فرهاد مظلوم زوارق

Creativity and creative people have been always in the spotlight throughout the history and there has been numerous studies on creativity, as a psychological phenomenon, as a skill, and from several other points of view. Creativity has been investigated from an educational perspective, too. However, there has been little attention paid to creativity and teachers’ perceptions of that, especially in Iranian context. This study tries to uncover the ways by which Iranian English language teachers understand the term creativity. The participants of the current study were selected through a snow-ball sampling process. Twenty English teachers were interviewed regarding their understanding of creativity. In the next step, the interview transcripts were coded using MAXQDA software to extract the participants’ ideas. The findings of this study indicate that creativity is mostly associated with using proper educational activities and professional or personal characteristics of teachers. Furthermore, creativity might depend on teachers or students and even both groups. Furthermore, the participants consider wrong educational policies as a barrier of creativity. In addition, the majority of the participants believe it is difficult to find a single definition for creativity, since it is a combination of conscious and sub-conscious procedures. The results also show that training courses play a significant role in teachers’ perceptions of creativity, as majority of the participants believe creativity can be taught and learned similar to any other skill. Finally, creativity is believed to be an essential part of education by the participants of the current study. The results of this research can be helpful for teachers, educational policymakers, language teaching students, and teacher training centers.