Week 13 Annotation – “Understanding creativity in primary English, science, and history”

McLean, N., Georgiou, H., Matruglio, E., Turney, A., Gardiner, P., Jones, P., & Groves, C. E. (2021). Understanding creativity in primary English, science, and history. The Australian Educational Researcher, 50(2), 581-600. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-021-00501-4

McLean et al. (2021) conducted exploratory qualitative research of nine Australian primary school teachers to expand understanding of how teaching creativity manifests in the primary classroom and to see how creative thinking is operationalized within the classroom – a gap the authors perceived in the literature. McLean et al provided a robust literature review on creativity, emphasizing that the research gap was in how creativity is manifest in the classroom. This study investigated how “teacher practice can increase students’ creative capacity and creative confidence” (para. 6). Three research questions were investigated: What are primary teachers’ conceptualizations of creativity; What does creativity look like in the classroom, according to teachers? And What, according to teachers are the creative thinking skills associated with each discipline? Nine Australian primary teachers were participants. Three English teachers, three history teachers, and three science teachers represented their disciplines. The data was coded to three themes to answer the research questions: definitions, manifestations, and teaching for creativity. The first finding is that while teachers reported creativity was important to student learning, it was a difficult concept to define. Teachers could articulate creativity for their discipline, but not clearly or in a complete definition. Though all agreed creativity was essential for student learning. Manifestations of creativity were specific classroom practices and examples. Things like dramatic performance of concepts of text analysis were considered manifestations of creativity. Teaching for creativity was also a key theme included skills such as: analysis, communication, curiosity, inquiry, open-mindedness, and problem-solving. However to use the skills, students needed to be able to so in discipline specific ways. Additionally, all teachers spoke of creativity in relationship to foundational skill and knowledge in their area, holding that students could not be creative unless and until they understood the basics for the content area. McLean et al. hold there is opportunity for more research into how creativity is conceptualized in the classroom to eliminate ambiguity of the concept in operationalization in education,

Overall, this article is very well structured. The literature review leads directly to the research questions. The literature review leads also to a clear gap that the research can address. McLean et al. did a great job of clearly articulating the research questions, methodology to address the research questions, and provided coding process. The research results provided clear and specific examples to help the reader fully see the phenomenon at play. The only things that I wish were included that were not included were the questions used in the semi-structured inverview process and examples of the coding. While the process was very clearly described, and there was member checking and validation of the coding process, only the coding reference from NVivo was provided, and it would have been nice to see more details from NVivo, for example.

As an writing teacher, I think I take for granted that my students are going to be creative. It seems a given, that if you’re going to write a paper, for example, there will be an expression of creativity in the process. But from this week’s readings, it’s clear that creativity or having creative thinking  can and should more granular and specific. Seeing that in the classroom spaces, there are other educators who can state creativity is important – because it’s at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy and we’ve been taught we want students operating in higher order thinking activities such as creation – but being unable to fully articulate what it is to be creative is challenging when you’re trying to help students be creative. I think it helps to have a clear definition of creativity for a field that can be operationalized for a task and for assessment. This article affirmed that the ambiguity of creativity can be further refined through more research.