Drawing on data gathered from ITE students in two initial teacher education programmes in Ireland, this paper explores and analyses student teachers' understandings of creativity from their own perspectives. The broad aim of the research into student teachers' conceptions of creativity is to inform teacher educators' thinking and pedagogical practice regarding students' professional development as creative teachers. There is a dearth of research on this issue in Ireland despite the  rhetoric globally around creativity as a dimension of human capital and a means to solve problems in labour and development.

Traditionally, within a broadly liberal education paradigm, the creative and the artistic have been understood as significant to the development, of teachers and their students (Freire, Dewey, Bruner, Sternberg). Despite this tradition, there have been recent widespread calls from the labour market and within the public domain to reform educational curricula, including ITE programmes, in order to foreground what are more recently defined and understood as creative capacities and skills to enhance young people’s abilities to be more innovative and entrepreneurial, and to prepare them for teaching and for society in 21^st century.

For educationalists this is a familiar challenge, of attempting to balance the wisdom of the past with the urgencies of the present. John Dewey reminds us that it can never be one at the expense of the other, and that education should find within experience the connections between both.

In response  to this clamour for reform from without, and in light of many recent and indeed ongoing reforms within ITE, both in Ireland and in Europe, this research takes a phenomenological approach to this important issue. It seeks to explore how creativity is understood by student teachers themselves across two primary ITE programmes within a University. On the basis of students' perspectives on their personal and professional experiences of 'creativity' we seek to understand its significance for their professional development as teachers, and then more generally within primary teacher education.

The conceptual framework for the research is interdisciplinary (philosophy, sociology and  teacher education discourses) and draws from existing understandings of creativity so as to establish a working definition that meets students’ current realities. The selected theoretical perspectives that frame this research on creativity (Maslow, May , Freire, Amsler, Elliott) see the creative as something inalienably human and original, while recognising changes in contemporary understandings around creativity that are shaped by specific and global socio cultural contexts. A particular definition of creativity suitable for our purposes is drawn from RK Elliot's article 'Versions of Creativity', in which he avoids being too prescriptive by delineating and elaborating a traditional concept of creativity, and what he calls the new concept of creativity. Drawing on these differing versions of creativity helps us to avoid interpreting the creative in relation to narrow unimaginative aims, and achievements that are too exclusively materialistic. The main value of such an approach to creativity lies in its inspirational force and its capacity to make us reflect on the connection between the nature of education and the meaning of life (1971 p. 150). Our use of Elliot's approach includes the emancipatory possibilities of transformation of self and world (Freire 1990) that blend constructively with inquiry models of learning.

In this paper we present the conceptual underpinnings of the research and the findings from the first phase of data collection with ITE students in Ireland. Although part of a larger ongoing research project, the first phase of the data will be informative in its own right. It can form the basis for subsequent interactive sessions with students to articulate and concepualise 'the creative' and creative professional identity.

Amsler, Sarah (2011) Revalorising the critical attitude for critical education . Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 9 (2). Bruner, J. (1979) On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, Second Edition : Boden, A (2004) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. London: Routledge. Csikszentmihalyi (1996) Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Row. Elliott, R. K. (1971) Versions of Creativity in Journal of Philosophy of Education,5, 2, 139-152. Freire, P. (1990) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Dewey.J. (1929) The Quest for Certainty. New York: Minton Balch and Co. Diakody and Kinari (1999) Student Teachers' Beliefs about Creativity in British Educational Research Journal, 25, 2, 225-243. Howell, B. (2008) Some Student Teachers’ Conceptions of Creativity in Secondary School English in English Language Teaching, 1.2. Maslow , A, (1968). Toward A Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. May, R, (1975). The Courage To Create. Toronto: Bantam. Steiner R. (1996) The Education of the Child: And Early Lectures on Education. The Anthroposophic Press. NY: Hudson Press. Sternberg (2003) Wisdom, Intelligence and Creativity Synthesised. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, C W. (1988) Various Approaches and Definitions of Creativity in RJ Sternberg (ed.) The Nature of Creativity: contemporary psychological perspectives. NY: Cambridge University Press. The bibliography is indicative and as yet is not fully complete.