Responding to a call for articles on ‘…journeys of creativity from novice to expert…’ I reflected that my early workplace experience had this journey the other way around in that it might be argued I began with more expertise as a creative practitioner and then lost the opportunity to use my creativity before finding it again. This raised the question of what is important for creativity – our level of experience/expertise or the affordances we have to act creatively emphasising and how much the wider context of our work matters.
As an art student in the 1990s, where creativity was central to my practice, those years provided a formative experience. But after graduating, my ‘first career’ slowly eroded much of my creativity, despite being in the domain of theatre, film and television (ironically part of the creative industries), because commercial pressures overwhelmed my ability to practice creatively. The nadir was reached while working in a small engineering business undertaking diverse projects, each holding creative potential but the daily reality was ensuring the business was not loss-making.
This short personal narrative paper is in two parts. First, I briefly highlight three incidents that re-energised my creativity, before discussing in part 2, three simple activities I use in my current classroom practice to encourage students to use their imagination and creativity.