Considerate, convivial and capacious? Finding a language to capture ethos in ‘creative’ schools

ABSTRACT

Concepts of school ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ have been widely debated in education since the 1980s. This is partly as a consequence of marketisation, partly because ethos has been identified as a low-cost route to school improvement. Corporate, authoritarian, and most recently ‘military’ models of ethos have been widely promulgated in the UK. Another significant strand of educational thinking, however, has emphasised ethos for and as learning: how schools might prefigure alternative, more socially just, worlds. This article argues that accounting for such divergent notions of ethos demands greater attention to the intellectual resources mobilised in interpreting educational processes. We discuss schools that used their work with the English creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships, to develop what we describe as ‘considerate, convivial and capacious’ school ethos. We aim thereby to value their achievements, provide tools to contest dominant discourses around ethos, and advocate more critical, reflexive approaches to researching school cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• School ethos
• school culture
• post-structuralism
• creative learning
• creativity
• creative partnerships

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Teach First recruits successful graduates who commit to spend two years working in schools in disadvantaged areas. They receive some teacher education but also training in ‘leadership’ skills. After their period of ‘service’ they may stay in schools (possibly progressing rapidly into management) or continue into other careers. It is built on the ‘Teach for America’ programme which began to recruit graduates to work in leadership roles in low income schools in the US in 1990. ‘Teach for All’ is the globally expanding version of these programmes.

2 ASBO: ‘a court order … which places restrictions on the movements or actions of a person who persistently engages in anti-social behaviour … first applied in 1999’ (Oxford English Dictionary online, accessed 31 March 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Creativity, Culture and Education.