Relocating the personal : a critical writing pedagogy

Addressing the current and growing interest in the personal, the self, and the autobiographical not only in the teaching of writing, but also across many disciplinary and subject fields, Relocating the Personal describes a rich array of practical approaches to teaching the personal in settings where it has been excluded." "The author argues for the teaching of writing as a political project in schools and communities, and for a notion of the personal which is not simply equated with voice. The construct of narrative is preferred, because it allows teachers to examine all personal writing as a representation and not the same thing as the writer's life. Strategies are developed for examining how experience is portrayed and how it might be written differently, with material effects on both the personal text and the writer's person.

The book incorporates the latest theories of critical and genre literacy as it develops four teaching cases in different education contexts (secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and adult/community).

Reading, writing, crafting – Innovations in first year tertiary writing pedagogy

This paper will outline some of the rationale behind, and strategies contributing to, curriculum revision in first-year creative writing at Deakin University in 2012 – delivered in that year and currently running in 2013. The process aimed to produce two consecutive offerings, with distinct but strategically scaffolded preoccupations. This paper deals with the first of these. The design process for this offering, named ‘Writing Craft’, involved addressing two central concerns: (a) the need to unhook the initial encounter with tertiary creative writing pedagogy from a preoccupation with ‘genres’ or the ‘forms’ of creative writing (such as prose fiction, creative nonfiction, script, poetry, and so on) and instead to reorient efforts towards establishing an engagement with craft per se; (b) to address a perceived impoverishment in the range of texts to which students had been exposed prior to commencing study – in other words, to emphasise the practice of reading to facilitate the practice of writing. The curriculum design also involved reimagining assessment, noting the ‘messages about making’ sent to students via the framing of tasks and rubrics. Aiming instead to deemphasise the role of inspiration and ‘work arriving fully formed’, it sought to offer assessment that provided clear – and bounded – prompts for incidents of making and the practice of craft, as well as to provoke conversation with a broad range of texts as a way of courting intertextual inspiration and aesthetic formation.

This story wants to be danced : creative writing, dance, convergence and confluence

I suggest ways the discipline of dance can enrich and challenge the discipline of creative writing. I focus particularly on improvisation in dance, relating this to creative writing pedagogy, classroom structure and activities. Much possibility exists in utilising moments when creative arts disciplines touch. How might creative writers and creative writing courses use such fusions? I draw on material theory and briefly upon transformative and collaborative education theories in my exploration of these ideas.

Popular culture : a resource for writing in secondary English classrooms

This chapter explores how a secondary English teacher working with students aged 14-15 enabled them to use their popular culture practices as a resource for writing. The chapter provides examples of conventional classroom situations in which this teacher created a space for students to bring their own semiotic resources to bear on the curriculum. It argues the need for English teachers to become sensitized to the complex literacy practices in which their students engage outside school and to the ways these practices are bound up with their social relationships and sense of identity. The discussion challenges conventional understandings of ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘speaking’, and ‘listening’ as components of the English curriculum, arguing that a more contemporary understanding of literacy must take into account the multi-modal practices in which students engage in beyond school.

Assessing the reading and writing of EAL/D students: issues and implications

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a study on literacy strategies for learners in established English as an Additional Language (EAL) classes in Years 7-10 in three Victorian secondary schools. The paper draws on baseline reading and writing assessment results (N=45). 

Gender and genre : a case study of a girl and a boy learning to write

This study addresses questions of gender and genre in early writing by drawing on systemic linguistic theory, It is a longitudinal case study that compares the writing development of two children, a boy and a girl/ who learned to write in classrooms that adopted an approach to writing known in Australia as 'process writing1, The children's written texts were analysed using the systemic functional grammar as developed by MAK, Hallidey and the models of genre and register as proposed by J,R, Martin. The children were followed for the first two and a half years of their schooling, from the first day of kindergarten to the middle of grade two. They were observed weekly during the daily ‘writing time’ and all texts were collected. Although the children were ostensibly 'free’ to determine both the writing topics and text types they produced, systemic analysis revealed that: 1) the majority of texts written were of one genre, the Observation genre, in which the children reconstructed their personal experience with family and friends and offered an evaluation of it. 2) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre, such that the boy reconstructed experience in terms of the male cultural stereotype of being an active participant in the world, while the girl reconstructed experience in terms of the female stereotype of being a more passive observer of experience. It is the strength of systemic linguistic analysis that it revealed how the choices the children made in language were constrained by a number of social and cultural contexts, including: a) the teacher's theoretical orientation to literacy; b) the models of spoken and written language available to the children; and c) the ideology of gender in the culture. In particular, the analysis made visible how children appropriate the meanings of their culture and socialise themselves into gender roles by constructing the ideology of gender in their writing. The study contributes to an understanding of genres by offering a revised description of the Observation genre, which derives from the Observation Comment genre originally identified by Martin and Rothery (1981). It also raises a number of implications for teacher training and classroom practice, including the need for: 1) increased teacher consciousness about gender and genre, especially an understanding that choices in language are socially constructed 2) a critical reassessment of the notion of 'free topic choice’ promoted by 'process writing' pedagogy, a practice which may limit choice and tacitly support the gender status quo.

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, ‘Language and Literacy in Secondary School’, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy (this is dictated by state government specifications of graduate outcomes for teacher education programs). To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. They thereby create a heteroglossic text (Bakhtin, 1981) that stretches their repertoires as language users and enables them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences, and (in a separate piece of writing) endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit.

The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. Their writing also raises questions as to extent to which tertiary students are actually able to formulate a critical language awareness that will subsequently inform their professional practice as secondary teachers.

Heteroglossic spaces : interrogating academic literacies in teacher education

This paper explores the challenges of implementing critical writing pedagogy in conditions of increasing cultural and textual uniformity of literacy and emphasises the need for a pedagogy that takes into account the heteroglossic nature of writing space and its relation to the multiple textual practices of students. In practical terms, we argue for such literacy practices in teacher education that would require students not only to understand the complexities of language and literacy but to actively engage them in a diverse range of textual practices that would both stretch their repertoires as language users and sensitise them to the cultural-semiotic diversity of contemporary classrooms. This task becomes more urgent in the current era of standards, accountability and classroom pedagogies that are not attuned to the particularities of students’ textual practices and the communication networks in which they participate.

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, “Language and Literacy in Secondary School”, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit. The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that such heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin, 1981) prompt students to stretch their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students.

Clarifying creative nonfiction through the personal essay

In a recent issue of TEXT, Matthew Ricketson sought to clarify the ‘boundaries between fiction and nonfiction’. In his capacity as a teacher of the creative nonfiction form he writes, ‘I have lost count of the number of times, in classes and in submitted work, that students have described a piece of nonfiction as a novel’. The confusion thus highlighted is not restricted to Ricketson’s journalism students. In our own university’s creative writing cohort, students also struggle with difficulties in melding the research methodology of the journalist with the language and form of creative writing required to produce nonfiction stories for a 21st century readership.
Currently in Australia creative nonfiction is enthusiastically embraced by publishers and teaching institutions. Works of memoir proliferate in the lists of mainstream publishers, as do anthologies of the essay form. During a time of increasing competition and desire for differentiation between institutions, when graduate outcomes form a basis for marketing university degrees, it is hardly surprising that, increasingly, tertiary writing teachers focus on this genre in their writing programs.
A second tension has arisen in higher education more generally, which affects our writing students’ approaches to tertiary study. The student writers of the 21st century emerge from a digitally literate and socially collaborative generation: the NetGen(eration). From a learner-centric viewpoint, they could be described as time-poor, and motivated by work-integrated learning with its perceived close links to workplace contexts and to writing genres. They seek just-in-time learning to meet their immediate employment needs, which inhibits the development of their capacity to adapt their researching and writing to various genres and audiences.
This article examines issues related to moving these NetGen student writers into the demanding and rapidly expanding creative nonfiction market. It is form rather than genre that denotes creative nonfiction and, we argue, it is the unique features of the personal essay, based as it is on doubt, discovery and the writer’s personal voice that can be instrumental in teaching creative nonfiction writing to our digitally and socially literate cohort of students.

Towards a blended ecological pedagogy for advanced EAL academic writing.

This ethnographic research project explored the application of selected ideas relating to grammar from M.A.K.Halliday's theory of systemic functional linguistics in the context of developing the academic writing skills of upper secondary students studying English in West Jakarta in 2009. Results showed significant development in students writing and grammatical awareness.

Rethinking the English pedagogy at Hope College in Taiwan

For many years Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and an English-Only approach to English teaching have characterised pedagogy at Hope College in Taiwan.

These approaches have had a significant impact on the ways in which students understand their cultural identities and develop competency in both oral and written English. Sometimes, in the EFL context in Taiwan, an English-Only policy can impact on students' learning in two ways. Firstly, it may cause students to doubt the validity of their own culture in comparison to English speaking culture. Secondly it may lead to students' resisting English culture because of enhanced feelings of nationalism. Furthermore, sometimes, students may feel disturbed when learning English in an English-Only class because the lack of cognitive understanding usually makes them misunderstand the content expressed in the target language (English) and misuse the target language.

In this paper I consider the need to reintroduce elements of the Grammar-Translation method to an EFL context and suggest an integrative pedagogy in which native English-speaking teachers, applying English only in the classes, focus on teaching listening and speaking to directly foster students' English linguistic competence, while local English teachers, applying both English and Chinese in the classes, focus on teaching reading and writing to foster students' in-depth cognitive ability of English culture and suitable written expression. The purpose of such integrative pedagogy is to keep students' cultural identity as well as advance students' understanding and correct use in English.

Bringing pedagogy to doctoral publishing

This article explores the role of publication in taking forward the work of the doctorate. Low publication rates from doctoral degrees have been noted as a problem in the quality of doctoral education for preparing students to participate in research cultures. At the same time there is ambivalence and some resistance among doctoral supervisors and candidates about the place of publication in doctoral work. This article argues that issues of writing and publication need to be systematically addressed within doctoral pedagogy. In a climate of increasing pressure to publish during and after candidature, pedagogies need to take up a more explicitly outward-looking stance, developing a stronger orientation to induction and participation in the world of peer-reviewed publication. These arguments are developed through two case studies that illustrate ways of supporting doctoral researchers to effectively recontextualise their dissertation writing for wider audiences.

Creative pedagogies : "art-full" reading and writing

This paper reports on a small-scale research inquiry, designed to support teachers in a Melbourne primary school to bring together the arts, reading and writing in their classrooms in ways that create possibilities for "art-full" teaching and learning. The principal, concerned by underperformance on State literacy tests of the school’s largely working-class and NESB population, requested David Hornsby and other members of the project team from the Education Faculty at La Trobe University to offer whole-school professional development. The focus was on developing oral language as a foundation for literacy learning, enacting Britton’s claim that “reading and writing float on a sea of talk”. The project team introduced the teachers to a range of innovative classroom practices for using visual and performance arts, literature, music and crafts. Drawing on video, interviews and writing samples, a number of teachers worked collaboratively with the research team to develop case studies of individual students with a range of literacy aptitudes and social skills. A key research question was: "What do children take from their engagement in arts-based activities into reading of literary texts, and potentially into writing from the perspective of another character?" In this paper we ponder this from three vantage points: by outlining the informing principles in our research project; confirming insights from current interdisciplinary work about children learning to see, do, act and say in play; and analysing the research data from the initial phase.

Critique and creativity : the pedagogical nexus between literary studies and creative writing

This paper will explore the nexus between literary studies and creative writing on the basis of Stanley Aronowitz’s and Henry Giroux’s work on the democratic potential embedded in a critical literacy education, which provides ‘a language of critique’ and ‘a language of possibility’ (1993: 46). This paper argues that literary studies and
creative writing, as cognate disciplines focused precisely on languages of critique and possibility, are uniquely positioned to cooperatively enact this pedagogical agenda.