Pelosi, Ligia (2017) Whispering into knowing: teachers as creative beings. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

This study (re)presents how teachers enact pedagogy in order to become transformative agents of change in their students’ lives. The importance of teacher agency and creative, arts-based practices in the teaching and learning of literacy was explored during interviews with a small sample of Australian primary school practitioners. The field texts are (re)presented in the form of a novel that interrogates the contemporary landscape of schooling as a datadriven, political instrument. The novel, which should be read first, looks at the impact of creativity in classrooms and on teachers’ lives and reframes the meaning of teacher agency. The study sought to define, reflect on and re-evaluate how creative processes in literacy education have flow-on effects for the broader literacy curriculum in Australian schools. The focus on the constraints and challenges of teaching and learning in neoliberal times frames the concept of childhood in the novel. The accompanying exegesis contextualises the contemporary educational landscape as an environment into which teachers are inducted into didactic, mechanistic and metric-driven practices. The novel and the exegesis seek to articulate the effects of the neoliberal landscape on the teaching and learning interface by looking at the role of creativity in shaping professional practice and children’s learning.

Search Google Scholar

Repository staff login