Creative in finding creativity in the curriculum: the CLIL second language classroom

Abstract Modern education is often characterized by a tension between learning and creativity (Connery et al. in Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts, 2010). “The Arts”—if attended to at all—is often positioned as a distinct element of the broader curriculum, and separate from teaching and learning within other curricular domains. Yet, despite being largely neglected within contemporary social constructivist literature, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind (Vygotsky in Mind in society, 1978; Vygotsky in The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1: Problems of general psychology, 1987)) has as its core a fundamental concern for creativity, affect, and emotion as the basis for human development. This paper argues that Vygotsky’s understanding of catharsis—in particular, the transformative potential of emotion—gives cause to rethink the qualitative nature of pedagogy, and especially the importance of “mundane creativity” (Holzman in Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts, 2010, p. 27) at the core of teaching and learning. This, in turn, opens up new possibilities for conceiving of how creativity might be understood and realized within and across different dimensions of the curriculum more broadly. For an empirical example to explore these constructs, the paper considers data from a “content and language integrated learning” (CLIL) context. Emerging in the mid-1990s as a European response to the success of the Canadian French immersion method for teaching languages (Johnson and Swain in Immersion education: International perspectives, 1997), CLIL sets out several guiding principles for integrating second language (L2) with content to develop both simultaneously. With a focus on how Japanese mediates a unit of work on Geography, the study highlights how the integrated language/content focus affords a space for creative pedagogical engagement in terms of learners making their own creative choices on what language to use, and how it could be used, to facilitate the learning of both language and content (Bachman and Palmer in Language assessment in practice: Developing language assessments and justifying their use in the real world, 2010; Mahn and John-Steiner in The gift of confidence: A Vygotskian view of emotions, 2002).