Self-Story, Self-Worth and Self-Sufficiency:
A Creative Writing Session with Adult Basic Education Tutors
1. Introduction: from belted misspeller to writer of the story of the belted misspeller.
2. Reflections on the Story To Tell Project at the Energi Drop-in Centre, St Monans - a collaborative venture between creative writing and adult basic education.
• If you have lived a life, you have a story to tell.
• Life experience is an innate source of creative self-expression.
3. Letter-Seed exercise and discussion.
4. Not learning and learning from the past: correcting errors and encouraging play.
• Learning models that emphasise linguistic and intellectual structure at the expense of creative and self-expressive elements, neglect the crucial role of personal awareness and self-experience in the formation of a person’s learning world.
• The teaching of literacy skills can benefit from the complementary teaching of creative expressional and experiential skills. A blend of both methods can combat a correctional mentality and methodology in educational practice that, in its worst form, leads to the loss of any correlation to the source of language itself: the creative spirit and inquiry of ordinary people.
5. Picture Book exercise and discussion.
6. In search of an integrated model of creative and literacy learning: self-story, self-worth and self-sufficiency.
• The process of self-story can be described as the exploration and manifestation of a person’s identity, experience and awareness through creative self-expression.
• Through this process of self-story a person can move from their creative centre into an environment of self-worth, acknowledging and being acknowledged for their personal value as a creative being.
• Through this process of self-story and self-worth, a person can move with greater confidence into the social worlds of language and communication, thereby enhancing their sense of self-sufficiency.
7. Being Rooted exercise and discussion.
8. Anatomy of a poem: War Photographs, Corris Institute, Wales.
9. Conclusion: towards a therapeutic future of self-value.
©John Brewster, April 2009
