Creative Expressive Writing: A Situated Pedagogy for Confidence, Skill, and Negotiated Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to coin a term and theorize creative expressive writing (CEW) as a situated, negotiated, and distributed mode of writing that serves to support, not replace, other types of writing instruction at all levels of education including second language writing. Using the work of Elbow (1973) and Allen (2000, 2002) as pedagogical approaches, along with Fulkerson’s (1990, 2005) framework for a full theory of writing, this thesis offers a reassertion of expressive writing as a pedagogical opportunity that empowers writers and works against traditions of dominance in the writing classroom. Creative expressive writing is a democratic mode of writing seeking to decolonize writing instruction by honouring and exercising voice. Expressivism, a mode of writing about personal experience that was popular in the 1970’s, has been denigrated as being solipsistic and careless; however, it has not left the landscape of writing instruction despite it being “seriously undertheorized” (Hyland, 2016, p. 13). With the framework provided by bioecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), this dissertation argues that creative expressive writing is socially situated and has both cognitive and affective benefits for students that can be transferred to their academic work. This is a three-article dissertation that includes one chapter of personal narrative and two grounded theory research studies. The first of the two studies took place in a middle school English class where students attended creative expressive writing workshops that were designed around their novel study. Findings reveal that creative expressive writing (CEW) as new literacy practice supports meaningful engagement, confidence, critical thinking, and empathy among peers. The second study took place in a second language English for Academic Purposes (EAP) context. Findings revealed that learners benefitted from the community of practice that formed. Engagement and enjoyment of writing activities led to both affective and cognitive gains similar to those found in the middle school classroom study. Ultimately, the argument is made that creative expressive writing has multiple benefits, but articulated, consolidated, and deliberate conversation about the possibilities and limitations needs finally to occur for the benefit of teachers and students alike. This dissertation endeavours to begin this conversation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".