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

What is it about?

There is little research into how teachers conceptualise and teach creative writing and its redrafting and how this might differ depending upon the age of the pupils being taught. In this paper, we compare the creative writing conceptualisations and practices of primary and secondary school teachers in England through a qualitative survey. Taking an ecological view of creative writing, we analyse the qualitative survey using the 5A’s theory of creativity (Glăveanu, 2013) and landscapes of practice (Wenger-Trayner, Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Our analysis demonstrates how product based approaches are prevalent in both landscapes of practice, meaning redrafting is largely conceptualised as a technical rather than creative action. Our analysis also shows that whilst creative writing is overall more marginalised in the secondary school landscape, it is often taught through a mixture of product and process approaches that provide pupils as actors with more agency to determine the nature of their artifact and their audiences when compared with the primary school landscape. Reasons for this difference are explored and we recommend professional development which involves dialogue between primary and secondary schoolteachers in order to enable them to cross boundaries of practice.

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