Creative activism is an approach to education that asks, ‘What can happen when we take learning outside the classroom and think of it happening everywhere?’. Two charities - House of Imagination and Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination - have been asking this question in their creative place-making programmes working with socially engaged artists and communities linked to primary schools in Bath and Cambridge. Young children and adults co-create and speculate about the future of their communities and environments in these different geographical locations. This article draws together our shared understanding of creative pedagogies and the value to everyone of working in this way

STEM to STEAM as an approach to human development: the potential of arts practices for supporting wellbeing

The National Science Foundation conceived the term STEM with an emphasis on the links between economic prosperity and knowledge-intensive jobs that are dependent on science and technology. As such, traditionally STEM subject initiatives have aligned with and facilitated a largely economic conceptualisation of human and social development. It seems likely that the wellbeing crisis that we are experiencing in the West is linked to this. This is compounded by the rising influence of technology which has facilitated what is sometimes called the indoorisation of children, and the raised levels of parental concern about safety; from this follows an associated sense of disenfranchisement for children, with consequences for their wellbeing and happiness. This chapter begins with an overview of the impact of STEM on wellbeing, arguing that a focus on human development after Sen and Nussbaum is a more holistic approach to understanding wellbeing. In this understanding, wellbeing arises from an entanglement of threads representing the different elements of an individual’s life, such as their physical health, their social networks, their access to wild, natural and outdoor spaces, and so forth. This chapter focuses specifically on this access to wild, natural and outdoor spaces (using the arts and arts-based research to mediate this access) to consider how the capability approach provides a foundation for a broadly conceived notion of wellbeing that incorporates environmental sustainability, social justice and future economic wellbeing. Nussbaum’s list of capabilities is used as a framework with which to analyse focus group data from artists working with the arts-based charity Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination. The chapter concludes by considering how working with artists as co-researchers and how the co-development of artwork between children and artists might expose a more holistic understanding of the entangled roles of art and wild/natural/outdoor spaces in the wellbeing of young people. In so doing the chapter adds to conceptualisations of childhoodnature which seek to demonstrate that children and nature are inextricably linked through shared characteristics such as freedom and a non-linear view of time

ArtScapers online resource

ArtScapers online is a resource for creative practitioners interested in exploring change alongside children. It displays the key principles that have informed the ArtScapers work. There are five core values that define our approach to art in education, these are: slowing down, imagining, co-creating, not knowing, and looking differently. This resource shows how those were explored through creative arts workshops on site. Online resource also includes information about the programme, how to join in and research links to key documents that describe ArtScapers, evaluation reports and research. ArtScapers takes an approach to arts engagement that has creativity at its core. The North West Cambridge Development Art Programme involves research into the work of contemporary artists who have been commissioned to research the site itself, the local landscape and the context and location of Cambridge. It provides a valuable opportunity to address some of the socio-cultural tensions between University and non-University communities. What has emerged through the ArtScapers research is a pedagogical approach with five core values that are based around creative pedagogic theory: slowing down, imagining, co-creating, not knowing, and looking differently

ArtScapers: being and becoming creative

This book tells the story of ArtScapers, an Art-in-Education programme as part of the University of Cambridge's North West Cambridge Development. Written as a collaboration between the projects art education consultant Esther Sayers, project manager Ruth Sapsed, Head teacher Paul Ayliffe and Academic David Whitley with Susanne Jasilek, Filipa Pereira-Stubbs, Caroline Wendling and the children and community of Mayfield Primary School, Cambridge; this publication is an account of the impact of the ArtScapers programme on the community linked to Mayfield Primary School. "An inspiring story, beautifully told –– of how children are wondernauts; of how art and making can change minds and lift hearts; of how using the outdoors as a classroom can transform learning, and bring joy and hope. It's a chronicle of the ongoing, unfurling adventures of the imagination in one place, with one group, which ripples outwards in powerful ways." Rob Macfarlane, writer and CCI Patro