Research topic/aim 

Although research shows creative writing to have the potential for facilitating learning, Swedish upper secondary school policy documents do not mandate or suggest it as a pedagogical tool. Consequently, upper secondary school teachers may find creative writing to be didactically valuable yet difficult to legitimize except as extraneous activities, due to the lack of support in both policy documents and textbooks (Malmström, 2017; Pulls, 2019). 

Theoretical framework 

The present integrative literature review explores research on the didactical potentials of creative writing in secondary education to “assess, critique, and synthesize the literature on a research topic in a way that enables new theoretical frameworks and perspectives to emerge” (Snyder, 2019, p. 335). The review maps the uses for creative writing in education, making use of abductive analysis (cf. Timmermans & Tavory, 2012) and Ivanič’s (2004) discourses of writing in education: the skills, creativity, thinking and learning (see Sturk & Lindgren, 2019), process, genre, social practices, and sociopolitical discourses of writing. 

Methodological design

A total of 318 peer-reviewed articles – both empirical and theoretical – on creative writing in secondary education and beyond have been systematically collected and categorized according to their discoursal positionings in the abstracts, introductions, and/or conclusions (in order of priority). These excerpts have also been inductively coded for topics and themes. Furthermore, several articles have been both randomly and purposefully selected for close reading. 

Expected conclusions/findings 

The review shows that despite a large body of international research showing didactical affordances of creative writing, few Nordic studies on the issue exist. The research portrays creative writing as relevant within all the writing discourses, thus demonstrating its usefulness in comprehensive pedagogical practices. For instance, creative writing is found to support learners’ general, literary, and critical literacies and to foster students’ interpersonal, cultural, and writerly identities. 

Relevance to Nordic educational research 

These findings may a) inform in-service teachers interested in integrating creative writing into their pedagogical repertoires, b) facilitate precise assessment of creative writing without necessarily making judgments on learners’ creative or artistic abilities, and c) inspire research on the topic to be carried out in the specific contexts of the Nordic countries.

This position paper argues that creative writing can be a fruitful tool for cultural responsiveness in secondary education and calls for creative writing to be viewed as a more natural part of language teachers’ culturally responsive pedagogical repertoire. The integration of creative writing exercises in culturally responsive language arts education may rouse a strengthened voice, benefit cultural literacy, engender the discovery and exploration of individual funds of knowledge, enhance relational competence, and bring about the critical crafting of and engagement with cultural representations. These arguments are convergent with the view that teaching, in order to be culturally responsive, should originate from students’ funds of knowledge, taking both subject content and relational aspects into consideration – and this paper proposes that creative writing is uniquely positioned to facilitate these aims.

This workshop will act both as a presentation of the article “and-hypo-critic forays” (Brauer, forthcoming) and as a collaborative exploration of the creative-critical affordances of sticky notes. The article is a poetic inquiry into my positionalities as a novice researcher in educational science, relating to traditional (Northern) ways of knowing and being as well as ‘post-’ (modern/qualitative/humanist), feminist and de/colonial ontoepistemologies. Taking ‘mastery’ to be an oppressive concept (Singh, 2017), the poem avoids making definitive statements, instead consisting of a continuing re-posing of questions, interspersed with mutated quotes from academia and popular culture, nonsensical lines of flight, and personal reflections. 

The inbuilt open-endedness of “and-hypo-critic-forays” hopefully lends itself to continued collaborative exchange. It is an assemblage intended to be charged with numerous intensities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/2008), inviting readers as co-creators. I mean to investigate these intensities in a more concrete manner, through the use of sticky notes. Owing to the tangible yet transient nature of sticky notes, I argue that they can constitute a unique method for messy and spontaneous co-creation of rich material. The threshold of the sticky note is low; as opposed to a common notepad in which removing a page entails some violence (however slight), the sticky note is immanently re-movable. Borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s concept of sticky objects, sticky notes can be created in (ostensible) isolation, but sooner or later they tend to move, to attach to other objects (texts, desks, walls, computer monitors, other notes, floors, foreheads), and to detach again (whether by choice or insufficient stickiness) – making a materially tangible yet protean rhizomatic assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/2008)

References

Brauer, A. (Forthcoming). and-hypo-critic-forays. Tidskrift För Genusvetenskap.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2008). Kafka: Toward a minor literature. University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1975)

Singh, J. (2017). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Duke University Press.