Challenging Creativity: A Critical Pedagogy of Narrative Interpretation
English Studies in Canada 43.1 (2017): 45-66.
By Alexander Hollenberg
Abstract
The interdisciplinarity of creativity research in academia has lent itself to a proliferation of inchoate ideas, definitions, and arguments, and yet, curiously, within the public sphere "creativity" is often promoted as a socio-economic panacea, a word with power enough to heal us of the fractious vicissitudes of modern life. In the face of widespread precarious employment with which our graduating students must now contend--employment that is insecure, temporary, seasonal, contracted, lacking benefits--workers' creativity is typically celebrated as a means of negotiating the new neoliberal norm. (1) In Ontario, the recent mandate of the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (2) emphasizes its role in support of "a dynamic business climate that thrives on innovation, creativity and partnership" (2014 Mandate Letter). Likewise, the Ministry of Education's report, Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario, repeatedly calls for "increase[d] training in innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship" for secondary students (3, 6, 7). Unsurprisingly, this vision echoes economist Thomas Friedman's pedagogical imperative in a New York Times op-ed column almost word for word: the education system must teach "entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity," so as to engender a class of creative "untouchables" who have the requisite imagination to do old jobs in smarter ways ("The New Untouchables"). For many in the humanities, these more-or-less explicit ties between creativity and capital are suspect. In literary studies, we often see our role as filling out a vanguard of social critique, and we view our subject matter--the creative texts themselves--as the vehicles of such critique. Suddenly, our own pedagogical obligations come into question. How can literary educators teach modes of creativity that prepare students for their contemporary context without also tacitly endorsing the precarious world they are inheriting?
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