Creativity and the past

As well as investing creativity with qualities that took it beyond the classroom and linked it to existence itself, Sally and Lynn also looked back to what creativity meant to their teaching at the start of their careers. Both constructed the past as a more creative time than the present. They put this down, in part at least, to the freedom they felt to draw on their own lives and those of the students in designing lessons. Lynn, for example, talked about the start of her career in the mid 1990s when “teaching was less prescriptive, you had a bit more autonomy about what went on in your classroom and there was more scope for creativity”. She linked this to there being “more trust in the profession in those days” so that teachers were left to get on with their work as best they saw fit. Her examples of being more creative at that time included “taking children out and having a football match and writing it up as a report”. There was a wistfulness in her tone, not just for the way teaching had changed, but for the teacher she no longer was, or never managed fully to become. This was suggested when she talked of the current “drudgery in the job”. She admitted that when she entered the profession she “had quite a romanticised view of what teaching actually was”, but nonetheless thought that teaching at that time was at least closer to her ideals than by the time of the interview.

Sally (B40) shared this view of a more creative past. She talked about the free choices teachers had in what to teach at the start of her career. “If you enjoyed a poem,” she said,

139 “you could actually go and teach it, talk about it, get the children to imagine themselves … it was completely free then”. Sally and Lynn, then, both constructed creativity as dependent on freedom from state intervention and prescription.

The past as referred to by Sally and Lynn (and also Jane [A, 25], referenced in chapter six) did not necessarily reflect the dominant form of English as taught in schools at the start of their careers. Writing about English teaching from the 1970s and 1980s showed similar frustrations at English being practised in ways likely to limit what students might become (Rosen 2017). There was no reason, though, to doubt that they were personally able to teach in the ways they described. Exam syllabuses did allow teachers to have a large degree of choice in texts taught and less centralised and punitive forms of accountability meant that the ‘the terrors of performativity’ were some way away.

Three teachers at Windhover, Ewen (W37), Alan (W40) and Matt (W20), offered a very different version of what creativity and English teaching in the past meant to them. They were all keen to distance themselves from perceptions of what creativity was in previous periods. Ewen (W37), for example, recounted a class he taught at the start of his career at Windhover in the 1970s. There were no expectations that the students would take a final exam. Consequently, he was free to teach them whatever he wanted. He remembered this as follows:

Down in the 70s when I started there were some loony things going on. I mean when I started there was unexamined English in the 5th _{form which was} a bit nightmarish. That must have sounded like a good idea at the time. What it meant was in my first teaching job I was just dumped in the middle of the 5th _{form and just told get on with it, do what you like, and I didn’t have a}

140 clue. That was not creative at all. It was deeply unpleasant. It was well

meaning but ill thought out stuff.

The notion that “unexamined” English was not creative resonated with his comments in chapter six about creativity being possible within the current examination system. It suggested a construction that saw creativity as part of the formal structures of English, in contrast to the opinions generally expressed in the two state schools, and the specific example of Sally (B40) who regarded teaching in the past as “literally free”.

Alan (W40) linked constructions of creativity in the same period to what he called “eccentricity”. He said of eccentric teachers that “there is a degree of flair to that kind of person but a degree of indulgence as well”. He said that this flair might also be seen as “inaccurate”, a term that constructed creativity – at least by association – as running counter to notions of correctness that were so central to debates about English language teaching. He also talked about teachers who thought of themselves as having flair as often being “impossible”, adding dismissively, “I mean you have to turn up for your lessons don’t you”. Matt (W20) had a similarly ambivalent relationship with such teachers from the past. He pointed out that when he arrived at Windhover as head of department 14 years previously, there was “a creative writer in charge and there was lots of exciting creative stuff happening”. He added, though, that “the results were pretty poor” and that “an under-performing department needed to be turned round”.

There was, then, a contrast between constructions of creativity that emerged from a number of teachers interviewed in the two state schools compared to the private school. When they talked about English as a subject discipline, there was a level of uniformity from teachers in all three schools about what creativity meant in relation to the broad discipline

141 of English. However, only teachers at Archford and Bloomington offered constructions of creativity that spoke to professional longings beyond current classroom enactments; similarly, only teachers at the two state schools looked back to a more creative (and by implication better) past, while only teachers at Windhover equated the past with a form of creativity that resulted in negative experiences, poor working practices, and underperformance by students. The comments were perhaps indicative of different levels of satisfaction with current practices in relation to how teachers felt able to teach according to their own pedagogical beliefs. The next section will explore this further by looking at the examples that teachers gave of their own creative practices.

8.2 Practices