Creating space: accounting for where I stand

This paper explores the journey through a career which combines that of teacher/educator, team leader and writer, and attempts to find connections and coherence between them. In taking this journey, I am asking the question: which values and beliefs connect the different roles I have played as an educator, a poet and novelist, and a team leader? Why has creativity as a driving force been important to me throughout these roles and since childhood, and what exactly do I mean by this term? Why do I continue to use the term creative when it is so fraught with debate and ambiguity? In this paper I aim to explain where I stand in relation to these questions, and what impact they have had on my own practice and on my professional community. I explain by offering a window into two specific examples of my practice, firstly as a novelist, and secondly as a teacher and teacher educator. The paper arrives at two concepts reached as a result of these reflections: knowledge transformation, and creative space. I conclude with a story that acts both as an exemplum of my own creative practice, and also of the creative space generated by a deeply effective teacher/learner relationship – a mythologised account of my own doctoral studies with Jack Whitehead.