Creativity and learning - for school teachers

CreativeUEA

Our resource and research area for educators, featuring projects addressing creativity in education, either in the nature of learning they promote or in their approach to teaching.

Find out about UEA projects and research for creative education, with a focus on arts and humanities specialisms, digital and arts-based approaches to learning across early years, primary and secondary phases.

Some items offer resources or research findings to support your teaching. Other items report on projects involving young people and their schools.

Places, voices and texts

These projects explore connections between places, voices and texts.

They are particularly useful for learning in language and literacy, history, geography and citizenship, but often have themes of interest across the curriculum.

Stories of place: Akenfield Now

The Akenfield Now schools project celebrated local identity, culture and history by inviting A-level students in Suffolk to make films about a village community. The model of the project can be adapted for different places, age groups and school subjects, with activities developing literacy, oracy and media literacy across several themes and subject areas.

Inspired by oral history techniques used by Ronald Blythe for his book Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), the students interviewed local people of all ages, creating original screenplays based on what they learned and making new films influenced by Sir Peter Hall’s film version of Akenfield (1974).

Sir Peter Hall’s film version of Akenfield (1974)

Teachers’ pack - Akenfield Now

Suffolk on Film

Using regional film archives for teaching

Regional film archives are a rich resource for education about place, culture and identity - and often for learning across the whole curriculum. We focus on the example of the East Anglian Film Archive, freely available online, to explore purposes and principles of using archive film for teaching and learning in schools.

Here, a range of resources to help teachers incorporate archive film material in teaching:

Reading ‘Black Beauty’: Linking fiction, place and local history

Dame Jaqueline Wilson provided the forward for a new edition of Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty, published by the UEA Publishing Project in collaboration with Redwings Horse Sanctuary. The book’s editorial team have collaborated with primary teachers and schools in Norfolk to develop approaches to reading the novel in class and to inspiring children’s original writing in response to Sewell’s book.