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According to creative writing pedagogies academic Susanne Gannon (English in Australia, 54(2), 43-56, 2019), and the Federal government-commissioned NAPLAN review (McGaw et al., 2020), NAPLAN has restricted how writing is taught in secondary schools. A NAPLAN-influenced structural approach to teaching writing has subsumed the development of imaginative capacity. Given the considerable negative criticism of the NAPLAN writing tests, including the negative impact it has had on the teaching of writing, there is a need, we argue, for a fit-for-purpose assessment rubric that assesses creative writing. In a 10-week project, teaching creative writing with three classes of Year 9 students in Steiner schools, we evaluated the use of a novel creative writing rubric, created by published creative writers and lecturers (the second and third authors), to assess the students' creative writing pre- and post-program. Consecutively, the NAPLAN narrative criteria were also used to assess the same writing scripts as a point of comparison. The creative writing criteria privileged craft-based approaches to imaginative writing compared to the function and form-focused criteria of NAPLAN. Statistical analyses of the reliability and validity of the creative writing rubric showed that the construct can be scored with a significant moderate level of reliably by different raters (r = 0.5-0.7; ICC = 0.6). Internal consistency reliability of the criteria was found to be excellent (Cronbach's alpha = 0.94). Content validity of the instrument was found to be strong (r = 0.7-0.9) and significant. Unexpectedly, analyses for concurrent validity showed that the instrument correlates strongly (r = 0.7) and significantly with the NAPLAN narrative rubric, suggesting some overlap, but not parity with the NAPLAN assessment. We found that students' post-project writing improved in all aspects according to the creative writing rubric, with a statistically significant improvement in students' structural elements and presentation and group average improvement approaching significance in two other criteria: words, sentence, and voice and characters and context (effect sizes d = 0.3-0.4). However, there were no significant improvements in the students' post-program writing according to the NAPLAN criteria, possibly because the NAPLAN narrative task criteria did not capture student development of a unique writing style or individual 'voice' or other craft-based standards of proficiency measured by the creative writing rubric. Given the validity and reliability evidence, we conclude that the creative writing rubric is a fit-for-purpose guide to school-based learning and assessment of creative writing. Keywords Creative writing . NAPLAN . Rubric, 1 Introduction The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is the independent authority responsible for the development and management of the National Assessment Program (NAP) which includes the National [...]

Huy ch q'a siem hwulmuxw mustimuxw. Noor hindi opens her poem, 'Fuck Your Lecture On Craft, My People Are Dying,' with a confrontation: 'Colonizers write about flowers. / I tell [...]

A world away from the blockbusters produced by the modern studio system, the Italian neorealist and French New Wave movements consisted of filmmakers who often prioritised intimate, everyday observation over more conventional narrative beats. As JASON D DEHART describes, these texts provide great learning opportunities for students seeking to compose their own work., Using film in the classroom is a concept that is really not new and shiny anymore. These days, popular films and movie clips make their way into classrooms on a [...]

Our aim is to produce students who, having experimented with and developed their writing, are effective writers who are prepared and able to pursue their careers as they choose, whether [...]

Abstract: This study seeks to reposition writing as a central part of L2 instruction aimed at developing the multilingual learner (Kramsch 2009) within fully integrated curricula. Drawing on current research [...]

This past spring I scrolled through the comments on a blog for prospective creative writing MFA students and found, amidst talk of funding, faculty, and acceptance rates, writers' backup plans [...]

Introduction CHIARA CILLERAI St. John's University The four essays collected here began as a roundtable discussion at the 2010 American Studies Association meeting in Austin, Texas. The roundtable gave the [...]

Can creative writing be taught? I've always hated the question, in part because of its passive construction, which omits both students and teachers. It has always seemed to me to [...]

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees in fiction and poetry have been around since 1936, when the Iowa Writers' Workshop--the country's first MFA program in creative writing--was founded. About twenty [...]

Adapted from a lesson by Maureen Carroll Can athletes' moves be described as beautiful? How are grace, beauty, and aesthetics expressed through movement? These and many other questions will provide [...]

AS RECENTLY as 1975 there were only a dozen or so full-residency creative writing MFA programs in the world, no low-residency programs anywhere, and a global pool of applicants numbering [...]

Students' interests and achievement in writing are often debated and located in theoretical and pedagogical arguments. These issues can polarise understandings of effective teaching practice. This article describes one teacher's classroom practice in a New Zealand primary school. It outlines a collaborative project between a local teacher and a university lecturer. The two educators were concerned about political and educational changes and the influence this had on teachers' writing pedagogy. They were concerned about the differences between the children's reading and writing achievement evident in this year three classroom. As researchers they were keen to explore the 'power of literature' as a way of enriching children's oral and written language experiences. The writers argue that by using quality literature in the classroom, with an explicit focus on authors' literary techniques, students develop an awareness of how authors craft and construct texts. The young writers were apprenticed to experts and developed a metalanguage, which enhanced their own writing skills., Introduction: Collaborative conversations This article began from a conversation between two educational professionals, Steph, a university lecturer in literacy education at the University of Waikato and Liz, a practicing classroom [...]

the dream of an uncommon reader: 1 I recently designed an upper-level, special topics English course as a 'workshop' in wreading contemporary women's innovative poetries. (1) I was inspired to [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Transformational or re-creative writing offers you the chance to engage creatively with a literary text and explore alternative ways of responding to it. The new AQA Specification A […]

Graduate programs in creative writing featuring 'star' faculty of well-known authors, upon whose fame these programs are built and sustained, are criticized. The act of teaching creative writing becomes deprofessionalized and marginalized in such 'star' pedagogies which are neither community-based nor theoretically constructed, with the ethos-based teaching detrimental to students who would need both writing and teaching experience as future academia.

Abstract This article describes a Creative Writing Learning Community Webpage. This Learning Community comprises components addressing writing as process and writing as profession. A unifying component, the Reader Response Forum, [...]

'Try telling yourself you are not accountable to the life of your tribe the breath of your planet...' 'My work is rooted in the notion -- Adrienne Rich that art [...]

I went to Galway from Belfast in 1974. It was towards the end of the following year that I first met Tom as he was preparing the ground for what [...]