Professor Anna Craft takes up her post at the University of Exeter, England, in January, 2007.

Previous to this she has been based for 15 years at The Open University, working with schools, universities, projects and policy makers both across the United Kingdom and abroad, in Europe, the Middle and Far East, and North America. This has involved work with teachers and other educators including artists and arts organizations, as well as young people, together with policy makers and researchers.

At The Open University, she was Director of The Open Creativity Centre which she established in 2002. She is also Founding Co-Convenor of the British Educational Research Association Special Interest Group, Creativity in Education, and Founding Co-Editor of the international journal, Thinking Skills and Creativity. She is the author of five books on creativity in education and numerous chapters and journal articles, and has designed and directed many courses, seminars and conferences for classroom assistants, teachers and advisory staff, partners and other researchers. She also has substantial experience over more than a decade of fostering and evaluating continuing professional development centred around pupil learning, having written Open University courses and two books on this topic.

She holds a Visiting appointment at Harvard University and is currently engaged in co-writing a book with Howard Gardner, Guy Claxton and others, on developing creativity in education with wisdom. She also works with staff at Harvard on aspects of documenting creative learning, arising from their ‘Making Learning Visible’ project which draws on, and involves collaboration with, Reggio Emilia in Italy.

Her research work includes capturing the stories of learners, teachers and others in fostering and exercising creativity. Her qualitative empirical work in this area has focused on both adults and children, and includes work examining learning contexts which appear to foster learner creativity from the learner’s perspective. She draws on the deductive tradition of philosophical analysis in the context of critical theory seeking to draw on both philosophical and empirical research in order to influence and improve the learning offer provided by the education system. She combines conceptual work with empirical traditions of enquiry from social science enabling her to build theory through inductive engagement with situated data, using a grounded theory approach to analysis. Her empirical work is thus interpretivist, seeking to understand and to characterise, recognising the situatedness of perspectives, is informed by constructivist and socio-cultural views of learning, and is angled ultimately toward seeking impact on practice and policy.

She has substantial experience of directing research and evaluation projects, both within the University and on a freelance basis. She currently co-directs The ASPIRE Pilot, funded by NESTA, which involves working closely with young people as lead provocateurs in considering new learning systems, in the context of multi-disciplinary creative and cultural partnership with adults beyond the classroom: http://www.schome.ac.uk/aspire-pilot/default.htm

Relevant empirical work includes approaches adopted by schools and other providers to engage young people in cultural and creative development activity, for example:

· Creative Science Teaching, 2005/6 – funded by The Arts Council

· Progression in Creative Learning, 2005/6 – funded by The Arts Council

· Possibility Thinking, 2004-6 – funded by Cambridge University and The Open University.

· Camden Arts Image Conscious, 2004/5 – funded by NESTA

· Let’s Get Going! 2002/4 – funded by Calouste Gulbenkian

· NESTA Ignite! 2003/4 – funded by NESTA

· BCCP Creative Friends 2003/4 – funded by The Arts Council