| Summary: | Education policy, in practice so singularly an experienced phenomenon, may be irreconcilable to single forms of academic interpretation. The questions and possibilities raised by this proposition animate the core of this study. Why, given the volume of noise generated by the multiplicity of agents and agencies with critical interests in education policy and practice, do some voices dominate while others are unheard or silent? What might this mean for those being educated and for art and design education? Responses, rather than being articulated as a series of arguments in a traditional research format, are presented as a series of imagined texts comprising dialogues and monologues. The texts fuse a wide range of sources into a series of performed analyses of education policy and creative practice. Primary, secondary and archival sources bring together the voices of: artists; designers; other creative practitioners; educators; researchers; politicians; policy makers; national agencies; social theorists; and art and design undergraduates who were part of a three-year longitudinal field study. The theoretical and methodological formations underpinning the analysis are woven into the content and form of the texts themselves. Normal citation conventions are suspended until after a performance or reading, in order to aid unfettered interpretation. This study, undertaken over six years, draws on creative arts practice and dramaturgy to formulate alternative platforms for the articulation of critical discourses on education policy and creative development. Volume One contains a series of re-constructed monologues and imagined dialogues created to be intelligible to those inside and outside academia. Collectively they represent a series of enactments of the impact of policy on the everyday lives and creative development of individual art and design students. Readers are politely invited to read all of Volume One before reading Volume Two. The temporal separation of text from source provides a space for those who are willing to reflect on the forces that might be at play when reading (or writing) texts such as these.
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