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

The overarching recommendation
of this report is to forge stronger
interdisciplinary partnerships that can
educate for innovation. Researchers, school
constituents, contemporary art institutions
and other stakeholders should seek to create
reciprocal learning networks that are jointly
focused on increasing innovation cultures
and capacities.
Optimally, these initiatives would be
designed in response to local contexts,
challenges and ideas, and draw on the
available resources of the combined
partnership.
Research into these initiatives should, where
possible, employ a longitudinal approach
to trialing and testing, so as to contribute
better to policy developments and wider
arts, innovation and education discourses.
The following particular recommendations
are proposed for researchers, schools, and
contemporary arts institutions:
Researchers:
Build a clearer profile of the arts and
cultural innovator, including more detailed
definitions of competencies in relationship
to other innovator ‘types,’ and the factors
that help or hinder the development of
these dispositions.
Develop more robust tools to measure
innovation competencies and employ
these to evaluate the impact of arts-led
programming in education contexts with
teachers and young people.
Critically review the new national
curriculum framework to evaluate the
extent to which it supports innovation
content, values, skills and delivery.
Explore extra-curricula learning contexts,
in addition to classroom experiences,
for forging innovation cultures and
competencies.
Schools:
Directed by the seven key factors
identified by Kirkland & Sutch (2009)
reviewed in this report, critically reflect
on the education institution capacity
to support and engage with the
innovation agenda.
Diversify the means of engagement with
contemporary arts institutions to include
alternative but accessible teaching and
learning initiatives and technologies, and to
promote dialogue and exchange between
innovators and school constituents.
Partner with contemporary arts
institutions to offer teachers, students
and other learning partners genuine
opportunities to exercise creativity, risk
taking, self-efficacy, energy and leadership.
Establish ‘expert collaborations’ between
teachers and contemporary artists and
curators that develop 21st century
learning environments and a culture of
innovation with staff and students.
Explore the ways in which contemporary
arts experiences and dispositions are
transferrable across disciplines and of use
to learning and innovation in non-arts
fields and contexts.
Employ contemporary arts-led
programming that can reinforce or scaffold
curriculum but that can also exceed it via
extra-curricula opportunities.
Contemporary arts institutions:
Clarify the arts terminology of innovation
in relationship to other sectors as
part of promoting existing innovation
that is hidden, submerged or underacknowledged.
Cultivate ways for schools to access
innovative content and creators, drawing
narrative strategies to communicate more
clearly the innovation in the world and
work of artists.
Actively experiment with new technologies
and virtual reality platforms that can
overcome geographic and economic
barriers to engaging with school audiences.
Offer teachers and young people practical,
hands-on opportunities to experience the
methods, materials and cycles of creativity
and innovation that artists use.
Partner with schools to grow habits
and dispositions of innovation through
sustained engagements like artist
residencies or long-term, immersive
projects that are mindful of curricula yet
not limited by these frameworks.
Growing future Innovators: a scoping study 67