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

172 Oakley (2007:5)
#3
SKILLS & DISPOSITIONS
Contemporary arts institutions can help
schools cultivate innovation attitudes
and competencies such as creativity,
self-efficacy, energy, risk-propensity
and leadership…
by designing immersive, experiential
and reflective learning opportunities
that are artist-driven or youth led, and
where genuine experimentation and
empowered questioning can thrive.
Integrated and sustained modes of
engagement, such as long workshops and
artist residencies, are perhaps the more
effective way of developing innovation
cultures and skills with students and
teachers. As Oakley reports, “the extrinsic
benefits of the arts (including the development
of non-cognitive skills) are brought about by
a prolonged or habitual interaction with the
arts.” 192 This deeper form of engagement is
embedded in many of the examples that follow.
The development of innovation
competencies requires a culture and
practice of open-ended enquiry that
contemporary arts learning programs can
create. Prescriptive approaches and overly
specific outcomes, on the other hand, tend to
shut down innovation. As Anna Cutler from
the Tate Modern sees it, “the point where
you say, ‘We are going to make this and this is
how we are going to do it’, you have stopped
innovating. And that, unfortunately, often
describes the educational system.”
Avoiding this approach demands a level of
trust in the creative process as well as an
understanding and tolerance of failure within
experimentation. “If we want to innovate we
are going to have to throw out the practice
and see where it lands” says Anna Cutler, “and
some people will do it better than others and
some people might get toes curled, and you
have to let that happen.” This idea is reiterated
by Baba Israel, from Contact Theatre in
Manchester, who explains that without
flexibility and relaxing a certain amount of
control organizations only stifle innovation:
[Creative freedom] is what sparks
innovation, you need some structure, but if
you have structures that are too formal
or too trapped in tradition, they kind of
put a strangle hold on innovation. I think
that there’s always a little bit of risk with
innovation, and there’s always a little bit of
uncertainty, and a little chaos…. There’s a
good amount of managed chaos.
In describing the lead up to the Creative
Manifesto project cited earlier as part of the
Tate Today project, Anna Cutler comments
that it was crucial to prepare young people
by developing the art of questioning. With
regard to the ten schools they engaged
across the country, she says:
…we worked with them for 18 months
to talk about creativity and what they
felt they needed to be creative and
innovative... The question was, “What do
you need to be creative and achieve?”
And what I always hate about these things
is that horrible idea that you just put a
child down and ask them there and then.
It’s not possible. So we worked with them
for a year and a half to talk to them about
asking questions. Of course, we work in
creative partnerships to do that, and the
children had definitely been discussing
it. So, again, it’s about making the task
explicit. Once you know that’s a possibility,
as a child, you can start to talk about it,
instead of this ‘thing’ that’s there. Or isn’t.
You don’t see it, because you don’t know
it’s there.
She says she was surprised to hear how
much fear was associated with putting up
a hand to ask a question and notes, “that’s
when you think everything’s gone horribly
wrong here. Because it is no longer about
curiosity and exploration, it’s about receiving
information. It is about passing a test. You
come out of the test and you realize it
relates not at all to the world you live in.”
Supportive environments where genuine
experimentation and empowered
questioning can thrive allow the skills &
dispositions of innovation to flourish. As
detailed in Section 2, there are various
levels of innovation skills that are sometimes
referred to as basic (foundational), hard
(disciplinary), or soft (wider, life skills). Chell
and Athayde’s research (2009) suggests that
the skills commonly exercised by a range of
innovators across disciplines are creativity,
self-efficacy, energy, risk-propensity and
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 49