Standardized literacy assessments that place emphasis on testing and attainment of results have caused many students, particularly in middle years schooling to be disenfranchised by literacy teaching and learning practices. This study employed an action research methodology to investigate whether an outdoor learning experience in a Year 7/8…

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

Current research suggests that students who struggle with grammar, spelling, mechanics and other "problems of ability," as well as students who suffer from "problems of engagement," as well as those students who see reading and writing as a chore, can benefit from creative writing assignments and learn to enjoy reading and…

Disruptions to learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been one of the most concerning consequences of school closures in Australia during 2020. Carefully planned curriculum sequences and learning progressions were flipped into online formats, with teachers having very little time to prepare and students being unused to learning away from each…

This article draws on Donna Haraway's call for feminist speculative fabulation as an approach to qualitative research methodologies and writing praxis in schools. The first section of the article outlines how I conceptualize speculative thought, through different philosophers and theorists, and provides a brief literature review of speculative…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

The author shows how using art helped a blind student in an AP class and students in Creative and Practical Writing classes improve writing proficiency and critical thinking.

This article is a reflective account of my work as a writer-in-residence in 12 post-primary schools, over two academic years. Coming from the perspective of a writer the article fills a gap in the literature, where a substantial body of work exists on the teacher as writer, but little exists on the writer as teacher. The article makes a case for…

This article puts forward moral-philosophical arguments for re-building and re-thinking secondary-level (high-school equivalent) English studies around creative writing practices. I take it that when educators and policy makers talk about such entities as the "well-rounded learner," what we have, or should have, in mind is moral agents…

This article arises from a four week study of a class of 14-15 year old students. The study explored students' perception of themselves as writers and the effects of a variety of teaching and learning strategies on their creative writing responses. The aim of the project was to enhance the students' creative writing, whilst ascertaining whether…

Creative writing courses are growing in universities and outside them. Publishers and agents even turn to them now as sources of promise and talent. This article describes a particularly successful MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London and makes a case for the popularity and the usefulness to universities, to aspiring writers and…

The emerging field of creative writing studies has provided new conceptions of creative writing's role within the English discipline. These conceptions focus on the relation of creative writing to composition studies, and there remains a need to reconsider creative writing's relation to literary studies. "Reading for pedagogy"--the…

Focusing on the creative writing of Year 6 boys as they make the transition to Year 7, this article establishes a theoretical model for creative writing as response. In line with Bakhtin's notion of utterances as 'interpersonal' (1986), the model demonstrates the complexity of creative writing -- the text is influencing of and influenced by an…

Is it possible to teach people to write fiction? A more important and helpful question is: "how" do we teach creative writing? And "who" are the teachers? A published writer is not necessarily qualified to teach creative writing. To helpfully share their declarative knowledge with students, a writer must embrace the art and…

In this age of standardization, many English teachers are unsure about how to incorporate creative writing and thinking into their classroom. In a fresh new voice, Luke Reynolds emphasizes that "creativity in our lives as teachers and in the lives of our students is one of our most vital needs in the 21st century." Based on his own journey as an…