Challenging the Message of the Medium: Scaling Participatory Arts Projects and the Creativity Agenda in Kenya

This chapter investigates the efforts made by the Kenyan Ministry of Education to put more emphasis on creative skills development in the country’s national curriculum from the perspective of a teachers’ training programme developed by the chapter’s authors. Here Cooke, Otieno and Plastow discuss the role of the facilitator as artist and the need to understand the particular aesthetic tradition within which a given community is working, while also challenging participants to look beyond this tradition. They reflect upon the role of the ‘message’ in such work, and how message-focussed projects can both help to enhance and hinder the creative skills development of those involved. In particular, they explore the role of the child in this process, looking at how a child-centred approach can be lost in the pragmatic reality and resourcing challenges of the teacher’s everyday experience. This is also often not helped by the ingrained attitudes of some parents and teachers who can be cynical towards the role of creative practice in education, despite the current ostensibly very supportive environment for the arts generally in Kenya.