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Abstract
When a successful primary school engaged a writer to work with children on an arts project, the teachers and the writer thought that the result would be a lively, publishable product. When the writer worked with the children, he thought that he should use the children's experiences and ideas as a basis for meaningful and engaged composition. However, the result was a text which the head‐teacher and her staff felt was inappropriate. They were concerned that it could bring disapproval from parents and possible adverse publicity. The head refused to publish but continues to worry about this decision. The writer describes the project as censored. In this paper, we suggest that this critical incident raises important questions about the nature of ‘partnership’ between artists and schools and the role of the flagship Creative Partnerships policy and programme. We suggest some possibilities for dealing with such situations in future and argue that Creative Partnerships must do more to promote dialogue about the critical role of the arts and artists in society.
Notes
1. See http://www.creative‐partnerships.com/aboutcp/facts/. Accessed 2 August 2005.
2. ESRC–RES‐000‐22‐0834 (2004–06): Promoting social and educational inclusion through the creative arts.
3. We cannot cite the actual report because it will reveal the identity of the school.
4. A national investigation of arts education outcomes conducted by NFER (Harland et al., Citation2005) did not have such ‘critical cultural capital’ in its research framework.
5. We interviewed all of these children, the artist and their teachers in the first phase of our project.
6. Think here of Neighbours and Ramsay Street, the square in EastEnders or Coronation Street.
7. Think for example of Bladerunner (1982) with its perpetual gloomy light and continued drip of acid rain over decaying buildings, or Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998) with its eerie grey–yellow filter over a decaying cityscape.
8. Roald Dahl's (1995) alternative nursery rhymes contain similar gruesome images.
9. Our research project works with a reference committee made up of school staff and their CP advisor (absent from this meeting).
10. CP suggests that it too values these things and that these qualities are the reason for having artists working in schools.
11. Only four sources are used here—university–school partnerships, interagency projects, family–school partnerships, and school–business partnerships. There are, of course, many other sets of literature which address partnership.
12. Pringle (Citation2002) notes the need for more research about, as opposed to evaluations of, artist–school practices. In suggesting that artists should work with Freierian approaches and in suggesting social activism as one of the roles of artists in education, she opens up the possibility of critical incidents of the kind we have discussed.
13. Such debates have a long history (Dewey, Citation1934; Greene, Citation1995) and are alive and well in art education (see for example Eisner, Citation2002; Atkinson & Dash, Citation2005).
14. An Arts Council North East handbook on quality indicators for artist–school partnerships (Orfali, Citation2004) suggests that schools and artists must be ‘matched’. We suggest that if this is the prevailing way of thinking, then critical incidents such as the one we have described can be simply dismissed as cases of ‘poor matching’. In our view, the notion of match is of limited use since it renders invisible more significant issues around partnership.
15. See for example action research facilitated by Griffiths et al. (Citation2005).
