Accounting for creativity: Subject English teachers' everyday creative practices

The study investigates secondary school English teachers ‘everyday’ creative practices within diverse institutional and curriculum settings in Victoria, Australia. The analysis highlights English teachers’ creative negotiation of tensions across a combination of policy, institutional, ideological, and curricular contexts. It argues that creative practices—especially those practices which draw on professional knowledge of subject English, teaching context and student needs—provide teachers with ways to manage the tensions between competing priorities. In doing so, the study affirms the valuable but often under-appreciated creativity of English teachers’ practices, in ways that do not readily align with standards-based conceptions of teaching.