The Lived Experiences of Elementary School Teachers about Cultivation of Social Creativity: A Phenomenology Study

The aim of any education system is to develop learners' creativity and elementary school is the place where the early social experiences are formed. Elementary school can be a potentially great opportunity for developing social creativity and the role of elementary school teacher in stimulating and encouraging social creativity cannot be ignored. Considering this, investigating teachers' lived experiences can improve our understanding of how to improve students' social creativity and overcome barriers against it. Therefore, the aim of this study is to gain a phenomenological understanding of elementary school teacher's lived experiences about cultivation of social creativity in students. In line with this, a qualitative research approach and a phenomenological research design were used to conduct this study. Accordingly, 14 teachers with at least 10 years of teaching experience were selected from among elementary school teachers in Shiraz. Participants were then semi-structurally interviewed via telephone. The interviews were next analyzed by doing a thematic analysis and using Colizzi's seven-step method. After thematic extraction and classification, four main categories, namely student characteristics, divergent questions, teacher-student relationship style, and knowledge sharing, and eight sub-categories, namely perseverance, curiosity, openness to experience, tolerance for ambiguity, divergent questions in textbook, teacher’s divergent questions, mentoring style, and the participation principle, were identified. Based on the findings of this study, it can be concluded that teachers' experiences can be useful for developing students' social creativity and overcoming the passive approaches to knowledge acquisition. Considering the dialectic of social creativity and with regard to the competitive education system of Iran, it can be theoretically recommended that upstream documents, such as the country's National Curriculum Document, be revised and focus be placed on the development of social creativity in students. Practically considering, too, some courses should be devoted to improving students' social creativity in teacher training centers.