Abstract:
This research reports on selected results from the author's qualitative analysis of creativity in senior art classrooms. The study examines the transactions between art students and their art teachers as students make artworks that are assessed in the NSW HSC Visual Arts examination. The investigation is theoretically underpinned by Pierre Bourdieu's theories of the habitus and symbolic capital. Bourdieu's theories are demonstrably relevant for understanding creativity as a kind of inferential social reasoning that is transacted between teachers and students in the social context. The study provides for the concept of creativity to be extended beyond current accounts as evidenced in everyday use and as represented in theoretical interpretations of talent, curiosity, divergent thinking and problem solving. It identifies the importance of the history of interactions and how circumstances are continually reassessed. Such iterative adjustments have the power to not only transfigure the social standing of the participants and their relations with one another but the creative attributes of the artworks themselves. The paper concludes by questioning the voracity of evidenced based assessment which accepts a logical means ends relation between the artwork, achievement of a standard and a student's acquisition of knowledge.