The place and art of writing alongside secondary English students in rural communities : an ethnographic case story of writerly identities

Abstract

My research was born out of the writerly, relational, affective, spatial experiences I encountered in a remote rural town in north-west New South Wales. The research explores the meaning and significance of context, place and space for the creative writing processes, practices and written pieces of young people in particular nondominant communities. The research impetus stems from my background as a writer and as a high school English teacher, but aims to foreground the stories and voices of my students. The drought and dust of small rural towns is a familiar, material concern in the Australian landscape. For students living in and leaving these places, writing is a space where they can both imagine elsewhere and come to know familiar places and themselves differently. Geographical distances between rural places and metropolitan centres are vast, and reflect the distances between dominant understandings of urban students and rural students and their communities. To gain a deeper understanding of those students, their communities and their writing practices, I immersed myself in teaching English at a small rural central school, in writing and place alongside the secondary students I taught, and in designing a longitudinal ethnographic case story approach to my research. The research aims to mobilise affect, context, place and relationality in the articulation and performance of creative forms of writing. The research considers the affects and impacts of writing alongside students of secondary English, and writing in, of and as place. The significance of the spatial trajectories of emergent writerly identities are emphasised by drawing on theories of place and space, third space and borderlands. In resisting the context of educational policies that value standardisation and datafication, I adopt affective, fictive and poetic approaches to the theoretical framing and data analysis of this thesis. The writerly approach of the thesis led to the conceptualisation of writing as place, writerly borderlands and writing as movement. My approach established the value of writing as research and highlighted the parallels between teaching, researching and writing. The writing of this thesis-as process, practice and piece of writing-is relational, affective and spatial and acknowledges the voices and stories of young people from rural, nondominant communities.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English