Peter Childs, University of Glocestershire
My project's immediate focus is on trying to influence pre-University students' perceptions of the experience and benefits of studying English. I intend to draw on the views of staff and specialists in English studies, to collate different student accounts of their experience at a range of institutions, and then to use the ideas and information gained from these sources to produce on-line resources and learning materials to reach out to prospective English students. Such a website would help sixth-formers to gain from higher education students' and lecturers' knowledge and in particular it could help non-traditional University applicants envisage a realistic future in higher education with its attendant benefits in terms of employability, lifelong learning, and self-development (as well as the pre-twenty-first-century reasons for studying English, such as pleasure and enjoyment). The aim of the project is thus to present English in an attractive way to potential higher education students and to provide them with resources that tell them about studying the subject at university in terms of the experience and processes more than the content. Further down the line, I will disseminate the project's findings both within the English studies community and more widely.
Celia Hunt, University of Sussex
One of my main interests has been in the way creative writing – or more specifically creative writing that draws on autobiographical material – sometimes enables people not just to develop their writing skills, but also to develop themselves. In a standard creative writing course this developmental dimension of writing is not the main focus, and I wanted to see whether it would be possible to focus on it more directly in an educational setting. This is how the Centre for Continuing Education’s Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Writing and Personal Development came into being in 1996. During that time I was also instrumental in setting up, with others, the Association for the Literary Arts in Personal Development – Lapidus – which is now an international organisation (www.lapidus.org.uk). The MA which evolved out of the Diploma is the only programme of its kind in Britain. It has proved highly successful in offering people the opportunity of both deepening and strengthening their creative writing through a deeper engagement with themselves, and of acquiring the skills to use creative writing in work with others in healthcare, therapy and education. Much of my thinking and writing over the last ten years has been devoted to exploring in a variety of ways the developmental and therapeutic nature of creative writing in an educational context. Over the next several years I shall be undertaking a research project on the way the different teaching and learning elements of the MA contribute to the learning process, with particular reference to understanding better how changes in participants’ sense of themselves as learners and writers is effected. I shall also be organising an international conference on the use of creative writing as a learning tool in higher education, and editing a collection of papers arising out of it, so that models of good practice can be widely disseminated.
