How Children Experience Writing: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Brett Healey

For children, writing is a complex experience. The classroom experience of writing is made especially complex by the external demands imposed by the pedagogic process and by children’s developing ability to express ideas. The purpose of this research was to describe how children experience the expression of ideas in creative writing in the classroom context. It was done by applying an interpretive method of phenomenology. Eight Year 6 children, aged 10-12, were interviewed (four male and four female) in an open-ended dialogue where they described their experiences of writing. Following the process of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, three major themes emerged to describe the general experience of expressing ideas through writing. The themes and their sub-themes are as follows: (I) The Writing World: (A) Watching, (B) Ideas from Elsewhere, (C) Flowing, (D) Words as they are; (II) The Self: (A) Concealing & Revealing, (B) Adequacy, (C) Agency; (III) Schooled Writing: (A) Standards, (B) Satisfying Requirements, (C) The Rules of Good Writing. These findings were discussed regarding how children make sense of the themes and explored further in light of current research on writing cognition, the social factors of writing and the phenomenology of writing. It was found that writing appears as both an imaginary escape from the classroom (the writing world) and as a school-based task-oriented activity (schooled writing) within these children’s consciousness, causing a tension in the way writing is experienced. The self is situated between the consciousness of the writing world and schooled writing, and these experiences tend to exist exclusively from one another.

How Children Experience Writing: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

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