Creativity in primary level dance ed

37 Pages·2009·0.29 MB·English

ORE Open Research Exeter
TITLE
Creativity in primary level dance education: moving beyond assumption
AUTHORS
Chappell, Kerry
JOURNAL
Research in Dance Education
DEPOSITED IN ORE
22 May 2009
This version available at
http://hdl.handle.net/10036/68770
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Creativity in primary level dance education: Moving beyond assumption

Introduction
This paper represents the final layer of analysis which was carried out in relation to a doctoral
study investigating the conceptions of and approaches to creativity of three expert specialist
dance teachers within late primary age dance education in the UK. Paralleling developments
within the mainstream creativity in education practice and research communities in the United
Kingdom which saw endeavours shift from investigating the nature of creativity and its nurture to
problematising creativity, this research journeyed through a number of analytic phases to offer a
variety of insights into creativity in dance education at the primary level.

In its early stages, between 2001 and 2003, the research was taking place in the context of the
afterglow of the National Advisory Committee on Creativity and Cultural Education Report
(NACCCE, 1999), and initiatives which stemmed from it such as Creative Partnerships
(www.creative-partnerships.com, ongoing). Of particular relevance to dance education, the report
and subsequent initiatives had advocated that school children should have the opportunity to
develop creativity in learning via collaborative partnerships making best use of the UK's creative
wealth. As part of this ‘creative wealth’, dance education organisations were identified as key
potential partners in the drive for developing creativity.

As Projects Manager within the Laban Education and Community Programme
(www.laban.org/laban/education__community.phtml), this directly impacted on my work with
dance artists and educators within the programme1. At this point it is important to acknowledge
that the three expert specialist dance teachers involved in the study are of a very particular kind.

1 This Education and Community Programme is part of Laban, one of the leading conservatoire’s for dance
artist training in the United Kingdom. It runs classes, workshops, projects and teacher development
sessions in dance, in a wide variety of life-long educational and community settings, across London and
nationwide in partnership with dance organisations, agencies and professional dance companies.
(www.laban.org/laban/education__community.phtml)
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Their professional identity can be defined as a hybrid of dance educator and dance artist. They
teach on short-term contracts and in visiting capacities both in projects designed and established
by dance educators and projects responding to the government agenda. They all have extensive
experience as dance educators with some degree of experience, either past or present of
creating and/or performing as a dance artist.

Increasingly, as a team, we found ourselves surrounded by claims, assumptions, directives,
definitions, funding and project awards focused on creativity. Initially this provoked questions
around the nature of creativity in dance education, what it means to be able to teach for creativity
within dance, and what this means in relation to the wider current educational agenda.
Responding to these questions of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of creativity for these expert specialist
dance teachers in the context of the creativity agenda in the UK, formed the main body of the
research.

A secondary analytic focus arising during the study and guided by researchers such as Russell
and Munby (1991) and Tillema (2004), involved framing the specialist dance teachers’
conceptions and practice in relation to creativity in terms of the pedagogical dilemmas or puzzles
that they encountered. Grounded in Schön’s (1987) epistemology of practice, these researchers
argue that this way of framing can be used to describe an inner debate between action and
professional views, providing insight into the link between teachers concepts and their solutions
to problems. A focus on dilemmas or puzzles and their situational solutions also provides a way
of articulating experts’ approaches to teaching for creativity which can be used by other teachers
to stimulate flexible and situationally responsive reflective practice, without becoming constrained
into rigid ‘how to’ guides to teaching for creativity.

The emergence of dilemmas as a secondary analytic focus mirrored an increasingly felt need
within the mainstream creativity in education practice and research communities to problematise
creativity in educational settings as the initial afterglow of the NACCCE Report (1999) faded (e.g.
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Craft, 2005; Jeffery, 2005; Murphy, McCormick, Lunn, Davidson and Jones, 2004). Similarly as
creativity was increasingly put under the spotlight in the dance education realm, concern was
growing regarding the assumption that dance education labelled as ‘creative’ inherently
engenders creativity by default of the activities therein. There was therefore perceived danger for
some of choreography becoming formulaic rather than truly encouraging creativity (e.g. Ackroyd,
2001). The risk of formulaic choreographic processes and products being produced within
supposedly creative experiences in school dance education has also been highlighted again
more recently by Jobbins (2006), and in arts education generally within the recent Ofsted Report
of Creative Partnerships which states “sometimes in arts subjects creativity was assumed when it
was not necessarily evident” (p. 3, Ofsted, 2006). This secondary analytic focus of the dilemmas
that the dance teachers faced and overcame provided an insightful way of moving beyond the
assumption of creativity within dance education. Within the situations being studied in this
research, the dilemmas provided a way of articulating the issues and tensions which might be
endangering meaningful creative experiences for the learner in dance education.

Theoretical Framework
In theoretically contextualising and conceptualising this study, a framework was developed which
brought together previous theorising and research from both national and international
mainstream creativity in education and dance education literature. Craft’s (2000) theory of “little c
creativity” (p. 3) and its overlapping lenses of people, process and domain was particularly
influential.

The theory was prioritised and given in depth consideration for a number of reasons. Firstly,
Craft’s (Craft et al, 1997) work is cited within the NACCCE report (1999) and as such this work
and developments since (2000, 2002) provide a key part of the research now contributing to the
creativity in education agenda in England. It might also be argued that it is the most fully
developed ‘theory of creativity in education’ existing in relation to the English educational context
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at the time of this research. Secondly, Craft (2000) incorporates and inter-relates a great deal of
the existing strands and debates surrounding creativity in education shortly after the NACCCE
Report was published. This includes those aspects of the psychoanalytic, humanist, cognitive,
personality and social systems approaches to creativity which might be most fruitfully inter-related
and applied into a theory of ‘everyday’ creativity which is conceptually appropriate to educational
settings. For these reasons the work was considered as a key influence on the context and
environment within which the specialist dance teachers were and are working.

Thirdly, because of the theory’s selection and inter-relation of a variety of approaches, as Craft
(2000) herself argues, the conceptual strands within the theory stretch beyond the ‘imaginative
activity’ at the heart of the NACCCE Report’s (1999) definition of creativity. She therefore
acknowledges and incorporates criticisms of the cognitive (e.g. Torrance, 1963) and personality
(e.g. Shallcross, 1981) approaches and their attempted resolution within the systems theory
approach (e.g. Feldman, Csizzentmihalyi and Gardner, 1994). This is important for this study,
because as will be exampled below, the theory’s strands resonate with and articulate aspects of
creativity implicit within much of the dance education literature’s discussions of creativity.

Craft (2000, 2002) uses two (individual and domain) of the three (individual, field, domain) strands
of the framework from the social systems theory approach to creativity, because they emphasise
the importance of seeing creativity as coming from the interaction of people and the wider domain
in which they are working. It must be noted that Craft extends the notion of the individual and
their intelligences within Feldman et al’s theory to the notion of ‘people’ in order to incorporate
more of an idea of “personal-as-a-whole” (Craft, 2000, p. 18). Craft also sees Feldman et al’s
(1994) framework as not satisfactorily acknowledging the role of processes as part of creativity,
and introduces this as the third interactional node within her theory.

When compared with the dance education creativity literature, these strands - people, process,
domain - resonate with and articulate aspects of creativity implicit within much of that literature.
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In particular, connections can be made between Craft’s articulation of people and Smith-Autard’s
(1994) discussions of the individual, and subjectivity incorporated in creativity within the UK
Midway Model of Dance Education, also Americans Green (1993), Stinson (1998) and Shapiro’s
(1998) foci on self and agency at the heart of creativity in dance. Similarly connections are
apparent between Craft’s discussion of processes and Smith-Autard’s (1994) foci on the
intertwined processes of creating, performing and appreciating inherent within creative activity,
Redfern’s (1982) articulation of imagination in dance, American Hanstein’s (1990) development of
the Artistic Process Skill Model incorporating creativity, and Schwartz (1993), Lynch Fraser
(1991) and Lindqvist’s (2001) considerations of play as part of creative dance processes. In this
way the strands of Craft’s (2000) theory catalyse and bring into shape the conceptual framework
for this study, within which the dance teachers conceptions of and approaches to creativity were
studied.

When visually representing people, process and domain, Craft (Craft et al, 1997) overlaps all
three components in a three-dimensional venn diagram. As this study was considering aspects
of people and process within a particular domain, the configuration of the three strands, which
made the most sense in terms of facilitating this study, prioritised people and process within the
wider circle of domain (see Figure 1). For the purposes of this study, environment was also
explicitly included within the visual representation of the framework, as it emerged as
fundamentally important to investigating teaching for creativity and how the dance teachers’
conceptions and approaches are shaped and influenced by experience and situation. Craft
includes environment within their discussions but not her diagrammatic representation.

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PEOPLE PROCESSES

DOMAIN
ENVIRONMENT

Figure 1: The inter-acting strands of the conceptual framework

Relation between Theory and Research
It is important to emphasise that framing the study in this way does not represent an attempt to
consider every potential aspect of the interaction between people and process within domain and
environment. The framework is not an attempt to test or develop a new theory of creativity in
dance education. Hammersley and Atkinson (1983), drawing on Glaser and Strauss’ (1967),
make a distinction between ‘substantive’ and ‘formative’ theory which is useful in understanding
this point. The former is described as being more ‘topical’, concerned with types of people and
situations readily identified in everyday language. The latter is described as being more ‘generic’
and abstracted, developed more for a formal or conceptual area of sociological enquiry. It is
theory building of the substantive kind that was carried out here in response to emergent findings;
that is theory building in relation to a particular group of dance teachers, in a particular area of
their conceptions and approaches.

Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) also distinguish between micro and macro levels of analysis;
the former referring to local forms of organisation, the latter referring to “large scale systems of
social relations linking many different settings to one another through causal relations” (p. 204).
This study works in the area of micro level theory building, that is expert specialist dance
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teachers’ conception of and approaches to teaching for creativity in specific educational contexts,
focused on a specific set of relationships.

In building theory of whichever kind, Bassey (1999) argues that it is vital to “relate the argument
or story to any relevant research in the literature”. He is clear that finding a new piece of the
theoretical puzzle is of limited value unless it can be fitted into a growing picture. Merriam (1988)
argues that “the process is one of flexible interaction between phenomenon and theory” and that
“theory permeates the entire process” (p. 60).

Existing theory was therefore used in this study in the early stages as both Merriam (1988) and
Bassey (1999) recommend in order for the researcher to interpret and synthesise what has been
published in relation to conceptions of and approaches to creativity in dance education and in
mainstream educational research. This literature reviewing process also fed into the honing of
the research questions alongside early time in the field (see Chappell, 2006a, section 3.4 for full
details of how this theoretical framework encapsulated and related to the subsidiary research
questions).

Although analysis was carried out inductively using the grounded theory method (see method
section below), as Merriam (1988) makes clear, on occasion, existing theory and deduction can
feed in. Merriam (1988) argues that the insights that inform new theory (in this case substantive
micro level theory) can come from existing theory as well as one’s imagination, personal
experience and others’ experience. For Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) the key to using existing
theory in this way “is to line up what one takes as theoretically possible or probable with what one
is finding in the field” (p. 253), rather than “merely selecting data for a category that has been
established by another theory” (p. 37).

In the final analysis and write up stages, the relationship between theory and research remained
interactive, in order to demonstrate the significance of the findings, the ‘new piece of the
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theoretical puzzle’, in relation to the existing theoretical picture synthesised within the literature
review. Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) have argued that on one level substantive theory
building can obviously contribute to substantive theory – in this case theory relating to expert
specialist dance teachers’ conceptions of and approaches to creativity. They are also clear that,
if applied carefully making clear connections, findings from substantive studies can also be
applied to other areas of substantive theory and more general categories of relevant formal
theory – in this case theory relating to aspects of teaching for creativity in other areas of
education. Both of these kinds of contributions are therefore considered later for this study.

Methodology & Methods
The research methodology was firmly grounded within the qualitative interpretive realm,
acknowledging reality as socially constructed and investigating meaning within that paradigm
(Marshall and Rossman, 1995). This was coupled with Stenhouse’s (1985) multi-case
educational case study approach, which allowed for the development of understanding of the
complexity and particularity of each dance teachers’ conceptions of and approaches to creativity
in context. Data collection methods used within the study were: stimulated recall semi-structured
interviews with dance teachers and children; participant observation in classes; video (particularly
useful for later task analysis) and photography; collection of documentation; and reflective diaries.
The research was designed to allow the researcher to consecutively spend a period of
approximately twelve weeks in the field with each dance teacher, carrying out cycles of data
collection and analysis, followed by an extended period of analysis, applying the principles of
constant comparative analysis (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) throughout.

Early analysis involved immersion in the data, starting afresh in each site to cyclically work
through fieldnotes, video and photographic data, documentation, and interview transcripts, as
they were generated to create code labels, and then categories. Italics used in the text below
indicate category and sub-category labels developed during analysis (the full final category list is
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provided in Appendix 1). Double quotation marks indicate the participants’ own words. By the
beginning of case three, it became apparent that the emerging categories had strong similarities
for all three teachers, with the differences lying in the subtle dynamic relationships between sub-
categories. Memo and vignette writing, reflective diaries, and diagrammatic manipulation of data,
working through iterations with the dance teachers, were invaluable during this process.

In order for detailed analysis to take place, particularly to understand the subtle differences in
pedagogy (e.g. see Balancing Personal/Collective Voice and Craft/Compositional Knowledge
dilemma below), it was necessary to then develop a task analysis system. Firstly, an interim
categorisation system was developed which investigated task dynamics. It included type of task,
the dance teachers’ delivery style, and aspects of the dance teachers’ internal task structure.
Secondly, a pro forma and questioning structure was developed to provide a structure within
which the researcher could use the interim categorisation system, and develop it into the final
version which can be seen in Appendix 1. All analytic activity sought to achieve trustworthiness,
quality and rigour through the application of Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) principles of credibility,
transferability, dependability and confirmability. Further information including detailed examples
of task analysis can be found within Chappell (2006a, section 4.8).

The generalisations to be made from the findings of this study are of a particular kind. Fortin and
Siedentop (1995), drawing on Shulman (1983), are clear that studies of this nature are aiming for
generalisations described as ‘images of the possible’. Key to this (Schofield, 1993) is the use of
contextualising descriptions. This allows the reader to understand the details of the situation from
within which the findings were generated, and to compare these with the situation to which they
are looking to apply them, in order to judge for applicability.

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