Creative Thinking Across Systems: Insights from Migrant English Teachers in Ireland

This paper examines how three ELT teachers from Türkiye working in Dublin understand and enact creative thinking in language teaching, with particular attention to how cultural experience shaped in Türkiye informs that process. While creativity in ELT has been widely discussed in relation to pedagogy, teacher beliefs, classroom practice, and institutional constraints, less attention has been paid to how teachers’ own cultural and cross-system experience becomes part of creative pedagogical thinking. Drawing on a phenomenologically informed interpretivist design, the study analyses semi-structured interviews with three teachers who had built their professional lives across Turkish and Irish educational contexts. The data were developed as three interpretive cases through close, iterative reading, supported by analytical memo-writing, attention to disconfirming evidence, and member checking. The findings suggest that Turkish cultural experience operates with a dual logic. Across the cases, the same cultural matrix produces both affordances for and constraints on the flexible thinking through which creative pedagogy is enacted. Relational warmth, collectivist orientations, hospitality codes, teacher authority, and internal cultural heterogeneity function as pedagogical resources, while examination pressure, institutional rigidity, regulatory barriers, and evaluative interactional norms restrict creative action. The cases further show that movement between educational systems generates analytical capacity, enabling teachers to recognise conditions that support or inhibit creative pedagogy. The paper argues that culturally diverse ELT teachers from Türkiye may be better supported through their cultural experience, including its contradictions, provided that such experience is recognised as a complex pedagogical resource rather than reduced to a simple advantage or obstacle.