TR&W Issue 20

THE CRAFT Let’s bring motivation, enjoyment and authentic writing purpose back into our classrooms, say Ellen Counter and Juliet McCullion S itting down to write can be daunting. There’s a blank screen in front of us, a few ideas in our heads – and the impetus to write. We note down a plan and general structure, and ideas begin to blossom, but tying them together takes time. As adults, we likely have the privilege of reading many articles, so we know why they’re written and what makes them enjoyable to read. Yet, it’s not always easy to marry those things together to get to the finished product. Ideas bounce around our heads, words and phrases appear in our mind, but it takes care, motivation, and the many steps of the writing process to get to the publishable result. It’s a hugely complex and demanding skill. Not only this, but writing places great demands on our emotional resources alongside the cognitive requirements. As teachers, we place writing demands on children every day in school. To do something so demanding, pupils need to feel that writing is a worthwhile pursuit – they have to be motivated, volitional, autonomous and confident writers. If they are going to leave a little piece of themselves on the page – an insight into their identity for scrutiny – then there had better be good reason to do so. As Young & Ferguson state: ‘Emotionally healthy young writers are able to produce better texts because they have secure writerly knowledge (cognitive resources) to draw on, they know how to manage the processes involved in writing, and they can use and apply a variety of writerly techniques’. We know that there has been a stark decline in the percentage of children and young people in the UK who are volitional writers. In June 2023, the National Literacy Trust produced results from its latest survey, which showed that only 34.6 per cent of children and young people aged between eight and 18 enjoyed writing in their free time. In 2023, 71 per cent of pupils met the expected standard in writing, down from 78 per cent in 2019. The good news Despite these gloomy figures, there is hope. An writing craft knowledge. We’ve outlined and expanded on these in the panel overleaf. Whilst we cannot go into details for all of these areas, let’s briefly focus on the three text-oriented themes: the reader-writer relationship; language choices; text-level choices. In other words (and this is a huge simplification!) how can we write effectively based on our purpose for writing, and how we want our reader to feel/think/do/understand? Following on from that, what language and text choices can we select to do this? The national curriculum currently does not help teachers to understand the craft of writing. Statements such as ‘In narratives, create characters, settings and plot’ offer up no guidance as to how a writer would go about bringing a character to life, or the techniques writers use to construct a vivid setting. This lack of direction increasing demand for research-informed writing teaching is blossoming, led by the clarion call of Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson at The Writing for Pleasure Centre, and other hugely influential academic researchers. In a recent article, written by Debra Myhill, Teresa Cremin and Lucy Oliver, entitled Writing as Craft: Reconsidering Teacher Subject Content Knowledge for Teaching Writing , the authors suggest that there is a distinct lack of empirical evidence concerning what constitutes teacher subject knowledge for writing. They propose reframing writing as a ‘craft’ rather than a subject, and suggest five key themes of www.teachwire.net | 47 TH I NK I NG L I T ERAC Y “To do something so demanding, pupils need to feel that writing is a worthwhile pursuit”