“Just because I’m not a published author does not mean that I’m not a writer”: Primary Trainee Teachers’ Identities as Creative Writers

This paper analyses data from the Community of Writers project, which saw 15 final year undergraduate trainee teachers teach creative writing and write creatively in a primary school for a period of 10 weeks. Taking as its starting point the research-informed understanding that effective teaching of writing involves the teacher writing for their class (Dombey 2013), this paper explores the impact of the project upon both trainees’ perceptions of their identities as writers and their creative writing pedagogies. Engaging in theoretical discussions as co-researchers, a paradox emerges in the trainees’ reflections: on the one hand, the trainees perceive their unstructured teaching of creative writing as being threatened by neoliberalism; on the other hand, discourse analysis of their reflections reveals that they are often dependent upon neoliberalism’s structured approaches when it comes to actually writing both with their class and outside of the class. This is conceptualised as resulting from both the trainees’ own neoliberal education and the low-status “positional identities” (Holland, Lachicotte and Cain, 1998) afforded to them as writers by societal discourse, as demonstrated by Foucault’s “author principle” (2001, p.214). Though the research project is small-scale, the key recommendation is that if we want our teachers to teach creative writing in more creative ways then it is vital that Universities continue to play a key role in teacher education.