Writing to Transgress: Sharing Stories, Claiming Space, and Finding Community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My research has shown that community-based creative writing groups can be safer spaces for people who are under-represented in the English literary canon to craft and share their stories, poems, and other genres of writing. They can also put the act of cultural production into the hands of participants, redefine the notion of great literature, and provide a counterpoint to institutional learning. These groups are potential spaces for learning how to relate to one another with respect while acknowledging our own privileges, which can ultimately transform hegemonic social relations that exclude and oppress rather than connect and build support. Using critical arts-based inquiry and program evaluation methods, I employ a reflexive technique to investigate the benefits of a single group for youth, Toronto Street Writers (TSW), which I facilitated for six years in the neighbourhood where I grew up. TSW is positioned within a range of literacy and community writing groups across North America, transgressive and anti-oppressive theories around creative writing pedagogy are summarized, and interviews with former participants and staff of TSW are analyzed for insights into how to facilitate sustainable community-based creative writing groups that genuinely benefit members. Interview respondents reported several benefits, including: finding support and community, developing identity and a unique writerly voice, learning writing tools and leadership skills, discovering a more equal/safer learning environment than traditional schooling, and using writing as part of a healing process. These findings support the notion that creative writing groups promote personal and community healing and resilience for people who have been historically silenced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".