The Storymaker Wheel: An investigation into how teachers and pupils can use a counter‐culture assessment tool to evaluate creative writing in the classroom

Jenny Elliott,Alex Southern

doi:10.1002/curj.112

Abstract

AbstractThis paper outlines the processes of creating a ‘Storymaker Wheel’, a creativity evaluation tool conceptualised with input from a children's book author, a children's book illustrator, academics and teachers, for teachers and pupils to use to support and develop their creative writing. It documents the ways in which teachers and pupils engaged with the Wheel in three schools in England: a primary pupil referral unit, a primary school and a secondary school. Interviews with teachers and pupils about the Storymaker Wheel, and classroom observations of the Wheel in use, expose some challenges of teaching creative writing within the current English educational context, which we discuss.

Highlights

Debates around different paradigms of writing in UK schools remain as prevalent today (Rosen, 2021) as they were in the seventies (Bullock, 1975)
The data indicates that rather than using the Wheel as a tool to develop different creative writing pedagogies within their classrooms, teachers were instead seeking to find ways to assimilate it to existing assessment frameworks and current education trends (‘growth mindset’), privileging form, structure and accuracy, and teacher—led approaches
It could be argued that the ‘docile’, ‘productive’, ‘conforming’ teacher that Ball and Junemann assert as a product of neoliberal educational ideology (2012, p. 29), is evident here and in tension with the dialogic, iterative, student-centred pedagogies needed for the Wheel to be used in the way it was conceptualised

Summary

Introduction

Debates around different paradigms of writing in UK schools remain as prevalent today (Rosen, 2021) as they were in the seventies (Bullock, 1975). . ELLIOTT and SOUTHERN student-centred, iterative creative, messy process, with the former currently (in 2021) more dominant in UK schools as discussed below. The latter, which for the purposes of this paper, we term ‘creative writing’ can, for reasons discussed below, be marginalised, and there have been many projects established to enhance support for the teaching of this in schools in England. Zip-Zap is a creative social enterprise, whose vision is to support teachers to develop children's creative writing in schools. The organisation is a Community Interest Company (CIC) that manages and delivers school-based projects to support children and young people to develop interest in and enjoyment of literary arts. Its remit resonates with some of the key ideas for ‘what works’ for teaching creative writing as mentioned in the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), and with a ‘’writing for pleasure’ pedagogy’ (Young, 2019) to include encouraging the teacher and children to identify as writers, engaging with professional authors and their processes, authentic writing activities including an authentic modelling of the writing process, fore-fronting dialogue and speaking activities to encourage imagination and oral rehearsal, allowing children time and space to develop their ideas in writing and using creative teaching approaches for building imagination (CLPE, 2018; Young, 2019)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion