Key concept
The main theme or keyword of a particular post, maybe with reference to a teaching or national curriculum topic.
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Review of Creativity in the English Curriculum: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions by Lorna Smith
Lorna Smith’s book could not be timelier. It is published at a point when creativity – in all its manifold forms and iterations – is under serious attack in educational jurisdictions across the world.
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Review of Out of Time: Poetry From the Climate Emergency
A review of ‘Out of Time: Poetry From the Climate Emergency’
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Review of “Real-World Writers: A Handbook for Teaching Writing with 7-11 Year Olds”, by Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson
“Teachers themselves should be writers” and the ways in which writing for pleasure can be nurtured by English teachers.
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The Time Devil runs amok: How I improved my creative practice by adopting a multimodal approach for a specific audience.
How teacher-writers can improve their craft and pedagogy by writing for a specific audience, namely school children. And why they might do so.
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Diagrarting: theorising and practising new ways of writing and drawing
To “diagrart” (my neologism combining the words diagrams, dialogue and art), one must write and draw, and believe you are creating art, no matter how crude you think your work to be.
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The Reciprocal Rebellion: Promoting Discussion in Authoritarian Schools
Reciprocal Teaching re-orders education by fostering meaningful relationships, challenging the hegemony of neoliberal schools: it is a rebellion against their authoritarianism.
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Letting it all spill out: the benefits of venting for creative writing teachers and students.
Specific therapeutic pedagogies that help people ‘vent’ their traumas and issues, with lots of practical suggestions and a rationale for ‘letting it all spill out’ in educational settings.
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Affective digital presence: how to free online writing and drawing?
How freewriting and drawing can have a therapeutic effect when working online. It draws upon the experience of my students and my colleague, Dr Miranda Matthews. It also suggests a methodology for this approach.
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What’s Next? Ecoliteracies and creative writing
Creative writing can be used to nurture ecoliteracie, helping people developing an organic, ecological view of language.
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Teaching Creative Writing Online: Research-Informed Strategies
A summary of a presentation at NAWE Conference 2021, suggesting some ways of teaching creative writing online, using puppets, stories, drawings and metacognition.
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Why teach creative writing? Examining the challenges of its pedagogies
One of the purposes of teaching creative writing is ‘to heal’, in other words, creative writing is taught as a form of therapy, maybe more than is openly stated. Many teachers set therapeutic tasks so the author can learn and grow from the experience of writing about it.
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Lockdown lessons: Teaching and working during the Covid-19 crisis
Some of the lessons I learnt during the Covid lockdown, about staying sane, being mindful and engaging with technology
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Finding a new path: Building affective online learning spaces for creative writing and arts practice
On Covid-19 related research, for the British Educational Research Association.
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Teaching 1984 in the surveillance culture of schools
Teaching Orwell’s “1984” as a set text in an examination-obsessed and heavily surveilled school system.
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Mindfulness and Creative Writing
How mindfulness can be used by creative writers to develop their practice and pedagogy
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Riding the Reciprocal Teaching Bus. A teacher’s reflections on nurturing collaborative learning in a school culture obsessed by results
My interactions with the teaching strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching (or Reciprocal Reading), which involves students learning to read collaboratively in small groups.
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Aesthetic literacy and autobiography
How I became ‘aesthetically literate’, and used other artistic work to educate and heal myself. ‘Aesthetic literacy’ may even be more important than other forms of literacy because of its therapeutic dimensions.
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Mindfulness and English Teaching
Is English a mindful subject? How can mindfulness help English teachers teach their subject? I argue that awareness of the present moment can help learners appreciate the qualities of literature.
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Dreaming of a Better World
A creative writing and reading project, carried out at Deptford Green school, which put the principles of Reciprocal Teaching into practice.
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The Creative Writing Teacher’s Toolkit
There are certain pedagogical strategies, such as encouraging freewriting, using prompts and fostering flow which can significantly help learners to write creatively.