Writing Historical Fiction Online: Community Digital Literacies in Regional Australia
Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.
- Journal
- Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
- Published
- 2022-02-16
- DOI
- 10.59236/rjv21i1pp154-160
- CompPile
- Open Access
- OA PDF Gold
- Topics
-
writing pedagogy teacher development online writing instruction literacy studies community literacy editorial matter
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References (7)
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Fuller (2004)Writing the Everyday: Women's Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada
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Hewett (2015)Foundational Principles for Online Writing Instruction
Show all 7 →
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Reddy (2019)The Spirit of Our Rural Countryside': Towards an extracurricular Pedagogy of PlaceCommunity Literacy Journal ↗
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Wise (2020)Not-So-Invisible-Mending: Teaching and Learning Professional Editing Skills in a Large On…
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