GrowinG Future innovators - ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative ...

140 Fiske (1999:11)
141 Personal interview (2009)
142 Xanthoudaki et al. (2003),
Howell (2009)
143 Hooper-Greenhill
(2007:1)
144 Creative Partnerships is
the UK Government’s flagship
creative learning program,
designed to develop the skills
of children and young people
across England, raising their
aspirations, achievements,
skills and life chances. It
has delivered programs in
almost 2,500 schools in 36
of the most deprived areas
of England. www.creativepartnerships.com
sense of success. Arts learning outside
of schools can also enhance the sense of
accomplishment and well-being among our
young people. 140
For Anna Cutler, Head of Education at
the Tate Gallery, the intrinsic power of
arts learning lies in its holistic and deeply
humanist approach, which is enabled
by three key aspects embedded in the
creative process:
The first is that it makes the abstract
manifest, which is a very tricky thing, and
a very philosophical problem. And all the
things we don’t teach anywhere else in the
lives of children start to become critical.
You have to imagine, you have to think
forward. You have to not know. You have
to explore. You have to tolerate. You have
to persist. I mean, these are all fantastic
disciplines of mind for innovation… So,
firstly, it is making the abstract manifest.
We do need to do this. It matters in the
world. And then, secondly, you have to
account for your object or your thing,
which means that it gets taken into the
public realm. It suddenly becomes this big
social and critical enterprise. It’s flexing
your intellectual muscles, because you have
to negotiate the public realm. And then,
thirdly, it’s deliberately engaged with the
emotions. And that’s what art does—it
deliberately takes that on to communicate
something about who we are. …therefore
it’s terribly personal. So you see, you
have the three realms that make you a
human being—the intellectual, social
and personal… And that, I would claim,
is the added value of what our art and
culture brings, because nothing else in that
combination does that. 141
3.2 Learning through
contemporary arts and
cultural institutions
As the burgeoning field of gallery and
museum studies shows, the last few
decades have seen contemporary art
institutions place significant emphasis on
developing arts learning programs for
young people. This has been part of a larger
shift undertaken by cultural institutions more
generally, where museums, galleries and
libraries have increasingly prioritized visitor
experience, participation and education.
Areas of scholarship such as Institutional
Critique and Museology document this
‘education turn’, which began in the early
twentieth century but has come into its own
in the twenty-first. 142 Hooper-Greenhill
describes this sector change as follows:
At the beginning of the twenty-first
century, museums are re-orienting
themselves through imagining afresh
what they can become; familiar
practices are being reassessed and tired
philosophies are being overturned. New
ideas about culture, society and new
policy initiatives challenge museums to
rethink their purposes, to account for
their performance and to redesign their
pedagogies… One of the key dimensions
of the emerging ‘post-museum’ is a
more sophisticated understanding of the
complex relationships between culture,
communication, learning and identity that
will support a new approach to museum
audiences; a second basic element is
the promotion of a more egalitarian
and just society; and linked to these is
an acceptance that culture works to
represent, reproduce and constitute selfidentities
and that this entails a sense of
social and ethical responsibility. 143
More than ever before, cultural institutions
reach and seek to be of value to a range
of audiences beyond traditional, specialist
or elitist groups. As part of this access and
inclusivity, children, families, teachers and
schools have become prioritized visitors,
evidenced in the significant resourcing
of staff, space and finances for initiatives
variously described as ‘education’, ‘learning’,
‘engagement’ or ‘participation’ programs.
These programs are no longer a token or
on-the-side component.
Increasingly these organisations are
dialoguing with young audiences and
finding ways to inspire, educate and
engage. An example of this can be seen in
the extensive consultation initiative, Today
Tate, curated by Tate Modern, one of the
most popular contemporary art museums in
the world and with 60% of its audience now
under 35 years. In association with Creative
Partnerships 144 , British Telecom and Channel
4 Television, Tate Today is described as “one
of the most extensive consultations ever
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 33