Collaborative writing with young people with disabilities: raising new questions of authorship and agency

Candice Satchwell

doi:10.1111/lit.12146

Abstract

AbstractHow an author communicates with a reader is a central consideration in the critical examination of any text. When considering the communication of ideas from young people whose voices are seldom heard, the journey from author to audience has particular significance. The construction of children and young people as ‘authors’ is important, especially for those with learning difficulties or who struggle to comply with the current emphasis on spelling, punctuation and grammar. This article relates to a UK Research Council‐funded 3‐year collaborative research project involving the co‐creation of fictional stories with young people with disabilities to represent aspects of their lives. Drawing on frameworks from narratology, I analyse the co‐creation of one of the stories and present an interpretation and elaboration of the discourse structure of narrative fiction to illustrate the complexities of the relationship between the multifaceted ‘author’ and community ‘reader’ of these stories. The combination of qualitative research and fictional prose has particular characteristics and implications for the dissemination and communication of research findings. An extension of feminist critique of Barthes' claim for the death of the author provides new insights for engaging children in writing with their own voice.

Highlights

Tracking the journey of a text from author to reader involves first identifying who the author and reader might be. While these concepts may appear straightforward in the production of a conventional academic article, for example, the concepts of author and reader are less simple when considering research data which have been transformed into fictional prose by a research team comprising academics, young people with a range ofabilities, writers and designers
While the voices of coresearchers with intellectual difficulties are poorly represented in academic journals (Strnadova and Walmsley, 2017), by creating works of fiction based on the young people’s experiences and ideas, the project aims to reach a much wider and more diverse audience than might be achieved through conventional academic outlets
While the author has been overlooked, assumed, obscured or killed in narratology, I suggest that an analysis of the multifaceted author of co-constructed stories is a critical factor in understanding how stories connect

Summary

Introduction

Tracking the journey of a text from author to reader involves first identifying who the author and reader might be While these concepts may appear straightforward in the production of a conventional academic article, for example, the concepts of author and reader are less simple when considering research data which have been transformed into fictional prose by a research team comprising academics, young people with a range of (dis)abilities, writers and designers. In this project, the young people provided their ‘stories’.

Objectives

Conclusion