“CREATIVITY IS AUTONOMY”: THE COMPLEX INTERACTION OF KAZAKHSTANI SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ BELIEFS AND PRACTICES THROUGH MICRO, EXO, AND MACRO CONTEXTUAL FACTORS

Abstract

The significance of creativity and fostering creativity in the educational sphere is widely recognized internationally. Kazakhstan’s renewed curriculum emphasizes the importance of developing creativity in schools. Actual classroom practice may lack creativity development. This dissertation fills an important gap in the literature by presenting Kazakhstani teachers’ beliefs about creativity and developing a creative environment through the lens of the micro-context of classrooms, exo-context of schools and macro-context of society and explores this topic by examining how their beliefs and practices shape and are shaped by the three contexts and the relationship between them. The research approach was designed as a qualitative, interpretivist, multiple-case study which included four Kazakhstani secondary schools (NIS, private school, and state Kazakh and Russian language schools). Data collection includes 15 pre- and post-observation interviews, observations of teacher’s classes, and document analysis. The complexity theory of teachers’ beliefs (Zheng, 2015) and the conceptual framework for teachers’ beliefs about creativity (Bereczki & Kárpáti, 2018) were employed in this study. Consequently, these two frameworks combined became a holistic conceptual framework which helped to study the interaction between teachers’ beliefs about creativity, practices and contexts. Despite different types of schools, the findings revealed that teachers’ beliefs about creativity align with many creativity theories, creativity researchers and empirical findings on teachers’ beliefs about creativity. A noteworthy finding of this study was that the creative environment construct of this study’s initial conceptual framework on teachers’ beliefs was expanded with two additional subconstructs: the physical environment and students’ needs. Findings also showed that teachers’ beliefs about developing a creative environment influence their teaching practices in spite of barriers that prevent them from enacting their beliefs in the classrooms. Finally, the findings also supported the dynamic and co-adaptive features of the beliefs-practice system and its complex nature suggested by Zheng (2015). Among the three contexts, the macro-context was the biggest influence on teachers’ beliefs and practices about creativity, and shaped teachers’ beliefs and practices. Based on the findings, the Kazakhstani educational system needs to provide teachers professional training on creativity, better school resources and find ways to address current obstacles to developing creativity so teachers can better develop creativity in the classroom.