This paper describes some of the key principles and practices of Teachers as Writers groups in the UK. It draws on participants' own accounts of the personal and pedagogic benefits of these voluntary teacher-led activities. It also presents a case-study of a teacher who used her experience of the process of writing in such a group to support…

Britain's Children's Laureate Scheme has now been running for 14 years. This article asks Quentin Blake, Anne Fine, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Browne, Michael Rosen and Julia Donaldson for their views on their own experience of taking up this post. It concludes with a discussion of the recurring issues raised by these Laureates…

This essay explores what the development of writing might look like and how it might take shape in a secondary English classroom. The study problematises current definitions of progress. In direct opposition to standards-driven models, I propose an alternative way of thinking about the development of writers through a series of narrative accounts…

This paper starts from the premise that there is more to writing than simply skill, knowledge and ability, i.e. cognition. This is an important part of writing but is only one aspect of it. The paper discusses the idea of the affective domain and goes on to focus largely on the positive and negative attitudes and feelings of graduate students…

The author uses the diverse role of scribes in different periods of time and different places as a lens through which to understand both literacy and illiteracy. Examples from fiction, film, social history, and interviews with various individuals, including adult literacy teachers, are used to support the following arguments: (1) moments of…