With the new academic year and course descriptions, classlists, and a new student information management system to be navigated before the weekend, I'm intrigued by the question posted in the Digitaldigs blog: is teaching a creative profession?

Blogger Alex Reid launches his posting with Richard Florida's celebrated definition of creative classes to muse about the relationship between teaching and creativity, and although his observations relate most directly to budding teachers in the US, he touches several chords that will resonate for all teachers:

[Is teaching a creative profession?] Certainly according to Richard Florida's definition of the "creative class" it is, and I think most teachers would agree (though they might simultaneously remark on how their creativity is limited by standards, testing, budgetary constraints, bureaucracy, etc.). When we think of great teachers, when we see representations of great teachers in popular media, creativity is a common trait, along with a commitment to education that goes far beyond thinking of it as a "job." And perhaps there is a connection there: when we invest our creativity into an activity, our feelings about it change.

Despite that, we don't think of schools as being creative places overall. People like Sir Ken Robinson identify a crisis in creativity perpetuated by our educational system. Schools are places where creativity goes to die. Students get creativity taught out of them, time and again, in a systematic fashion.

And when we look at teachers overall, do we see creative people in the way we see creativity among writers, musicians, graphic designers, game designers? Or even if we think of creativity in a less "artsy" way as in the creativity of researchers, architects, software designers, engineers: do we think of teachers as a profession that reflects that kind of creativity?

Read the full blog posting here, and yesterday's posting about creative writing and the creative economy here...

Check out Richard Florida's blog at http://www.creativeclass.com/