Synopsis: Results of a study conducted by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, which analysed and compared processes, practices and roles across a range of creative arts projects and investigated how these factors influenced children’s language and literacy learning.

Review: Building on the work of a previous study, Animating Literacy, Many Routes to Meaning follows ten creative arts projects across inner London primary and nursery schools. In each school creative arts partners, which included individual artists, small organisations and national cultural centres, worked alongside the children for one to three terms. Some of the projects were guided by aims, such as to help children tell their stories through the medium of film, or by specific research question such as can dance improve children’s writing skills? The study aimed to discover how work in the creative arts influenced children’s language and literacy development, what the favourable contexts for this process were and how it was appropriate to assess children’s creative work. Research was conducted through a mixture of interviews, observations and analysis of children’s talk, writing and multimodal texts. The study comes out overwhelming in favour of creative arts projects – even those projects which were less successful are shown to have had some positive outcomes. In the best projects, children are reported to perform better in literacy and other arts lessons, to be more confident and articulate and to integrate better with their classmates.

Although this report is not intended as a guide for teachers, sections of it would certainly be useful reading for any teacher involved in a creative arts project. The section detailing favourable contexts for the process is particularly useful – stressing the important of a shared professional vision between teacher and arts partner, a workshop atmosphere and the importance of working around set texts and allowing children space to talk through their projects. It also highlights problems with traditional modes of assessment in relation to creative arts, suggesting alternative criteria to use when assessing children’s work. Parts of the study make for very interesting reading, particularly the case studies and the explorations of individual children’s responses to the arts partners. The chapters criticising the lack of space for creativity in the National Curriculum are less gripping and for those short of time it might be more useful simply to read the case studies and the conclusion. For anyone with an interest in how children respond to arts partnerships in schools, however, it is definitely worth a read.

2007-05-08