Who gets to be creative in class? Creativity as a matter of social justice in secondary English lessons

Abstract

This chapter explores how teachers in three secondary schools construct creativity, individually and within the context of shared practice in their own institutions. The particular focus is on how constructions of creativity are shaped by national frameworks of curriculum, assessment and accountability, and how these vary from school to school. This is situated in a period of political transition in the English school curriculum (2010–2015), during which the National Curriculum (which had previously contained ‘creativity’ as one of its four key concepts) was replaced by a curriculum that made no mention of creativity. The chapter examines the role of policy in the construction of creativity in classrooms, analysing how teachers might resist official policy in the interests of their vision for their subject, and questioning the role policy can play in the implementation of ‘exhortative’ policies about difficult to measure concepts such as creativity, compared to ‘imperative’ policies that relate directly to accountability in schools. The chapter constructs creativity itself as a material resource central to the teaching of language and literature, with its relative levels of distribution within different schools and to different students a matter of social justice and equity.