ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the wider political and cultural context affecting primary education and offers some general background on creative teaching and the arts in the 1990s. Woods (1995, pp. 1–2) defines creative teaching as being ‘reflective’ rather than ‘routine’ involving ‘holistic perceptions’ of children and the curriculum and as being concerned with ‘the affective as well as the cognitive’ (p. 2) and the ‘whole child’. Woods also indicates that creative teachers tend to see knowledge as ‘indivisible’ and are deeply knowledgeable of ‘subject matter, pedagogy and pupils’. They have ‘adaptability and flexibility’, show both ‘flair’ and ‘discipline’ and are skilled in avoiding polarized views and resolving the dilemmas of everyday practice (Pollard and Tann, 1992). In the 1960s early pioneering versions of creative teaching associated with project work and the processes of the integrated arts were officially endorsed by the Plowden Report (CACE, 1967). By the 1990s, however, much had changed with the ‘Three Wise Men Report’ (Alexander et al., 1992) criticizing ‘Plowdenism’ and marking the fact that child-centred teaching had finally fallen from ‘official grace’ (Darling, 1994, p. 108). Creative teaching through the arts also lost its previous place in the renewed utilitarian climate in which attempts to strengthen instrumental and vocational rather than personal and liberal education aims were made. These changes are reviewed here in order to set creative teaching within a longer perspective after World War II and to relate the gradual politicization of primary education after Plowden to the wider general context of cultural change. Against the prevailing stereotypes, it is suggested that primary teachers in general responded to social and cultural change by becoming increasingly reflective rather than ideological, and that this professional development was post-modern rather than progressive. A brief case study of a project based in the arts is considered in this light, and creative teaching is connected to cultural reconstruction and a democratic future.
