The Australian Curriculum, creativity and narrative accounts of the classroom

What does it mean to be a "creative" teacher? What place does creativity have in education? And how do teachers assess students' creativity? These questions seem especially crucial in a time when education policy and curriculum place a high importance on the concept of creativity and creative thinking, evident in documents such as the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA), the Australian Curriculum (ACARA) and the Victorian iteration of this national curriculum (VCAA). These documents not only highlight the requirement for creativity to be embedded in the curriculum, they also in some instances stipulate that creativity and creative thinking are assessed. The narratives were generated from a combination of semi-structured interviews conducted before and after classroom observations. The semi-structured interviews established an in-depth understanding of the ­complexities and nuances of the English teachers' understandings of creativity.