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Leading with Difference: The Particular Case of Learning and Teaching Leadership in the Creative Arts

This paper is a research based commentary on a special issue of the TEXT journal. This special issue also adds to the field of teaching and learning scholarship. Studies of disciplinary variation in teaching or teaching scholarship have received limited attention. A collection of studies edited by Hativa and Marincovitch (1995) is one of the first recorded which gathers cases from different disciplines with respect to implications for learning and teaching. Within that collection, Murray and Renaud examine disciplinary differences in teaching and their relationship to student feedback and ratings of instruction. In their study, arts and humanities teachers scored higher than social science and natural science teachers on six out of ten teaching behaviour dimensions. This finding implies that ‘arts and humanities teachers tend to exhibit a wider range of teaching behaviors that contribute positively to student instructional ratings than social science or natural science teachers do’ (1995: 38). When we ask the question, ‘What can be learned from the context of teaching in the creative arts?’, these studies echo those of Alison Shreeve on teacher identity and practice and, in particular, the analysis of what can be learned from systemic approaches to the development of learning and teaching within a creative arts institution (Shreeve, Simms & Trowler 2010).