Developing socially just pedagogy: what might be the role of learner agency and creativity?
Pedagogy has been identified by government and in academic research as a key element of solving the enduring problem of educational inequality in England. Within sociology of education, a response to educational inequality has been to identify the need for more socially just pedagogies (Lupton & Hempel-Jorgensen, 2012) to disrupt current ‘default’ pedagogy, which contributes to reproducing inequalities. While test results dominate policy and public discourse about outcomes, there is less focus on the role of education in developing pupils as agentic learners. Research has shown that schools located in disadvantaged areas may be more likely to adopt performative pedagogies in which pupils’ agency as learners is highly constrained in contrast to schools in less disadvantaged areas. This arguably has significant implications for pupils’ engagement with learning, their learner identities and development as socially critical and active citizens. 
 
Existing socially just pedagogies, such as productive and critical pedagogies and ‘funds of knowledge’ aim to place learner agency at their centre. However, while these pedagogies make important contributions to developing learner agency in various ways, the literature on creative pedagogy offers a unique perspective on learner agency through its central elements of relevance, ownership, control and innovation and through the concept of possibility thinking which foregrounds enquiry, risk-taking and developing creative thinking by moving from the question of ‘what is’ to ‘what might be’ (Craft et al, 2012). The presentation will explore how these aspects of creative pedagogy, in dialogue with existing socially just pedagogies, can support the development of pupils’ non-attainment characteristics in disadvantaged schools, through developing learner agency.
Reciprocity between narrative, questioning and imagination in the early and primary years: examining the role of narrative in possibility thinking
Abstract The concept of possibility thinking (PT) as a driving force of creativity has been investigated both conceptually and empirically for over a decade in early years settings and primary classrooms in England. In the first wave of qualitative empirical studies, play formed part of the enabling context. Criteria for episode selection for PT analysis were that episodes exhibited children immersed in sustained focused playful activity. During the second wave of PT studies, the research team's attention was drawn to children's imaginative storying in such playful contexts and it emerged that consideration of narrative in PT might prove fruitful. The current paper revisits key published work, and drawing on data previously analysed for features of PT, seeks to explore how narrative might relate to the current theorised framework. Fourteen published PT episodes are re-analysed in order to consider the role and construction of narrative in PT. The new analysis reveals that narrative plays a foundational role in PT, and that reciprocal relationships exist between questioning, imagination and narrative, layered between children and adults. Consequences for nurturing children's creativity and for future PT research are explored.
Art and Imagination
The vocabulary of the art-critic seems to consist of two groups of words, those that refer to the formal or surface properties of the work of art, and those which refer to properties we can at first loosely term imaginative. The first group consists of words and phrases like “unity” (sometimes “organic unity”), “coherence”, “consistency”, “compactness”, “elegance”, and so on. The way such words are cashed will consist in an analysis of the determinate formal qualities of the work of art as evidence of the skill of the artist as a craftsman.