Creativity in the lives of English teachers: voices through found poetry

ABSTRACT This arts-based research explores the place of creativity in the lives of a focus group of teachers of English in an English secondary school who work within an increasingly performative educational system. As well as interrogating the place of creativity in their lives, the study explores how found poetry can be used as a research method to collate, analyse and then represent data. The poems are produced from semi-structured individual interviews. The participants were able to scrutinise and reflect upon the poems before returning for a second interview. This process helped strengthen the findings and gave a deeper understanding of their experiences regarding creativity. The findings suggest that the participants have limited space to be creative, or to think differently in their teaching practice. The limited space to be creative comes from normalising practices of a performance culture, but the restrictions are extrinsic and internally imposed by the participants.