Stepping from the known to the unknown : rethinking creativity in English classroms

To cultivate a reflexive awareness of the language we speak is crucial to any effort to critically engage in the world around us. Raymond Williams taught us this years ago, when he selected 'keywords' to trace the changes in sensibility that characterize the capitalist era (Williams 1976/1988}. He thus set out to chart 'both continuity and discontinuity' in the ways human beings have understood and participated in the society in which they find themselves (Ibid: 23). His inquiry involved grappling with the 'deep conflicts of value and belief' (Ibid.) that changes in the meanings of those 'keywords' reflected as England transformed itself into an industrial economy and imperial power. Not to be aware of how language shapes what we think and do is to remain trapped within the present, robbed of both history and any capacity to imagine and create a better world than the one we know at present (see Doecke and Parr 2011, Doecke et al. 2006).