The Curious Schools Project: Capturing Nomad Creativity in Teacher Work

Abstract

The Curious Schools project is a teacher professional learning initiative that aims to provide an insight into – and resource for – creativity in Tasmanian schools. It offers an alternative to conventional models of teacher professional learning by engaging teachers in multi-modal methods of documenting and reflecting on their work as the basis for an online community of practice and public showcase for creativity in education that takes place ‘behind the scenes’. The authors, as coordinators of the project, describe the rationale behind the project and the ways it embraced discourses and practices of curiosity as a means of making visible the creativity of teachers and classrooms. Drawing on the concept of nomadology in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as diverse scholarly perspectives on curiosity, the authors describe how the Curious Schools Project sought to capture the ‘nomad creativity’ of teacher work via a process of documentation and question-seeking that countered complexity-reduction in teacher professional learning and sustained teacher curiosity in their work. Reflecting on an evaluation of its 2013 pilot, the authors suggest that the project’s explicit emphasis on curiosity avoided limiting conceptualisations of creativity in education and will inform future plans to more appropriately document and support the processes of emergence in teacher professional learning. The digital site for the project is available at http://www.utas.edu.au/education/curious-schools.