Since the end of the 1990s, creativity has become a growing area of interest once more within education and wider society. In England creativity is now named within the school curriculum and in the curriculum for children aged 3-5. There are numerous government and other initiatives to foster individual and collective creativity, some of this through partnership activity bringing together the arts, technology, science and the social sciences. As far as education is concerned, this growth in emphasis and value placed (...) on encouraging creativity can be seen as being in stark contrast with the government policy prevalent from the late 1980s onward. One of the underpinning themes and justifications for this re-kindling of interest in fostering creativity is that the individual and collective empowerment which is fostered by the development of creative skill is seen to be a good thing at the social and economic level in particular (Craft, 2002). These justifications have been discussed elsewhere (Jeffrey and Craft, 2001). But an important question to ask is, how desirable are the cultural norms of continual change and innovation in Western society? This paper examines some possible social, environmental, cultural and ethical limits to creativity, in the context of educating for creativity (NACCCE, 1999). It argues that the notion of creativity may be value- and culture-specific and that this poses the so-called liberal educator with various dilemmas of principle and pedagogy, which are explored. (shrink)

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Do psychological perspectives constitute the only way through which the role of musical creativity in education can be addressed, researched and theorised? This essay attempts to offer an alternative view of musical creativity as a deeply social and political form of human praxis, by proposing a perspective rooted in the thought of the political philosopher and activist Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997). This is done in two steps. First, an attempt is made to place the pursuit of the concept of musical creativity (...) within a larger educational and societal context of conflicting trajectories that run through (a) Modernity and (b) Education. Then, I revisit the issue of educational value of improvising and composing through creating conceptual links between the process of music-making through improvisation and composition and the project of political autonomy as conceived by Castoriadis. By foregrounding instituting imaginary over instituted imaginary, improvising and composing become active processes of positing new legitimacies, and of creating a music-making context that searches for its own foundations. It is in and through creative musical praxis that we can think about issues of hierarchies, musical values, social dimensions of different music-making processes, our relationship to past values and to historical dimensions of music. By arguing that improvisation and composition might be seen as ways of positing the issue of political autonomy in musical terms, this paper emphasises the role of improvisation and composition as a mode of potentially transformative educational practice that may foster the development of critical consciousness, linking music education to a larger project of re-discovering and at the same time re-defining democracy. (shrink)

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Alan Simpson; The Usefulness of ‘Aesthetic Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 273–280, https://doi.org/10.11.

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This paper employs aspects of Hannah Arendt’s thought to explore different but interrelated questions that haunt contemporary music education. We see the importance of a return to Arendt now more than ever as we find ourselves, three authors in three different countries, trying to contribute to democratic music education practices and to researching the conceptual base of such practices, in countries where technocratic approaches to policy development prevail. More specifically in this article we address the following questions: how can we (...) re-think the political and creative dimensions of music education pedagogies in the face of recent educational policy trends? How can we go beyond linearity in our everyday educational encounters? How can we create forms of music education practice and research that induce a continuous interplay between acting and thinking? We pursue these questions through reference to three specific forms of music education practice: research seminars for PhD-students and senior researchers, pre-service music teacher education, and teaching music improvisation. In the first part of the paper, Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist elaborates upon how Hannah Arendt’s thinking influences our teaching, taking an on-going research seminar in music education as an example of a common place. In the second part, Cathy Benedict writes of ‘meeting’ Arendt and coming to an awareness of how Arendt can help us interrogate practices we have come to assume as ‘the right ones’. Seeking to create together with her students an epistemological space of appearance she challenges common teaching strategies that seem to ‘work’. Working within a teacher preparation program she comes to realize that students must also reflect on these moments so as to name what has occurred; thus they need to engage in acts of performative listening, setting aside their own desire and need to speak and be heard first. Finally, in the third part, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos raises the complex issue of how we should respond to the current deluge of entrepreneurial approaches to creativity, its use value, and its role in education. Based on the proposition that acts of musical improvisation belong to the realm of action, Kanellopoulos revisits Arendt’s notion of conservatism with the aim of outlining a possible way through which contemporary improvisation pedagogy might be re-thought. Taken together these three sets of reflections serve to offer a framing of Arendt’s thinking for music educators in different contexts, showing how Arendt's ideas might serve as a fertile ground for thinking over our own teaching, our curricular decisions, and the choices we daily make over space and time that connect us through our distinctness. (shrink)

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