ABSTRACT

The early years of the twenty-first century brought significant attempts across the United Kingdom (and elsewhere, for example Australia, Canada, Europe and the Nordic countries, Singapore, Taiwan and more recently the USA) to highlight the creativity in education by codifying it in the curriculum and emphasising the role of partnership work to inspire and nurture creativity in young people. Creativity and learning have increasingly been seen as intertwined, and with policy change has emerged a vocabulary around learning (and pedagogy) which frames ways in which educators and researchers understand how to develop both. Woods and Jeffrey (1996), Craft (1997) and Harland et al. (1998) during the 1990s had distinguished between creative teaching and teaching for creativity. Creative teaching has come to be understood as focused on exciting, innovative, engaging and often memorable pedagogy, whereas teaching for creativity was more overtly focused on the creativity of the learner. Creative learning, a term which emerged more through policy than research during the first decade of the twenty-first century, remains to great degree a term in search of meaning (Sefton-Green, 2008), though it has been described by Jeffrey and Craft (2006) as a ‘middle ground’ between creative teaching and teaching for creativity.