Signifying creative engagement : what is the influence of professional identity on the values that people ascribe to creative partnership projects in education?

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the relationship between professional group belonging and what individuals deem valuable within the creative partnership projects they carry out together in schools. There were three consecutive stages to the research. The first stage was the phenomenographic analyses of interview transcripts from twenty three teachers and twenty three creative practitioners who partnered each other to run year long projects. The second stage was the aggregation of the resulting forty six analytic outputs into formats permitting inter-group comparisons to be made. This stage included three separate analyses: not only was an individual¿s professional group belonging shown to impact on what they deemed valuable, but partnership type, i.e. new versus established, also had a substantive impact. The influence of school type was examined and shown to have a lesser effect. The third stage was the use of formal, academic theories to interrogate trends appearing in the results: social identity theory and social representations theory, alongside discursive psychology and readings of identity from cultural studies, were mobilized as consecutive lens on the analytic outcomes. These theories were found to be apposite and a deeper comprehension of creative partnership dynamics was arrived at. This study evidences not only a difference between what teachers and creative practitioners respectively value, but shows how the application of theory is a valuable aid in understanding the variations. This represents a major contribution to the field as the use of formal academic theories does not, as yet, feature in the discourses underpinning creative partnership work.