We start by exploring ‘creative writing’, and some of the challenges when seeking to assess it. This paper recounts the process of co-designing and trialling the Storymaker Wheel and reflects upon the ways in which teachers and students in classrooms in three different education settings in the UK engaged with it. They organised a three-year project evaluation and as part of this, asked us to co-create, with authors, illustrators and teachers, a creativity assessment tool, later named the Storymaker Wheel, to support and encourage children to identify as authors whilst developing their understanding of the craft of writing and their confidence in peer-and self-assessing creative written work. The school also receives copies of the writer/illustrators’ books in advance of the Festival, and can plan their own work and activities to tie in with the writer/illustrator sessions. Each class participates in a session delivered by a writer and/or illustrator of children's books, in which they might read or write stories, produce their own illustrations, design new characters, or create their own world of the story. The Festival is a two-week programme of workshops, which takes place across the whole school. Zip-Zap also runs an annual conference for educators, to explore children's literature and illustration, and a Festival of classroom workshops run by writers and illustrators of children's books, which collaborating schools can buy into.
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These schools are offered teachers’ Continuing Professional Development and Learning (CPDL), led by children's book authors and illustrators, so that they may develop their own identities as authors and, it is envisaged, their pedagogies for teaching creative writing. Zip-Zap runs a number of key initiatives, working with collaborating schools (for a fee subsidised incrementally over three years).
Its remit resonates with some of the key ideas for ‘what works’ for teaching creative writing as mentioned in the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), and with a ‘’writing for pleasure’ pedagogy’ (Young, 2019) to include encouraging the teacher and children to identify as writers, engaging with professional authors and their processes, authentic writing activities including an authentic modelling of the writing process, fore-fronting dialogue and speaking activities to encourage imagination and oral rehearsal, allowing children time and space to develop their ideas in writing and using creative teaching approaches for building imagination (CLPE, 2018 Young, 2019). The organisation is a Community Interest Company (CIC) that manages and delivers school-based projects to support children and young people to develop interest in and enjoyment of literary arts. Zip-Zap is a creative social enterprise, whose vision is to support teachers to develop children's creative writing in schools. For example, The Mantel of the Expert ( 2018) and Arvon's ‘Teachers as Writers’ ( 2018). The latter, which for the purposes of this paper, we term ‘creative writing’ can, for reasons also discussed below, be easily marginalised, and there have been many projects established to enhance support for the teaching of this in schools in England. There exists a wrestling between writing as accurate, grammatically correct product and writing as imaginative, student-centred, iterative creative, messy process, with the former currently (in 2021) more dominant in UK schools as discussed below. Debates around different paradigms of writing in UK schools remain as prevalent today (Rosen, 2021) as they were in the seventies (Bullock, 1975).
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