Culture and Creative Learning

Culture and Creative Learning: a literature review

Ken Jones

This review focuses on debates that have occurred in and around English education since 1944. It tracks a sequence of intense and continuing arguments about the proper meanings of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’, about their salience to education, and, through education, to wider issues of equality, democracy, economics and emancipation.

Who are the participants in these arguments? In the 30 years after 1944, the review identifies three main currents of thought and practice:

• a cultural conservatism for which tradition and authority are important reference points;

• a progressivism concerned with child-centred learning;

• and a tendency whose belief that ‘culture is ordinary’ led to an insistence that working-class and popular culture should be represented in the classroom.

After the ‘great transformation’ of the 1970s and 1980s, new protagonists emerged. These included currents of thought that have seen ‘creativity’ as central to the knowledge economy, as well as new theoretical frameworks that insist on the socio-cultural nature of learning. Their prominence did not mean the total eclipse of older perspectives, whose continuing histories are dealt with in the later sections of the review. In many cases, the review suggests, ‘new’ positions intertwined with older understandings.

Read the rest of the paper on the Creative Partnerships website at

http://www.creativitycultureeducation.org/data/files/cce-lit-review-83.pdf