Creative writing

An argument I want to make is about the place of creative writing in English classrooms throughout secondary schools. Complex influences all contribute, in my view, to a situation where I can agree with Doecke and Parr that: '[s]tory-telling and the imagination are now arguably under greater threat' than they were decades ago where I began this chapter (2009: 63). It is important to note that the other powerful influence on English pedagogy in the last decades has been 'critical literacy', influenced by poststructural literary theory. This has been taken up as a mode for analyzing texts with regard to the socio-historical contexts of their production and reception and for unpacking the discourses that circulate within a text - in contrast to earlier approaches to literary study that tended to isolate the text from the world. Thus it has been a mode that has influenced reading practices, rather than writing, and has, in its school versions, somewhat neglected the aesthetic dimensions of texts: the very aspect that I wish to draw attention to in this chapter, and that I believe has the potential to engage students.