Page 22 - The story of the Art of Learning

2.2 The beginning of Art of Learning
AoL emerged from a long-standing partnership between Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE, UK) and Centre for the Development of Inclusive Technologies (CEDETi) at the Pontifical Catholic University Santiago, Chile.
After first meeting at the World Education Summit in Qatar in 2017, CCE and CEDETI
shared their respective work on creativity and executive functions. They drew up a
diagram where they put creativity on one side and executive functions on the other, and
began mapping the connection, and together they found that they seemed to have been talking about the same set of skills, but from different angles and in different languages. From here, the idea of a common project was born, where CCE created a programme filled with creative arts and culture activities, aiming to incorporate CEDETI’s expertise in executive functions. This project was named The Art of Leaning, and from this, three pilots followed.
The AoL Ayrshire pilot was a two-year pilot programme devised for students aged 7-11 years old by CCE and delivered in partnership with Creative Scotland and Education Scotland. It was one of seven initiatives carried out across the UK, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation through their Teacher Development Fund. The programme went through a significant development from the first to the second year, building on feedback from participating teachers and creative practitioners. Read more about the AoL Ayrshire pilot here, and watch videos from the programme’s first and second year.
The AoL Oppland pilot was a one-year pilot based on the AoL Ayrshire pilot, delivered in partnership between Oppland County Council, CCE, CEDETI, The Norwegian Centre for Arts and Culture in Education and Inland University of Applied Sciences (INN). The programme was translated into Norwegian school context and into a younger age group (6-8 year olds) for
this pilot. Read more about AoL Oppland in the report here, and read the article published on AoL Oppland in Frontiers in Psychology here.
Research rig in pilots:
The AoL pilots has all been testing the childrens’ Executive functions (EF, see 1.2) using qualitative interviews and quantitative pre- and post-testing in separate control- and intervention groups. The research team tested the children using a digital game based test called Yellow/Red, developed
by CEDETI. In the AoL Oppland pilot this test was accompanied by an additional assessment tool called BRIEF, a questionnaire assessing executive function behaviors in school environments, completed by the teachers of those children participating in the project, as well as with qualitative interviews.
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