Khatoon, Iffat (2020) Creativity Beyond Conformity: A Study in Secondary School Students’ Creativity and Learning. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

This thesis touches on the varied outcomes of the recent global push towards creativity development in Australian secondary school education. There is a growing scholarly emphasis on learners’ perspectives on their schooling experiences as something integral to creativity enhancement and implementation efforts. However, students’ responses to creative pedagogic practices — crucial for enhancing both pedagogy and creativity — are hardly given any substantial consideration at practice and policy level. This study seeks to enrich research that builds around this gap and has implications for the field of creativity education, policy, and research. Five year 9 student groups were interviewed and observed to explore their active negotiation with creativity-focused pedagogy that centred on learner agency, interest, and ownership of learning. In this study, conducted at a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, portraiture methodology was employed. With its constructivist underpinnings, analytic framework, and narrative focus on documenting success, portraiture enabled the researcher to co-construct an interactional model with the research participants. The dynamic flow that the interactional model suggests between its collaborating elements has the potential to improve teaching and learning procedures through learners’ enhanced creativity- based learning, engagement, and voicing practices. The chief theoretical significance of this study centres on foregrounding a learner-centred approach towards creativity enhancement. The practical implications of this study include the ways students, teachers, teacher training, policy, and critical and creative skill enhancement programmes can benefit from these research findings to improve both teaching and learning processes. Through its theoretical as well as practical contributions, this thesis opens the way to make policy, practice, and research developments in this area.

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