How children experience creative writing in the classroom

Abstract

The structure of a child’s writing experience stems from the affect, embodiment, and materiality of their immediate engagement with activities in the classroom. When a child’s movements and emotions are restricted, so too is their writing. This engagement shapes the experiential landscape of classroom writing, and the way that children perceive, value and feel about writing, affects their motivation which predicts their writing attainment. This paper reveals the structure of children’s consciousness while expressing ideas through creative writing. It does so by presenting an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the writing experience in the classroom. In the study, eight Year 6 (11–12 years old) children from a school in Perth, Australia were interviewed, and qualitative data were analysed to interpret the essential components of the writing experience. The results produced three main themes (sub-themes noted in brackets): The Writing World (Watching, Ideas from Elsewhere, Flowing); The Self (Concealing & Revealing, Agency, Adequacy); and Schooled Writing (Standards, Satisfying Task Requirements, Rules of Good Writing). The themes indicate a binary experience of writing where the child’s consciousness shifts between their imagination (The Writing World) and the task before them (Schooled Writing), and each affects the way the experience of the self appears to the writer. When comparing the experience with that of authors, one notices that the experience of words as authorial tools is missing. The results imply that the writing environment, and the individual’s response to it, may restrict the engagement and the phenomenality of writing.