The educational importance of creativity in the lives of young people has long and rich history of scholarship. While much of this has concerned creativity and the arts, in the UK the publication in Citation1999 of the report All Our Futures by the National Advisory Committee on Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE) was regarded by many as an important call to extend the horizon of creativity beyond what has often been perceived to be the exclusive territory of the arts – performing, visual, written and verbal. Much of what followed in UK contexts saw a new alignment of creativity with such things as innovation, problem solving and entrepreneurialism; in short a repositioning of the value of creative activity and creative outcome primarily for economic competitiveness and benefit. Meanwhile, educational research in the domain of creativity was pointing to some of the stark differences between Western and Eastern conceptions of creativity (Craft, Citation2005; Lubart, Citation1999) and how this might necessarily shape our understanding, engagement and evaluation of creativity as a both a cultural and educational practice.
In the field of pastoral education and welfare, the value of creativity has been tacitly acknowledged but rarely fully explored and developed as a curriculum and pedagogical field of concern. The aim of this special edition, then, has been to begin to address this ‘blind spot’ and in doing so to examine the ways in which both fields of endeavour can be mutually connected through an inter-relationship of creative pastoral education. Not surprisingly, the call for papers has revealed three primary concerns for submitting authors – firstly, the power of visual methods in the representation of the lifeworld experiences of children and young people; secondly, the overwhelming desire to position children as reliable witness and co-participants in the research endeavour; and thirdly, a return to the expressive power of the arts to help heel, nurture and illuminate the interior world through imagination and creativity. In this configuration pastoral creativity focuses on the possibilities of creative reflection and personal development. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming number of contributions came from those working with visual methods in researching pastoral issues.
In the first of the papers, Francesca Lorenzi and Irene White contextualise the landscape of creativity research. In setting out a theoretical overview of the field they specifically draw attention to two important features of creative work and the connection to pastoral education; the liminal and the interstitial. In their account of creativity, the liminal deals with the transformative qualities of creative work, while ‘interstitial zones’ concerns the borders between time and space. The authors then consider how these spaces might be meaningfully explored and how pedagogies for creative pastoral education might be positioned within them.
Insight into how such spaces can be revealed and developed are discussed in the second paper by Laura Saunders. Here she details a phenomenological approach to researching the interrelationship between children’s experiences of the natural world and pastoral education as a creative endeavour. Based on the research design for a doctoral thesis, she draws on children’s rights, creativity research and children’s encounters with the natural world to explore the creative interplay between the ‘pastoral’ in education and the pastoral of the natural world encounter. Resonating strongly with creativity as personal growth and connection to the environment, her research uses creative artefacts combined with children’s own research accounts conducted in an English primary school setting.
Carol Mutch and Leua Latai then vividly demonstrate the therapeutic power of visual creativity in their paper detailing an approach to supporting children and young people who have been directly affected by natural disaster. Drawing on their experiences of work with children and young people in the aftermath of the Samoan Tsunami of 2009 and the New Zealand earthquake of 2010, their paper details two case studies in which they cast critical light on the role of visual symbolic aesthetic expression to enable personal histories of understanding in the management of emotional trauma.
In the final paper of the edition, the significance of visual metaphor and depiction is returned to in Daniel Warwick and Noel Purdy’s paper in which they research children’s developmental understanding of bullying through the use of cartoons in two primary schools in Northern Ireland. Using focus groups as a basis for collaborative discussions amongst the children participants, creative participatory approaches are developed to reveal the wide range of behaviours that children associate with bullying and the variations in children’s understanding. Importantly for these researchers, the adoption of creative approaches offers a number of benefits in researching complex pastoral issues with children and young people.
The research, thinking and possibilities presented in this small set of papers provides an important window on the interrelationships between pastoral education and the creativities of children and young people. The ambition of this special edition has been to illuminate the importance of creative expression in the contexts of pastoral concerns while retaining the power and imaging (literally) of the work. In this regard, I hope you find the papers as stimulating, insightful and creative as I have, and that the edition serves a catalyst for advancing further the importance of creativities in the pursuit of pastoral care in education.
References
- Craft, A. (2005). Creativity in schools: Tension and dilemmas. (pp. 339–350). Abingdon: Routledge.
- Lubart, T. (1999). Creativity across cultures. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of creativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- National Advisory Committee on Creativity, Culture and Education (NACCCE). (1999). All our futures: Creativity, culture and education. London: DfEE/DCMS.