Primary Pupils’ Creative Writing: Enacting Identities in a Community of Writers

This paper focuses on a Community of Writers creative writing project where twenty-five primary school pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds took part in two weeks’ intensive creative writing workshops at a Higher Education Institution. Using practitioner enquiry and discourse analysis, this paper views identity as participation in “figured worlds” and highlights the relationship between the children’s creative writing outputs and their shifting “positional identities” (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain 1998). A case is made that children’s authentic creative writing can be nurtured by a community approach which promotes intertextuality and “hybridity” (Bakhtin 1981) as well as balancing pedagogical “structure” and “freedom” (Davies et al 2013) in order to provide textual space for writers to enact different identities. At a time when the assessment of writing values technicality over composition (see DfE 2015), this paper also presents an argument for the value of school-University research partnerships.