The role of creative interventions in foreign language teaching. Exploring the role of creative actions and artifacts

Abstract

It has become common practice to refer to the importance of the 21st Century Skills and how necessary it is to equip students with a skillset that can facilitate their engagement with different situations in their personal and professional life. Little is said about how teachers engage with curricula to facilitate ways in which these skills may be enabled. A review of the extant literature does not indicate how personal creativity can be explored through the lens of the teachers’ creative actions and the creative artifacts that they produce throughout their careers. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by gaining an understanding of how teachers of different foreign languages engage with processes that reflect their creative actions and their outcomes. Drawing from past research, the current study adopted a qualitative method approach. This method was deemed suitable since it placed teachers in an introspective position inviting them to explore and evaluate the enablers, constraints and potential ideas that they encounter in their day to day activities in schools while they execute their duties. Data was collected by means of semi-structure, in-depth interviews with fourteen foreign language teachers who taught and resided in Malta (EU) at the time of data collection. The rich data collected was analysed manually through thematic analysis. The laborious process led to the identification of themes that led to interesting findings. The main findings include the implications of time constraints, the utilisation of different teaching methods and personality traits among other factors. These findings indicate that adaptations in the way things are done in collaboration with all the school communities and at policy making level could lead to improved practice paving the way for further quality teaching.