Towards boundary crossing: primary and secondary school teachers teaching creative writing and its redrafting

Introduction

What is creative writing? From the perspective of creative writers there is no consensus. Going back to the poet T.S. Eliot (1997), we find an extreme view of the creative writing of poetry as a formal activity, where the poet must understand form and the work of their significant predecessors, to write something worthwhile. For Eliot, therefore, creative writing is about “depersonalisation”, the poet removing themselves from the act of writing creatively to learn from and use previous creative works. To take a more contemporary creative writer, Smith (2017), for example, conceptualises creative writing quite differently. For Smith, the creative writer experiences a continual attempt to express themselves, to reveal their personality and lived experiences through the exploration of language and form.

Linked to these polarised views held by creative writers are pedagogical practices which have been conceptualised by Wyse et al. (2013) as existing on a continuum of “closed and open approaches”. Closed approaches to the teaching of creative writing lean more towards Eliot’s line of thinking, with students developing an appreciation of different forms to produce their own piece of writing. Such closed approaches were popularised in the teaching of creative writing in Australia and England in the 1990s due to an appropriation of genre theory (Martin et al., 1987), where both fiction and non-fiction texts were categorised as having specific features at whole text, sentence and word level that students should learn and adopt. In this paper, we refer to such approaches to teaching creative writing as “product approaches”.

In line with the thinking of Smith, on the other hand, more open approaches to the teaching of creative writing give students choice over language and form as they find and develop their writer “voices” (Grainger et al., 2005). Here, the act of writing is a process that has been conceptualised as problem-solving (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987), with the students exploring language and form to convey and transform their lived experiences to express what they want to say. Accordingly, open approaches give more autonomy and control to students in the creative writing process and in this paper we, therefore, refer to such approaches to teaching creative writing “process approaches”.

Like Wyse et al. (2013), we see product and process...