Something mysterious that we don't understand ... the beat of the human heart, the rhythm of language' : creative writing and imaginative response in English

In this chapter, I take up some of the work of Raymond Williams as a departure point to think through the particular case of creative writing, and I contrast this with some recent scholarship on creativity in arts and English education (Harris 2014; McCallum 2012). As I have argued elsewhere, following many others, creativity is a 'malleable and historically contingent concept' (Gannon 2011: 185). Beyond recognition of creativity as a thing, as some sort of quality that inheres in the 'creative' person, or as a commodity in the service of capital, in this chapter I suggest that we might think of creativity as an event, as something that happens when people engage in particular spaces and times with the affordances that are available at that moment. This is where, in classrooms, the work of the teacher as the designer of learning experiences becomes crucial. In that unit of time that continues to mark the rhythms of secondary schooling, the classroom lesson, the teacher creates the conditions and affordances for learning. Through artful and always contingent programming the teacher composes curriculum as a series of pedagogical events (Reid 2013). In an effective writing lesson, the teacher designs and incorporates provocations that lead students towards the new, the no-yet-thought-or-written, and that build their skills and confidence, and their capacities to take risks with writing. The chapter presents a brief discussion of some theoretical resources and contexts for thinking through creativity, followed by a case study of one lesson in a Year 11 class from a research project on creative writing pedagogies in schools.