What is the true nature of thinking? Can it best be understood as a solitary activity of a lone individual? This book suggests that our grasp of creativity is impoverished because we fail to recognise the vital roles that partnerships, collaborations, friendships, and communities play in our thinking, learning, and understanding.

Creative Partnerships was launched in 2002 as an arts-based education programme that aimed to transform the aspirations of young people living in socially and economically deprived areas of England. The organisation was established in response to the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE, 1999), which offered an account of creativity as a means to foster individual self-reliance and social unity. This thesis explores how the NACCCE?s construction of creativity enabled New Labour to appear to endorse the value of the arts in education whilst promoting the model of the self as an autonomous economic unit, and considers how Creative Partnerships was paradoxically welcomed by supporters of the arts in education who were displeased with the instrumentalism at work in much of New Labour?s education policy. The aim of this thesis is to understand Creative Partnerships by examining the discourse that constitutes the programme, and by offering an empirical enquiry into a project that took place within a secondary school in the north of England. In so doing, this thesis critically evaluates the political motivation for the use of arts-based education as a means to develop self-reliance, and considers how successive governments have imported the free market economic model into education to promote efficiency, and the role that Creative Partnerships might be said to play in the maximisation of the total social system. Finally, this thesis considers the current limitations of Creative Partnerships, and how arts-based education might be used to develop social cohesion.

The authoritative guide to embedding creative learning in schools, written by a Director at Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE).

This book examines the gaps in creativity education across the education lifespan and the resulting implications for creative education and economic policy. Building on cutting-edge international research, the editors and contributors explore innovations in interdisciplinary creativities, including STEM agendas and definitions, science and creativity and organisational creativity amongst other subjects. Central to the volume is the idea that good creative educational practice and policy advancement needs to reimagine individual contribution and possibilities, whilst resisting standardization: it is inherently risky, not risk-averse. Prioritising creative partnerships, zones of contact, practice encounters and creative ecologies signal new modes of participatory engagement. Unfortunately, while primary schools continue to construct environments conducive to this kind of ‘slow education’, secondary schools and education policy persistently do not. This book argues, from diverse viewpoints and methodological perspectives, that 21st-century creativity education must find a way to advance in a more integrated and less siloed manner in order to respond to pedagogical innovation, economic imperatives and creative possibilities, and adequately prepare students for creative practice, workplaces and publics. This innovative volume will appeal to students and scholars of creative practice as well as policy makers and practitioners.

Since the establishment of the National Curriculum and the National Literacy and Numeracy strategies in 1998 and 1999, concerns have been expressed that creativity and innovative approaches to teaching may have been unintentionally constrained. Creative Partnerships was introduced as a two-year pilot scheme in 2002 in 16 local areas, and then more widely from 2004. The scheme funds creative professionals to go into schools and work in partnership with teachers and students, offers continuing professional development to school staff, and also provides guidance on creativity in relation to wider school improvement. This report focuses predominantly on Creative Partnerships as a scheme. Policy-makers now appear agreed on a definition of creativity which goes beyond the expressive and aesthetic arts, and agree that in educational terms creativity should extend right across the curriculum. Evidence suggests a very high level of support for more creative approaches to teaching among school staff and creative practitioners. Continuing professional development is of fundamental importance to embedding more creative approaches to teaching and learning, and should be seen as the core of the operation. Extending creative approaches beyond a particular activity and firmly embedding them in the wider curriculum remains a key challenge for schools and also for Creative Partnerships as an organisation. A priority now for Creative Partnerships and its two sponsoring Government departments in planning for the future should be to produce replicable models or templates, which can then be used and adapted to initiate work in other schools.

From authors used to operating between the commercial, public and independent sectors of the mixed cultural economy, Understanding Creative Business bridges the gap between creative practice and mainstream business organisation, entrepreneurship and management. Using stories, case studies and exercises it discusses the positioning of creative practice within professional and business development, cultural policy-making and the wider cultural economy, and suggests what the broader field of business and management studies can learn from the informal structure and working practices of creative industries networks. Consideration is given to how ethical and moral value orientations animate creative practice and how they play into the wider debate about social responsibilities within business and public policy. The authors also explore the way creative business practices often coalesce around emergent and self-organized networks and how this signals alternative approaches to management, entrepreneurship, business organisation and collaboration. Above all else this book is about relationships; the practical examples expose the ways creative business can professionalise research, develop and sustain routes to growth through 'open' collaborative innovation and the lessons this holds for more general business innovation and policy engagements with the public domain. Written in accessible language, this book will be useful to researchers, students, educators and practitioners within the creative industries; to those working within cultural policy, arts and cultural management; and to all with an interest in management and leadership.

13 essays from leading experts, discusses international trade in cultural goods and services, discusses integration of arts and cultural policy on urban revitalization, civic engagement and historic preservation