Tags: Creativity | Curriculum Manager | Teaching & Learning | Teaching & Learning Coordinator
As you begin a new school year, fresh and rejuvenated from the summer break, many of you will be looking for new and inspiring ways to achieve more creative teaching and learning throughout your school. If you’ve not heard of Creative Partnerships, then now would be a good time to find out more.
www.creative-partnerships.com
Based at Arts Council England and funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the DfES, it was set up in 2002 with the aim of helping schools to tap into the creative hotpot of talent contained in the UK, which produces some of the most creative designers, artists, musicians and creative thinkers in the world, states the website. It allows schools to access new ways of developing creativity in learning to animate the national curriculum and further enrich school life by helping them to link with cultural organisations and creative practitioners in their area, including architects, theatre companies, museums, cinemas, historic buildings, dance studios, recording studios, orchestras, website designers and many others.
It first helps schools to identify their individual needs before showing them how to develop long-term, sustainable partnerships with organisations and individuals. Each school involved works with a creative director to devise ambitious and adventurous programmes of creative and cultural activity, focused on learning outcomes and on the aspirations of the schools and their staff. The creative learning that these projects aim to achieve is about equipping pupils with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in today’s world, nurturing ways of thinking and working that encourage imagination, independence, tolerance of ambiguity and risk, openness, and the raising of aspirations.
To find out about transformative projects developed by schools throughout the country, head to the project gallery section. Here you can search by region, subject area, year, key stage and artform. The variety is wide, from film animation projects and creating an interactive science corridor, to using creativity to develop employment opportunities and setting up a youth parliament.
You can also explore by project outcome, for students, teachers, schools and cultural and creative partners — head to the ‘research and evaluation’ section for this. For example, a search on projects that led to students being able to identify problems and ask unusual questions produced a 10-page list of different projects achieving this aim.
So if you are looking for inspiring ways to increase the creativity of the teaching and learning that goes on in your school, then head to this website today and begin exploring the many innovative projects that are housed within its pages.