I Come to This New Place with Curiosity: Writing, Reflecting, and Engaging with Conversations about Practitioners’ and Students’ Relationship with Research in the Field of Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes

Sue Walters

Authors

Sue Walters The Institute of Education, University College London Author

Keywords:

research, creative writing for therapeutic purposes, Lapidus, curiosity, exploring, innovation

Abstract

In this paper I explore and engage with eleven research conversations that I shared in and facilitated in 2022 in the UK. These conversations were created under the auspices of a narrative inquiry to explore creative writing for therapeutic purposes (CWTP) practitioners’ and students’ relationship with research. I was full of curiosity about the role of research in CWTP and how practitioners and students felt about research. This paper presents what I heard in the eleven conversations and where these led me. What emerged from the conversations about the weightiness and constriction of traditional, mainstream research. Then how people were finding their way to something more akin to play and ‘writing from the heart’ as their practice. And how I was transformed. This is not a traditional research paper. I have chosen to abandon my usual ways of writing research in order to present something that follows a line of thought, a curiosity. The paper shows how my knowledge developed through attending to the voices met with along the way and how I arrived at a place of new insight into research as potentially about (moving in) connection (with others). This paper contributes to emerging conversations in CWTP by proposing that, following Ingold, research in this field can be reimagined as a relational, dialogic, and process-led practice. Drawing on narrative inquiry and eleven research conversations, it challenges dominant, product-driven models of research and highlights alternative ways of knowing grounded in connection, reflexivity, and ‘writing from the heart’.

Author Biography

Sue Walters, The Institute of Education, University College London

Dr Sue Walters is a recently retired Associate Professor at the Institute of Education, University College London. She has been teaching and supervising research in education at undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels for over fourteen years. Before this she was a Lecturer in Education at Edinburgh University, a Research Fellow at the Open University, and a Research Associate in the Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research and publications have mainly focused on ‘race’ and ethnicity in education, multilingual learners, and literacy. Alongside her work in the academy, Sue has studied for a PGDip in the Use of Story in Therapy and Education at the University of Hertfordshire and more recently gained her PGDip Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes at the Metanoia Institute. She has been working as a CWTP practitioner for four years. Sue is also a walker of long-distance footpaths and a 5Rhythms dancer. She has always been intellectually curious and is currently in search of other intellectually curious beings to be curious with.