Data in the previous section suggests that creativity was distributed among different students in different schools based broadly on notions of academic ability, and also of social background and broader exposure to education. This section will explore the different levels of agency experienced by teachers in the three schools in terms of their relationship to the curriculum.
126 Significantly, Jane (A25) did not ascribe the lack of creativity she perceived in her current classroom as entirely down to the student body, as discussed above. She also reflected on changes to the curriculum. This linked back to her comments explored in chapter six, because she talked about the curriculum largely in terms of examination requirements. For example, she talked about how the GCSE when she started teaching in the late 1980s was assessed entirely by coursework. This meant “there was much, much more control over the curriculum in terms of what the teachers could teach and how they could teach”. To Jane, this offered teachers the freedom to construct a curriculum with a particular class in mind. In contrast, she felt that the GCSE she now taught was “much more prescriptive in terms of what we can teach and how we can teach”. This led her to reflect that the lack of reading experience of the students “must to some extent be to do with what we’re doing in schools”. She believed that the current model “isn’t encouraging students to read individually” and that “the way we teach the lesson is much more
formulaic and more regimented”. She talked about lessons at the start of her career when she took students to the library and “students sat around talking about books”. She
concluded this part of her response by stating that “you wouldn’t do a lesson like that now [because] it’s not seen as a taught lesson”. There was no statutory requirement for Jane not to teach as she once did, but the wider discourse within which she and her school operated – even as teachers at this ‘Bohemian’ school sometimes resisted such discourses in their personal rhetoric – denied her agency to practise in a creative way according to her beliefs.
The lack of agency afforded to teachers in the two state schools relative to former practices was a feature of other responses. Sally (B40), for example, reflected on the start of her career in the 1970s when, she said, “it was literally free. No national curriculum. You went in and you did something you enjoyed”. She gave the example of teaching poetry that she personally liked. The limited number of literary texts mentioned by the Archford and
127 Bloomington teachers was, indeed, striking. Staples of the then GCSE, Of Mice and Men18
and An Inspector Calls, were cited several times, as was an oft-taught Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, but little else. There was no sense of teaching something out of personal interest or enthusiasm; rather the texts selected were generally ones commonly taught out of a sense of expediency: they were short, relatively straightforward and well resourced. In contrast, teachers at Windhover mentioned a wide range of texts and poets, drawing from a mix of acclaimed contemporary works and established classics, such as plays by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, poetry by Tennyson, Keats, Heaney and Hughes, contemporary novels by Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, Chaucer’s Tales and Wuthering Heights. This was in line with head of department, Matt’s (W20), comments about how he encouraged his colleagues to teach what they wanted:
it’s important that teachers have got their own commitment to what they are studying. I think an English teacher must make their own choice of texts. I think that I do insist on that remaining the case at GCSE and A level even if the question is occasionally raised by senior management.
The Windhover teachers appeared still to have a great deal of agency over the curriculum they taught, both as a department and as individuals within that department. In theory, there was nothing to stop the departments at Bloomington and Archford adopting the same policy as Matt and teaching just about any text that they wanted to at some point in the curriculum, and a range of texts at GCSE and A Level (budget limitations notwithstanding). As Matt made clear, there were alternatives to Of Mice and Men and An Inspector Calls on the GCSE
18Reports that up to 90% of students studied this novel by American, John Steinbeck, led to direct intervention by
128 syllabus; it was simply his opinion that the majority of schools did not opt for these alternatives. Teachers seemed bound in terms of both practice and content by Jane’s (A25) notion of what was “a taught lesson”. Creativity was constructed within the context of what teachers would have liked to do, believed they ought to do, but ultimately felt that they could not do.
At Bloomington, teachers identified such a construction as linked to their school’s general ethos. Talking about how she generally could not teach in what she saw as a creative way, Simone (B1) said that “the ethos of this school has really affected my view of creativity and what I’m able to do to be creative”. Stan (B3) felt that “students are not encouraged to be creative” at the school and that “it’s maybe something to do with the school’s ethos on academic rigour”. He said that this equated to lessons in which students “write, write, write” in an environment where “there isn’t a focus on talking, which obviously I think a lot of creativity comes from … that’s probably not something that’s always encouraged enough”. Academic rigour was equated with repetitive, silent activity, the repetition of “write, write, write” holding connotations of drilling. It was constructed as the opposite of creativity, which, by implication would not help students to learn, suggesting that the ethos at Bloomington under which teachers operated was constructed within a wider discourse that did not value creativity.
While teachers at Archford made similar comments to those at Bloomington about the lack of creativity in their lessons, they did not attribute this to the particulars of their school in the same way, which meant that their constructions of creativity as applied to English teaching contained more contradictory impulses. The school itself was spoken of in consistent terms as a creative place, even as teachers didn’t generally feel able to teach English in a particularly creative way. Like Edie (A10), Samantha (A12) and Lee (A5) both went to private schools as students. Both were attracted to work at Archford by the particular
129 nature of the school. Samantha said that she “wanted to work in this kind of school” because “I didn’t enjoy my school very much and I think that from the pastoral side, this was the sort of school that I felt would give me what I wanted”. Lee talked about his private schooling as being “quite old-school in that sense in the methods and way I was taught”. He went on to say that
it was pretty much teachers out front, you read a chapter together, a few questions were asked, then you wrote something for homework. It never drifted from that really, it was a very traditional formula.
In contrast, he described Archford as “the sort of school I would have liked to come to when I was a kid”. He expanded on this by contrasting the ethos of his old school with that of Archford:
I didn’t like the traditional ethos of my school where you got in trouble if your top button was not done up. I think that there was no creative ethos to the school at all. If you played a musical instrument, it was violin or trumpet, something quite traditional. You couldn’t play drums, you couldn’t play bass guitar or something, there was no sense of artistic credibility to the school at all, it was just a kind of exam factory really. I think consequently I probably, I did my A levels there as well – I think after that I went through a little rebellious streak where I thought I don’t really like that at all. I felt kind of at home when I walked in here. I remember the kids showing me around that day that I turned up and just seeing some of the wonderful art, artistic bits that had gone up, seeing the music block and all that stuff, and I think that
130 there was a performance after my interview, I went to see that as well and I
just remember thinking straight away that it had a very artistic undercurrent. I was attracted to the fact that kids could wear their own clothes, things like that.
Despite the positive light in which teachers at Archford viewed much of what went on in their school, including its commitment to creativity, their comments about English teaching were not out of step with Mark’s (B8) about his school being a “sausage factory”. Lee might have implied that Archford was not an “exam factory” (because the school he attended as a student was) but everything he constructed as being creative lay outside of the English classroom. The separation of English and creativity, as witnessed in New Labour policy documentation (NACCCE 1999; Seltzer and Bentley 1999), seemed to have come to pass; there was room in one of the state schools for creative practice, but even then only in particular areas of school experience. In the two state schools studied, its presence in the English curriculum was limited at best.