Paper for the SEBDA International Conference 2010

Making schools fitting places for all: a creative approach

Melanie Nind*, Georgie Boorman and Gill Clarke

University of Southampton, School of Education

*

Abstract

In the UK girls are the ‘emblem of educational success’ (McLeod & Allard 2001:1), one possible explanation for their success being that girls are suited to the current education system or vice versa. Girls who fall outside this expectation are poorly catered for. Approximately 20% of permanent school exclusionsare girls (DCSF 2008) and for them it could be said that the schools ‘don’t fit the students’. The response of placing them in boy-dominated pupil referral units or schools for pupils with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD) can lead to an even poorer fit.

This paper reports on a collaborative Knowledge Transfer Project between university academics and the staff and students of a new school for girls excluded from mainstream provision for BESD. One project goal was to develop an holistic curriculum tofit the girls’ educational and social needs. This involved interrogation of evidence on ‘what works’ with girls/students with BESD, gathering and analysing the views of stakeholders, particularly the girls themselves, and action research with the school community to understand and enhance the emerging curriculum. One element of the process and product is explored in this paper, namely that of creativity.

Although the girls are in segregated provision the aim remains one of educational inclusion through re-engaging them. Ultimately this is a creative process of possibility thinking (Craft et al. 2008). In the paper we discuss evidence of the role of creative learning in inclusionthrough engaging pedagogies andalternative spaces (Noyes 2008) that afford different communicative and relational patterns. We explore the potential of creative work asidentity work (Miles 2007b), disrupting self-image and creating new and positive relationships.

Introduction

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships are intended to be a vehicle for knowledge to transfer from the academy and into businesses to make economic and social impact. The research associates employed to act as the conduits for this transfer often find themselves in a much more creative business of knowledge generation, combining different forms of knowledge to create new knowledge for the benefit of all. In the Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the university and an independent school for girls with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties this was very much the case. The aim was to develop a robust, holistic educational mode that was based on evidence, and a good fit for the girls’ educational and social needs, and transferable to new settings. We wanted to make use of the established knowledge base about ‘what works’ with students with BESD,but as most of this is based on boys then the relevance for the sixteen girls (aged 12-16) placed in the school we shall call Kahlo was questionable. Moreover, Fletcher-Campbell and Wilkins (2003, in Russell & McGuigan 2007) argue that only 25 of 300 innovations for learners with BESD reported in journals were supported by evidence. Although newly established,Kahlo school was already operating with emergent practices based on a combination of a strong foundation of values, the experiential knowledge of the teachers, learning on the job, and the influence of the girls’ responses. Developing the educational model, therefore, involved interrogating the research and practice literature, gathering and analysing the views of stakeholders, particularly the girls themselves, and employing elements of action research to understand and enhance the emerging curriculum.

The outcome was a model that articulated the ethos encircling the school and binding the community together, the fundamental foundations underpinning all school activity, the core practices informed by and compatible with these foundations and the learning experiences based on all of these. One core practice and accompanying learning experiences that we identified as significant was creativity in teaching and learning, based on a valuing of the teachers and learners as creative beings. We sought to understand this better and to examine the fit with the research evidence and why this approach met the girls’ and schools’ needs.

The need for creative solutions

Probing the literature helps to explain why a school like Kahlo should seek to foreground creativity. It is from Deschenes et al. (2001, cited in Smyth 2004 and Miles 2007b) that we find the helpful notion of schools that‘don’t fit the students’. A consequence of a poor-fitting school for the student can be that theybecomeidentified with having special or additional needs, a labelling process is instigated wherebythe young person becomes pathologised, which in turn has an impact on their attachment to education (Cooper 2008). When the label given to the young person is BESD the outcome is anincreased likelihood of punitive discipline rather than support for their inclusion (Jull 2008). A further consequence is that efforts to listen to the voices of the students may actually reduce (see Cefai Cooper 2009).To turn this around, such that the school becomes a better fit for the students, the students can re-story their experiences and their identity, means of expression are found and attachments can be formed, requires considerable creativity on a number of levels.

Being creative can be about freeing oneself of pre-existing ideas and limitations. For young people labelled with BESD, their experience of education is likely to have been being ‘packaged as units to be assessed rather than as agents being prepared for active engagement with the world that awaits them’ (Miles 2007a: 280).It may be that they‘did not feel they belonged in school, not because they wanted to avoid it, but because from their perspective the school environment actively discouraged them from playing any kind of pro-active role’ (Miles 2007b: 510). One student at Kahlo explained her experience of being pre-judged:

None of the teachers ever liked me anyway because they all read my file and stuff, then basically they thought she’s a pain in the arse from the get-go. That’s what they thought of me, and that’s how they treated me … every single school I have been to I reckon they have read my files and they didn’t get to know me, at this school … I don’t think [they] really read my file. I think they got to know me for me … and not for my file. But in mainstream schools, they get to know you from your file, and not your – not you basically.

Schools and learners wanting to reject the negative consequences of labels can find a better fit with process-focused rather than product-focused approaches. Craft et al. (2008:42) describe how ‘inclusion of creative processes within the school setting draw attention to processes rather than simply outcomes … [with learners] seen as competent, constructing unique meaning whilst engaged with others’. Further, Cole and Knowles’ (2008) point tothe importance of finding the most appropriate media for young people to express their voices. There has been a cultural shift in which the potential of creative solutions has been recognised in the UK with the instigation of Creative Partnerships as a ‘cultural offer’ designed to have an impact on pedagogies and result in whole-school changes, encouraging environments to be more inclusive (Thomson et al. 2009). Globally there have been assertions about ‘creative learning as a form of inclusive education’ (Miles 2007b: 505)and as such an ‘avenue to participation and social inclusion’ (Carrington et al.2007: 107).

Creativity at KahloSchool

The ethos of Kahlo school is about building relationships with students within a safe environment from which the girls feel able to access and engage with education. Central to this is the focus on voice for the girls - encouraging participation in learning and in the school community (Clarke, Boorman & Nind, in press). Nina, a student, describes the ethos at Kahlo in contrast to that of her mainstream schools, identifying the relationships within the school as fundamental to these differences:

it’s like a big deranged family it’s like… it’s not a school. … It’s not like a school because like, we don’t do school things, well we do maths and science and shit like that, but you don’t, do, things like as mainstream school does, because it’s more closer, and you talk more, and you get to know everybody, if you get what I’m saying.

Another student, Hannah, stresses the attention to knowing the student through listening to them as underpinning the ethos in Kahlo.

The staff team have worked on establishing and encouraging links between subjects in an integrated approach to the curriculum. For example in maths the girls have undertaken a module on perspective and optical illusions based on shape, introducing ideas about things not being what they seem and maths not being just sums or numbers. They have worked to create alternative learning spaces (to traditional lessons) which, asNoyes (2008) argues, afford different communicative and relational patterns. Hall and Thomson (2007: 323) cite a student who commentsthat ‘an ordinary lesson feels like you’re at school. When you compare it to the art lesson, the art lesson feels totally different’. At Kahlo, many of the integrated curricula spaces felt different to formal spaces in which the girls had previously experienced failure and rejection and in which they had actively communicated dislike.

The art teacher was passionate in interview about the potential of the space he created in his lessons for the girls ‘to express themselves, to build confidence, to learn new skills; I find art relaxing, and I think the girls do’. He was acutely aware that to enable engagement the curricular activities had to link in with the girls’ cultures: ‘It needs to be fun and it needs to look good … a lot of things in these kids’ lives is about looking good’. Arts-based processes were therefore becoming a means of expression in the school and much of the work focused on the girls’ communication of their identities. Through this both teachers and learners were negotiating their identities in relation to each other, enjoying their work and creating engagement sustained partly by a dynamic of peer enthusiasm.

Arts-based products though were also clearly important. One teacher explained:

I think it’s so important for these young people to be proud of something they’ve produced, as it gives you so much confidence’; ‘we’re working with people with lower self esteem than I could ever imagine possible … and when you see the little twinkle in their eye or a little smile because they’re proud of something it spurs both them on and you on … You can see the confidence and you can see their enthusiasm build.

As Miles (2007b) has argued, creative education affords alternative arenas for success and also removes fear of failure resulting from dichotomous right or wrong responses. A student cited by Hall and Thomson (2007: 323) sums this up as, ‘in art you can’t get anything wrong really’. We could see process and product combining at Kahlo to have a ripple effect, influential beyond the individual learner into more positive and dynamic interactions, relationships and the social environment.

During our involvement with the school our attention was drawn not just to the visual arts work, but also to the work on poetry and to the use of ICT and digital media. Work in all of these areas illustrated the value of creative approaches to creative learning for facilitating the engagement of learners who were previously disengaged. A situation reflected in Miles’ (2007b) argument is that creative approaches to learning can be seen as ‘identity work’as they support the location of self in the environment, identifying a position for oneself in the world, where previously this may not have been possible or imaginable. The cross-curricular theme towards the end of our two-year engagement with the school was ‘iDentity’ and we turn now to a more in-depth look at poetry and identity.

Poetry

Creative learning can put the learner’s biography ‘closer to the centre of the learning environment’ (Miles 2007a: 279) and this was the case in theiDentity poetry work. For the girls this was writing for a purpose, developed through stages. As one teacher explained, sometimes‘the only thing often we can relate to is our own experiences, what’s in our head or who we are, it’s all in your head’.Adams et al. (2008:11) explain that such internal processes present a challenge when they are unconnected to the broader environment; learning therefore can be about making connections if ‘it presents opportunities for placing themselves at the centre of their own learning, by drawing on personal experience, and referencing issues which emerge from their life-worlds’. At Kahlo ‘the girls had made a word list about what identity means to them, and the words they were coming out with were personal to them, like passport, journey. It was related to them, and all their poems and the poetry they’ve written is about themselves’ (teacher interview). The girls worked outwards from their lists of words to write poetry representing their identity. For the school this represented work in academic, social and therapeutic domains.

For this paper and for the purpose of hearing the girls’ voices in context, some of the poems are considered in relation to theirthemes, processesand mode of communication.

My past is like a tree all locked up as far away

As it could be but my future feels bleak to me

Stacey

Stacey introduces the issue of her identity as located in time, with themes of past and future emerging in the opening lines of the poem. Identifying as she does, the past as distance, with enforced containment within the self or between the self and other, and the future as limited or ‘bleak’, the assumed consequence would be a heavy investment in the present (as Devadson 2007 argues is common among young adults). This is illustrated in the poem in the sense in which there is some enjoyment of the role of her own character: ‘I’m also a funny person to be’. The label of BESD lingers in the poem as Stacey makes reference to herself as a ‘loud mouth’; she stresses the deterministic nature of this characteristic as ‘just me’. However, this potential challenge to others is juxtaposed beside a comment to those within her immediate environment, and the expressed importanceof significant others.Stacey is one of the few students who mention family positively in her poetry where the centrality of relationships to family and friends is presented as an anchor to her world. Her poem ends on a strengths-based positive, enjoyment at being herself.

Harriet opens her poem with an expressed sense of self as challenging to others, possibly experienced as ‘annoying’, again referencing the ‘difficulties’ discourse which typifies past educational experiences.

But changes will come with each passing day

People will come and people will go

Some of them I hope I get to know.

Harriet

Harriet also recognises the way the past exerts an influence on the present with reference to her past which seems to ‘catch up’ with her and as such is never left behind. Yet Harriet expresses no agency or control in escaping, or attempting to escape the past. This lack of agency is also evident in relation to the social world, where others impact on her emotional well-being: ‘I get upset when people mess up my head’. Time in the poem is related to change, implying the transitional, transient nature of relationships: ‘people will come and people will go’. She sees the potential for positive and negative: ‘some will bring happiness, some will bring tears’ and the affective importance of people passing through her life. For Harriet, the future is identified simultaneously as impending and ominous and as offering the possibility for wholeness - to feel complete. Relationships are the central thread throughout the poem despite their transience and her lack of personal responsibility for the nature of her interactions with others. This results in an understandable apprehension regarding the future, with such relationships beyond Harriet’s control, but central to her experience.

For Ellie, there is a sense that identity, where evidenced through behaviour, is contingent on the person being related to, thus the partner in interactions holds significance for how she behaves.

I’m helpful when I’m at school.

I’m helpful when I’m at home.

But when I’m not helpful people always moan.

Ellie

An element of choice is indicated by Ellie’s use of the world ‘can’ in reference to her behaviours. However, there is also an expressed awareness of the reciprocal nature of people and their behaviours on each other. She refers to a lack of predictability or conventional behaviour in herself, often without accompanying evaluative statements. However, for Ellie, her identity poetry references many strengths and positive behaviours, sometimes immediately countered with sarcasm, thus withdrawing the positive. She moves beyond simply the behavioural domain, referencing also affective, attitudinal, cognitive and physical appearance characteristics. Ellie identifies dissonance between her self-perception and external judgements which do not match the less positive evaluations of her appearance.