'But w'rry not we shall banquet again someday' : creativity and socially distanced English

Disruptions to learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been one of the most concerning consequences of school closures in Australia during 2020. Carefully planned curriculum sequences and learning progressions were flipped into online formats, with teachers having very little time to prepare and students being unused to learning away from each other and from their teachers. In this paper, we turn to the early moments in the Australian educational response to the pandemic when schools pivoted to online learning. We address the potential that emerged for localised, creative ways of thinking and educating under these conditions. We examine how an English class in a western Sydney school quickly adapted a writing task in a unit on Macbeth for COVID-19 conditions, and the varied ways that the students responded to their teacher’s invitation to write their own soliloquies. We consider how writing creatively in English created oppor tunities for students to begin to process the barrage of conflicting emotions precipitated by the COVID-19 crisis. We examine how textual form and convention, paradoxically, opened spaces for creativity in their writing. Students found distinct routes and modes of expression for conveying what they were feeling, thinking and experiencing about coronavirus during the initial school lockdown. We consider how theories of creativity within constraints help us to think through what students were learning about language, about themselves and about their text in the context of socially distanced English.