Some years ago now, my primary school dance club chose Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mushrooms’ (1962) to perform in a Medway town arts festival at Chatham dockyard. We...
It is 20 years since the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999) offered a simple if daunting definition of creativity:
I...
Assessment undertaken in schools should be valuable and worthwhile for students. In recent years, the pressures placed upon schools to improve performance have ...
In the 60 years since CP Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959, there has been a considerable narrowing in the cultural divide between science and the humanities, and onl...
This case study describes a research project called SciArt designed to explore how encouraging collaboration between art and science supports students’ developi...
What are the arts for?
Howard Gardner (1990) suggested that the arts provide three interconnected developmental pathways: helping to develop a child’s percepti...
Schools love to measure things. They like to collect these measurements up and present the numbers as an ineffable truth about a pupil’s progress. The data is e...
Why teach art?
In recent years, time pressures and focus on core subjects in the primary classroom have meant that art – and other foundation subjects – have b...
To neglect the contribution of the arts in education, either through inadequate time, resources or poorly trained teachers, is to deny children access to one of...
Research focus: Possibility thinking and the arts
The arts are often underestimated in the curriculum, despite evidence indicating that they are central to the...
In 2017, the Cultural Learning Alliance published an updated version of their ‘Key research findings’, which explores large-scale research into the impact of ar...
Tower Hamlets did not have a single student entered for A-level music in 2017–18 (Whittaker et al., 2019). It’s shocking statistics like this that reassure us t...
Disciplines and interdisciplinarity
Historically, academic disciplines were defined through the departments within which they were taught at universities, with...
Whilst there is clear intention that children should have opportunities for practical experience, this seems to be limited to performance skills, rather than co...
On 26 May 2019, a range of news sources reported on a 'crisis in music education' (Alberge, 2019), telling of how A-level and GCSE music entries are falling sha...
The basis of teaching in a practical classroom, such as art and design or design technology, is the much repeated and reliable teacher-led demonstration. These ...
As the focus of Ofsted moves to a broad and balanced curriculum and ensuring that cultural capital is developed alongside knowledge, the inclusion of the perfor...
We know that participation in structured arts activities can improve learning, attainment, employability, health and social engagement (Cultural Learning Allian...
Up-skilling teachers in ‘drama for learning’
It is worth all teachers knowing some drama strategies and conventions and how to use them effectively. There are ...
The aim of this project was to see how drama could be used to contextualise understanding across a range of subjects. Dorothy Heathcote MBE created ‘Mantle of t...
