Creative spaces for developing independent writing with English teachers

In this chapter, the focus is on beginning teachers as creative practitioners themselves of the language arts, partly for their own personal, aesthetic and professional development, and partly as modellers of creative practice for their own pupils. The research underpinning the chapter is based on the ‘Teachers as Writers’ project in Bristol, exploring how such an enterprise may both critically sharpen and creatively epitomize the nature of language arts teaching and learning. The context of identity and place is consciously presented not simply as backdrop for many of the writing processes and products exemplified through the project, but as the very centre of the enterprise itself: teachers’ identities, and the places so invariably intertwined with such identities, are explored with a critical and celebratory edge here. The chapter also refers to the broader UK context of the growing ‘Teachers as Writers’ movement, and various international counterparts.