Exploring the relationship between learning and creativity and the transformative role of the arts in education. Our researchers come from Education, Performance Studies, Medicine and Health, Literature, and the Visual Arts.
We are engaging in three main areas: creativity research; the role of the arts in creative education; and how the arts transform all levels of education from early childhood through to higher education. This innovative centre acknowledges the central, intrinsic role creative pedagogy and the arts can and should play in the lives, learning and formal education of all people. The centre builds on previous work in both the Arts, English and Literacy Education Network and the Arts and Creative Education Research Network.
Creativity and the arts are central to learning, and every Australian is entitled to high-quality creative pedagogy and opportunities to engage with creativity and the arts. The CREATE Centre is a vibrant hub of innovation in research making creativity and arts education a critical part of the education of all Australians at every age and stage of education.
We foster innovative, arts-informed and creative research methods, integrated with more traditional methods across the University. We are developing multidisciplinary research that engages experts throughout the University’s faculties and schools to enable the pursuit of new pedagogical and methodological directions in research, and to build:
Listen to our launch address by Wesley Enoch, playwright and Artistic Director of the Sydney Festival.
The centre pursues creative partnerships and establish an environment in which new ways of thinking using arts processes and experiences are encouraged and developed.
Our education program is designed in consultation with the the University, the faculty, schools, professional arts organisations and community partners. It is flexible and responsive to emerging requirements and opportunities.
We apply the creative arts to learning and doing, with participants exposed to new ideas and inspired by distinguished experts while developing key competencies and confidence in creative learning and teaching.
The centre will develop robust collaborative education programs for:
University expertise in knowledge building is a natural fit with arts organisations and community groups concerned to locate their practices and needs within a strong evidence base.
We aim to lead public discourse and communicate clearly and assertively on the importance of the arts and creativities in education and through existing and new networks and media channels.
Our program applies an interdisciplinary design, drawing on expertise across dance, drama, literature, media arts, music and visual arts to create and develop knowledge, innovation and creative research.
We apply research findings rapidly to develop and refine education programs to ensure educators are using the most relevant and effective techniques in the classroom.
Our academic leadership team advocates strongly for creativity and the arts in education, lobbying key policy makers at the state and federal levels for policy improvement.
Critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity (the 4Cs, NEA, 2013) have been deemed the most important skills for 21st century learning. But what core skillset is required in order to flourish in a future of innovation, uncertainty and change? A current research project (Gibson and Ewing) proposes a further 4Cs are imperative to empower educators and learners to move forward: curiosity, compassion, connection and courage.
Lead academics: Associate Professor Robyn Gibson, Professor Robyn Ewing
This is an educational research partnership between the University of Sydney and Barker College (Sydney). The project team also includes researchers based at the Australian National University (Canberra, ACT) and James Cook University (Townsville, Qld). Better Strangers brings teachers and academics together to design, test and disseminate creative new approaches to the theory and practice of Shakespeare education.
Academic leads: Linzy Brady, Will Christie, Kate Flaherty, Penny Gay, Clare Hansen, Andrew Hood, Jackie Manuel, Liam Semler, Lauren Weber
In partnership with Sydney Theatre Company, this program helps refugees, asylum seekers and migrants learn English and foster social connections. It uses imaginative stories and folktales to explore character, place and meaning.
A collaboration between the University of Sydney and the University of Auckland, the Creative Schools Initiative is developing a robust index measure of creative environments in schools using quantitative data. The Creative Index draws on 11 skills and capacities taken from a review of the literature of creativity in schools. An interactive ‘creative environment’ report is provided to schools and supports developing the environment for creativity in the school culture and curriculum.
Academic leads: Michael Anderson, Peter O’Connor, Kelly Freebody, Paul Ginns, Marianne Mansour
Innovative audio walks with higher education students explore embodied learning, the centrality of place in learning and the use of state of the art technology.
Lead academic: Kate Smyth
This project utilises inclusive pedagogy that honours the languages and cultures of the students and their agency in the learning process. It promotes translanguaging and a creative pedagogy that creates space to express symbolic understandings of students’ culture and worlds.
Identity texts are any products of students’ creative work that connect to the students' culture and community and disrupt an English only transmission pedagogy whereby students are viewed as blank slates (Freire, 1975).
They offer an accessible, focused way to draw attention to “essential aspects of the link between identity affirmation, societal power relations, and literacy engagement” (Cummins et al., 2015: p. 556) and, importantly for this project, they help bring the voices and languages of multilingual students to the fore as in this example:
Oute Alofa ia oe
Was once said to me,
I grew a tiny leaf,
But it died right after I tried to pronounce it
– Year 8 student
The project commenced several years ago. We engage with primary and secondary teachers in professional dialogue and reflection and focus on identifying the literacy and wellbeing needs of their students (Timperley, 2011). We then outline strategies to help students use their home languages in English lessons and share examples of quality literature that employs translanguaging to support students to develop authentic identity texts (Cummins, 1981; Cummins 1986; Cummins, 2000; Cummins and Early, 2011).
The research data is contextualised within the socio-spatial frames of Lefebvre (1991) and Soja (1980), and the concept of Li Wei’s (2011) ‘Translanguaging Space’. These spatial theories are used to understand how the everyday practices of school and classrooms are shaped by prevailing monolingual ideologies and how ‘thirdspace’ practices can challenge deficit views, support student agency and give voice to symbolic representations of self and culture.
Lead academics: Dr Kathy Rushton, The University of Sydney; Dr Janet Dutton, Macquarie University
A research-led practice exploring how people, particularly children, relate to the civic condition, and the ways in which ‘play’ can be integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Our projects explore ways that art in public places – and urban design more broadly – can become increasingly integrated, inclusive and interactive creative spaces. It is our goal to challenge the ways a permanent public artwork might be encountered in daily life. Developing major works of playable sculpture, we aim to expand the role of art in contributing to current definitions of ‘play’.
In this "playable sculpture" project, infants, toddlers and children will become the architects of their own playscape. It is our aim that the children’s encounters with their play space will reveal to us valuable insights into their perception and behaviour with environments and art objects. Through this research we will be able to deduce which physical determinants of sculptural shapes affect children’s decisions, actions, interactions, feelings and behaviours. This will be tested across key demographics, primarily age and gender categories.
This is a teacher professional learning program developed by Sydney Theatre Company in partnership with the University of Sydney and Professor Robyn Ewing AM. The program aims to enable teachers to develop the confidence and expertise to use drama-rich pedagogy with literature to improve students’ English and literacy. Each teacher works with a Teaching Artist to embark on a unique co-mentoring partnership. Since 2009, more than 30,000 teachers and students have participated in the program.
This is an action learning approach to professional development. Over five twilight workshops, teachers learn how to integrate drama across the curriculum, plan their own drama units and develop their teaching artistry.
Run by Diversity Arts Australia (2019-2020), this is a contemplative workshop series for culturally and/or linguistically diverse artists and arts workers to imagine a future where cultural diversity is present at every level in the arts.
Led by: Remy Low, with support from Paula Abood and Lena Nalhous.
In the face of an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, education can make the difference as to whether people embrace the challenges they are confronted with or whether they are defeated by them. And in an era characterised by a new explosion of scientific knowledge and a growing array of complex societal problems, it is appropriate that curricula should continue to evolve, perhaps in radical ways.
Understand them through their way of living and the circumstances of their lives … try to penetrate the psychology of different nations … endeavour to penetrate the psychology of persons around you toward whom you feel unsympathetic … attempt to experience what they experience (Chekhov, 1953).
If we can experience something through art, then we might be able to change our future, because experience engraves lessons on our heart through suffering, whereas speculation leaves us untouched (Sarah Kane, British playwright).
Academic lead: Dr Alison Grove O’Grady
Transforming Schools began as a project in 2017 to consider the “how” of school transformation.
Emerging from the books Transforming Schools and Transforming Organizations, the project now features more than 40 schools in long-term partnerships and several PhD, master's degree and honours students researching the how of transformation.
This work undertaken in partnership with 4C Transformative Learning and not only researches transformation and the 4Cs (creativity, critical reflection, communication, collaboration) but investigates how schools throughout Australia are making it a reality.
Re-storying homelessness through the Arts: Can creative, arts-based interventions transform the way we frame homelessness?
At the heart of this huddle is how performing arts practitioners, arts educators and researchers can work together constructively to address the growing problem of homelessness. We will discuss research possibilities including how we can think about documenting the long-term impact of arts programs in reframing such entrenched and ever-increasing social disadvantage.
Brining together experts in homelessness with arts educators and practitioners to explore the role of the arts – and theatre in particular – in informing our understanding of this critical issue.
A one day huddle working with Milk Crate Theatre and Professor Peter O’Connor from the University of Auckland, aiming to ignite some key research questions and possible research methodologies around the transformative nature of the arts to change the story around homelessness.
Funded by: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, SSSHARC