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This article describes the outcomes of a research project conducted at the Ministry of Stories (a London‐based writing centre) which sought to develop an online, mentor‐assisted, writing platform. Across a 3‐month period, at four different sites across the UK, more than a hundred Year 7 pupils took part in the project, using the platform to write stories and get feedback from mentors who came from a variety of backgrounds. For reasons of space, pupil/mentor interactions are not discussed extensively in the article; however, these stories were collected and analysed alongside a range of other survey and interview data to establish how creative writing might be developed through online mentoring, the use of an online interface and the intersection of both these tools. The article seeks to answer some questions raised by the data collected in the project, and in turn, uses both the questions and the data to interrogate some of the discourses which surround the teaching of creative writing both in and outside the classroom, and in particular the tensions that occur between the teaching of writing skills, 'official versions' of writing in the classroom and children's use of their own cultural resources in creative writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work on story-telling ability in autism spectrum conditions (ASC) has found a pattern of relatively intact use of story grammar in ASC narratives; however, prior analysis has concentrated primarily on whether specific story components are included, rather than how they are included. The present study analyzes an existing narrative dataset, concentrating on the kind of information that individuals with and without high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome include about story elements such as setting, character, conflict, and resolution. This analysis showed that individuals with ASC are biased toward providing local over global details about each element, regardless of whether the element involved mental content. These results are discussed in terms of the Weak Central Coherence and Hyper-Systemizing theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the coverage of whistleblowers in the UK national press as a way of examining practices of journalistic accountability. Based on a content analysis of newspaper coverage in the period from 1997 to 2009, the study demonstrates, first of all, that whistleblowing is viewed as newsworthy and is taken seriously by the media, who mostly cover whistleblowers in neutral or positive ways. Nevertheless, the acts of whistleblowing which receive most media attention fit with the existing news agenda and prevailing social and economic trends. We further suggest that journalistic story-telling constructs narratives of whistleblowers as heroic, selfless individuals to establish the legitimacy of their claims of systemic wrongdoing in the public interest. Thus, our study ultimately demonstrates that the forms of accountability and systemic critique enabled by whistleblowing stories operate in complex and historically contingent ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]