Writing Symposium

Last Friday's UKLA research symposium gave us multiple perspectives on children's writing. Debbie Wells-Rowe opened with a critical multimodal analysis of young children framing and annotating photographs of themselves. That was followed by Cathy Burnett's look at digital texts in the classroom, and the sorts of negoataitions that surround textual production. In the afternoon Debra Myhill took us into some of the methodological issues around her project on Grammar and Writing with older children. Although the over-arching issues weren't immediately apparent, each speaker brought a different methodological lens, and each in her own way troubled the definition of writing itself. But for me there was something very interesting about formal and informal adult pedagogies and how children and young people respond to these in their text-making practices. In most cases there were multiple adults, as well - the adult in the writing process, and then the adult as researcher (sometimes they were the same person), and then of course the adult audience at the symposium itself!