Creativity in English Education Workshop 1 – 18 Nov Graham Parr & Scott Bulfin (2000-1) ( )

Schedule for today 1. Welcome to stella From STELLA to stella2.0: quick bit of history 3. What brings you to this series of workshops? 4. Creativity readings for today: sharing stories and understandings BREAK (approx. 6.15) 5. Writing: – Creative stories, stories of creativity – Creating spaces for creativity 6. Sharing our writing 7. Moving on..

Learning in a professional learning community (at VATE): Reading, talking, writing, reflecting … Learning and research in a larger professional learning/research community: Reading, talking, writing, reflecting …

What brings you to this workshop?

Creative thinking? “Creative thinking involves students learning to generate and apply new ideas in specific contexts, seeing existing situations in a new way, identifying alternative explanations, and seeing or making new links that generate a positive outcome. This includes combining parts to form something original, sifting and refining ideas to discover possibilities, constructing theories and objects, and acting on intuition. The products of creative endeavour can involve complex representations and images, investigations and performances, digital and computer-generated output, or occur as virtual reality.”

Is creativity best conceived as initiating things, continuing them or completing them? Or is it something we always come at from the middle? Is ‘being creative’ something we can ever be or do entirely on our own, or must it be done with or with respect to others? Further, are we to think of ‘creation’ in terms of achieved objects and finished products, what was supposedly created by some one-off act … and now exists only as past fact? Rob Pope Rob Pope (2005) Creativity: Theory, history, practiceCreativity: Theory, history, practice

Creativity? Raymond Williams (1977): 'creativity and social self-creation are both known and unknown events, and it is from grasping the known that the unknown – the next step, the next work – is conceived' Cf. Bakhtin (1981): ‘unfinalizable’ education… nurturing and promoting a capacity and a readiness to create something new and original Ian Reid (1984): The workshop model of a literature classroom: ‘Imagine, if you will, a room for making…’ Margaret Langdon (1961): ‘I would listen with interest as their young, excited voices clamoured to be heard. Here was no stiffness of expression, dullness of phrase, no stilted, lifeless thought. Here, pouring out, was the very stuff of life, pulsating and vibrating with vigour and individuality. They were eager to express, to tell, to put into words.’ Thomson (1965, first issue of English in Australia): ‘the eternal boredom of the prim essays wilting in their well manured beds' John Dixon (1967): ‘liberation of pupils from the limits of their teacher's vision’

Small group chat re readings 1.What does creativity look like in your professional context and/or classroom? 2.How do you and your colleagues make space for creativity in your work as teachers/educators? 3.What do you see as the mediating impact of institutions/curriculum on creativity in your context 4.Is creativity ‘initiating things, continuing them or completing them….

Break

Some more brief pre-writing discussion ‘Genre/s’ for the writing we’re about to do…

Finally … Sharing Posting and responding on the stella2.0 website Next workshop: Wed 20 Jan ( pm)