Month: July 2016

By Becky Swain, Head of Learning and Participation, Arvon

As the school holidays get into full swing, I am writing in praise of the welcome holiday breathing-space for many teachers and students across the land.

And breathe.

Over the last three months, I’ve heard from teachers participating in this research project about how much they value the time to work with writers, not in a traditional sense of writers leading writing workshops or giving readings in school, but co-designing and co-planning a narrative fiction project together with writers to engage students, some of whom struggle with writing. Continue reading “Time and space to write”

By Anthony Wilson, Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter

The more I talk about writing with students, teachers, colleagues and other writers, the less I am sure that we are all speaking about the same thing. If I am on the phone to poet Cliff Yates, for example, whom I have known and been talking to about poetry for years, we soon slip into a kind of shorthand about reading and writing poetry that may be indecipherable to anyone who is not familiar with contemporary poetry and poetics. Continue reading “What we talk about when we talk about writing”

By Wyl Menmuir, author, editor and Writer Co-Mentor on the Teachers as Writers programme

We stepped down into the sea and stood just beyond the breaking waves, looking up towards the beach. Although it was already late June, the still-cold Atlantic water was a shock. We were Anglo-Saxon travellers and we’d just jumped down from our boats onto the fringe of an unfamiliar land. Continue reading “When does learning to write not look like learning to write?”

By Matt Bryden, poet and Writer Co-Mentor on the Teachers as Writers programme

At the Teachers as Writers Development Day in May, one teacher described the change in the way her class approached writing. Its new routine ran:

1          Free writing
2          Sharing work with an ‘edit buddy’
3          Preparing a finished piece
4          Deciding whether it is to be marked or not Continue reading “On Editing”