This research advances the phenomenological research that we presented last year on paradigms of creativity and student teachers understandings of creativity .

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 long tradition, there have been recent pressures from the labour market, and within the public domain to reform educational curricula, including ITE programmes, to foreground new versions of the creative, understood as teachable capacities and skills that can enhance young people’s abilities to be more innovative and entrepreneurial, and to prepare them for teaching and for society in 21st century.

In response to this clamour for reform from without, and in light of many recent and ongoing reforms within ITE, both in Ireland and in Europe, we continue to use a phenomenological approach to explore creativity from the perspectives of teacher education students. In this phase of the research however, we now also survey Humanities students within the same institution (university) as their education student peers, so as to compare understandings of creative activity, concepts of creaticvity and their own creative practices across groups. We hope to explore their understandings of creativity as self creation and development. A significant aspect of our research  is to build a conceptual map of creativity across education and humanities in response to the theoretical scholarship and the empirical findings of our study.

 In view of the literature one might  expect that constructive and social paradigms of teaching and learning in education might influence students teachers' understandings and perspectives on creativity in a particular direction, towards the newer pardigm. This was evident in the findings of the first phase of our research. We hypothesise  this may be less obviously the case for Humanities students. These students (chosen from selected subject areas) are not exposed to the same extent to the social constructivist theories  that are so prevalent in teacher education. (Many of these students do r go on to pursue Professional masters in Primary Education).

 Exploring the understandings of these  groups can help to ascertain if a new paradigm of creativity, as a socially constructed phenomenon and as teachable skills is dominant within initial primary teacher education and/or in the wider field of higher education and liberal arts. A significant issue is the growing literature that links well-being to creativity (Seligman 2012).

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 to avoid interpreting it  in relation to narrow unimaginative aims, and achievements that are too exclusively materialistic. The  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.

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