Dangerous and uncontrollable: The politics of creativity in Secondary English

Abstract

This article explores how policy discourses of creativity have an impact on the way that secondary English teachers construct creativity themselves and the opportunities that they have to enact these constructions in their classrooms. In particular, it focuses on policy around language learning and creativity, identifying significant differences in the way that this is constructed compared with policy constructions of the relationship between more general aspects of learning and creativity. It uses data drawn from interviews with twelve teachers working in two secondary schools to identify patterns that might begin to emerge in a wider study with larger numbers of schools and teachers. While it is not intended as a comparative study, some of the data that emerges encourages consideration about the distribution of creativity in secondary English classrooms and whether this is affected by issues of social class. As such, creativity for the purposes of the article itself is constructed as a resource existing in language (Blommaert 2010), with language users able both to shape meaning in particular ways and to be shaped by the language that they in turn receive (Volosinov 2000; Bakhtin 2006): a construction by and large mirrored by the teachers interviewed, despite the multiple other uses to which creativity can be put (Banaji and Burn 2008; Jones 2009).