The aim of the study is to investigate the effect of story writing on the story writing skills of primary school students with the collaborative story map method. This quantitative study has a quasi-experimental design with a pretest-posttest comparison group. The study group consists of 131 primary school 2nd-grade students, 60 boys and 71 girls.…

In this paper, we take an ecological view of children's development to argue that preventive interventions should move beyond separating the microsystems of school and home to create new intergenerational spaces for nurturing mental wellbeing. Using the 5A's theory of creativity, we draw upon our experiences of creative writing to explore how…

In the mid-1980s, researchers began to study writers working in collaboration. Much of this research attended to what might be termed side-by-side composing: authors working on their own individual pieces and discussing them with others as needed. Others have studied co-composing--that is, multiple authors crafting a single text--describing the…

All young people have stories to tell. Yet when children and teens declare that they hate writing or are too embarrassed to admit they like it, elevating their voices becomes challenging. It is urgent that educators, policy makers, youth development workers and leaders, and philanthropists work together to find a way. In the land of free speech,…

Providing students with the opportunity to generate new content and share it with a wide audience invites students to compose texts with the care and conviction that cannot be duplicated when writing solely for the teacher. This piece documents one teacher's effort to engage 99 eighth graders with an authentic writing opportunity: the…

This study examined struggling and skilled writers' narrative writing performances when revising stories in pairs online as compared to students working independently. In the experimental group, 5 mixed-ability pairs of upper-elementary struggling writers and skilled writers engaged in online collaborative revision. In the control group, 5…

We argue that opening a space for dialogic, imaginative writing in the classroom can create entry points for a culturally responsive writing pedagogy (CRWP). We explore how collaborative writing for a pre-existing community digital platform (FundZa) and audience aids the implementation of CRWP in a creative writing course for South African…

In an era of reductionist approaches to teaching and assessment, this dissertation returns to the fundamental question: "What is the value of writing, particularly poetry writing, in our society today?" The poet's central task, to abstract reality through symbols, requires profound cognitive and emotional work (Vendler, 2004; Steele,…

This paper discusses a case study of a small cluster of 10- and 11-year-old multilingual children, all first- or second-generation Canadians living in suburban Toronto, who collaboratively wrote an elaborate adventure book in English as a Grade 5 enrichment activity. We explore the language worlds of these gifted young writers to trace their…