There is an enduring public interest in the perceived social benefits of creativity and the role of education in developing it, and an increasingly global education policy imperative to develop creativity within and across societies (Harris, 2016). Politically, creativity is seen as a means of supporting socio-cultural development and sustainable economies, based on acknowledgements that it contributes to individual and collective human development and fulfilment as well as ‘knowledge-based economies’.  However, the situation is complicated by the contradictions inherent in the neoliberal discourses which have reconstituted social policy and practice in public and private services, including education, since the late 1980s (Klenk and Pavolini, 2015).  Creativity is viewed as desirable within neoliberal models, but can be conflated with narrower, marketised notions of innovation and there is a concurrent and often conflicting focus on managerialist strategies which emphasise standardisation, measurable performative achievement, individualism and accountability. Therefore, whilst the current interest in developing creativity in curriculum and recognition of the importance of creative approaches to teaching and learning is to be welcomed (OECD, 2019; Wyse and Ferrari, 2018), there are tensions between policies that call for innovation and originality and performative edicts which require conformity to technicist-oriented curricula.  The continual production of comparative educational performance indicators and rankings generated by the global education policy field over the past few decades exacerbates tensions further (Rawolle and Lingard, 2015).

This situation presents problems for teachers, not least because there are immense tensions between these policy emphases but also because the notion of creativity is highly complex.  There are major implications for ways both children and teachers make sense of creativity but also learning and teaching itself and their roles and identities within their school.  This research concerns itself with these issues as part of an in-depth, case study of the perspectives and experiences of staff working within a single English primary school with a stated interest in creativity.  It focuses on on the following research questions:

1. How do the staff define ‘creativity’, ‘creative learning’ and ‘creative teaching’?
2. How do the staff enact ‘creativity’, creative learning’ and ‘creative teaching’ within the neoliberal policy context of the school?
3. What are the enablers, constraints, tensions and ambiguities in this process?

This research combines an in-depth ethnographic case study design with a Bourdieusian theoretical framework (1977; 1990). The wider study elaborates the concept of ‘pedagogical habitus (Feldman, 2016: 71) to describe how sets of ‘embodied cognitive, dispositional, and corporeal pedagogical practices’ are added to a teacher’s primary habitus over time as part of their experiences in different social fields.  Its specific theoretical contribution is to provide a detailed portrait of the pedagogical habitus of the four staff participants with a focus on their ‘creative dispositions’, meaning any relatively durable sets of practices or ways of thinking about creativity.   It also contributes to the relatively limited research that exists on inter-field relations (e.g. Lingard and Rawolle, 2004) in considering the ways that dominant intersecting political and social fields affected the school as an institutional field. In this paper, I briefly present the notion of pedagogical habitus and examples of creative dispositions; these are discussed in more depth in other publications. I then focus on the powerfully coercive influence of neoliberal cross-field effects which currently operate across multiple fields including schools and the ways these can alter the ordinary functioning of a school field and the pedagogical habitus of the staff within in both temporary and enduring ways.  I examine the encroachment of ‘neoliberal policy dispositions’ (Thomson, 2005: 753) on school practice, specifically the ways that the staff in this school enacted ‘creative curriculum’.  

The case study focuses on a suburban primary school situated in South East England, examining the perspectives and experiences of the head teacher and three of the classroom teachers. The teachers were situated in different ‘key stages’ of the English national curriculum: Reception (where the children are aged 4-5 years), Year 2 (aged 6-7 years) and Year 6 (aged 10-11 years). Data were collected through observations, interviews, field notes and document analysis carried out in weekly visits to the school over the course of the entire academic year (2012-13). The overall aim of an ethnographic approach is to make sense of events from the participants’ perspectives through an interrelated, iterative process of data construction, analysis and theorising (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). A Bourdieusian analysis provides a way to contextualise data in relation to the socio-political context as well as enhancing the systematic and reflexive nature of the design, as this is part of both ethnographic and Bourdieusian traditions. I have previously examined the interplay between early years practitioners’ individual histories, both personal and professional, their understandings of their institutional role and their interpretations of policy as they engage in their work (Cottle & Alexander, 2014). I found Bourdieusian theoretical concepts were not only useful for framing the interactive relationship between these different elements as ‘pedagogical habitus’ but also for incorporating reflections upon my ethnographic positioning and relationships into the analytic process. My primary aims were to gain insight into the lived experiences and understandings of my participants, to build a system of themes representing their social world as it was experienced by them at that point in time. Therefore, initially I focused on inductive analysis, conceptualising dispositions and pedagogical habitus later in the process as I examined the ways that their definitions and enactments related to neoliberal policy and creativity research. In this way, participants’ micro-level perspectives were foregrounded then contextualised in relation to the ‘larger conditions of possibility’ (Sallaz, 2018, p. 490) systematically, drawing on detailed, longitudinal data to establish and validate connections. Adherence to these principles and the inclusion of a demonstrable set of procedures ensured the demands of rigour were met. These included the triangulation of multiple sources of data, theory and method, internal and external checks on the processes of enquiry and analysis, and careful organisation and documentation.

This research addresses calls for qualitative studies that explore teachers' beliefs and the theoretical framing of creativity in relation to their classroom practices in depth (Bereczki and Kárpáti, 2018), exploring the nature of the creative pedagogical dispositions of the study participants and demonstrating their value. However, neoliberal policy effects shaped the individual creative dispositions of some staff, dominated the pedagogical habitus of others and constrained collective efforts to embed a ‘creative curriculum’. Although the data demonstrate that it is possible to enact creative dispositions within a constrained context and staff even employed some of their creative dispositions to mediate negative policy effects for both children and teachers, it was clear that they were enmeshed within this policy universe and did not always recognise their role in dominating or being dominated. However, cross-field effects can also cause dissonance between habitus and field which seemed to offer opportunities for resistance, change and self-renewal (Mills, 2008). At its most extreme, such dissonance can prompt agents to disconnect from a field as was the case for three of the staff in this study and which would appear to be happening on a wider scale in England at least if teacher attrition rates can be taken as indicative (Foster, 2018; Worth and Van den Brande, 2019). These research findings therefore offer valuable insights to inform macro-level policy studies and policy-making. A Bourdieusian framework is recommended as a practically useful structure for collaborations between academic researchers and practitioners or students. It offers a language to expose and challenge doxic ‘common sense’ narratives and therefore the mechanisms by which symbolic and material violence is done to dominated groups, such as teachers and children, and resources to draw upon in order in order to recognise and resist performative dispositions and to develop pedagogical philosophies and creative aspirations.

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