Into the (textual) West

A critical/creative paradigm in contemporary English carries with it an imperative that students should be given opportunities for deep engagement with texts relevant to what matters in their everyday lives. In this paper, I argue that the materiality of everyday life includes the physical and geographic places where we live. When students live in areas that are habitually disparaged, there is an additional argument on social justice grounds for enabling students to examine and contest representations of (their) place in texts. Aesthetic and literary texts - poetry, fiction, drama, visual images - provide potent opportunities for students to write themselves into the world. Close study of place-based aesthetic texts provides students with essential knowledge of language forms and features to experiment with in their own imaginative rewriting of place. In this paper, I use extracts from fiction and poetry and related writing activities from the Writing western Sydney project to demonstrate how teachers and students can be supported to make the 'crucial move from critique to creation' (Sawyer, 2008, p. 61). I conclude with an outline of how this approach can be taken up and adapted by teachers in any location.