Philosophically, Creative Partnerships begins with the straightforward idea that teachers want to teach and children want to learn, but that too often other things interfere, the most common culprit being fixed ideas — among teachers, parents, even students — about how ‘learning’ happens. Experienced Creative Partnerships practitioners start small. Simply conducting a lesson outside of the classroom — in the sports hall, under a tree on the playground — can produce remarkably positive changes in student focus, just because it introduces novelty and curiosity. One looks for the slightest opening of a window through which new ideas might flow. It might be a throwaway comment by a teacher saying she’d found some new ways to talk to her students; it could be a single pupil who starts showing up in class rather than skipping school altogether.
Practitioners must tread deftly. Perhaps more than any other institution, schools are where a society is laid bare: its values, its aspirations and its cultural and political codes are visibly at work for all to see, for better or worse. Nonetheless, having worked with teachers, artists and students in six countries, I’ve found that some things are universal. Schools are places of constant change, yet can be deeply conservative — not least because they are the most regulated, structured, and procedural public spaces in any society. Even the tiniest change can have unpredictable ripple effects in terms of workload, curriculum, resources and the always-delicate relationship between teachers, pupils and parents.