Conflicted epistemic beliefs about teaching for creativity

Educational policymakers and workforce studies emphasize creativity for teachers and students, yet there is an overreliance on performance measures and ratings of creativity that excludes the perspective of how teachers construct epistemic beliefs about what creativity means to them. This paper presents results from a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews to unearth epistemic beliefs about teaching for creativity as described by sixteen pre-service and in-service teachers enrolled in teacher education, Masters and PhD programs in an American university. Using qualitative content analysis, five themes emerged: teaching for creativity as a component of teaching success, discordant beliefs about creative teaching abilities, diverse beliefs about student creative potential, the importance of creativity for student learning and freedom to express new ideas. We discuss further how beliefs conflicted, namely the confusion about student potential as innate, malleable or a fusion of both, and the conflation of creativity with the arts. For implications, we propose future research exploring the calibration of teacher epistemic beliefs with teaching behavior in the classroom.