The Oxford Handbook of Creativity and Education (Chapter)

Using Creative Writing to Fuel Creativity

Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Creativity and Education (Oxford University Press, 2025)

I am the author of the chapter “Using Creative Writing to Fuel Creativity” in The Oxford Handbook of Creativity and Education, a major international reference work published by Oxford University Press.

This handbook brings together leading global scholarship on creativity in education, examining how creativity is understood, supported, and constrained across policy, curriculum, assessment, classrooms, disciplines, and research cultures. It is designed for students, researchers, teacher educators, school leaders, and policymakers, and offers a comprehensive overview of current thinking and future directions in the field.

My chapter appears in Section 4: Creativity in the Disciplines, and focuses on the distinctive role that creative writing can play in fostering creativity across educational contexts, not only in English and the arts, but also in subjects such as science, social science, psychotherapy, and research practice.

Drawing on research, theory, and my own extensive experience as a teacher and teacher educator, the chapter argues that creative writing should be understood as a core pedagogical practice, not a marginal or decorative one. I explore how activities such as freewriting, flow-based writing, and my own concept of diagrarting (combining writing, drawing, and dialogue) can unlock creativity, deepen learning, and support reflection across disciplines.

The chapter also engages critically with:

• assessment and high-stakes accountability
• the limits of traditional creative writing workshops
• decolonising creative writing pedagogy
• critical literacy, identity, and positionality
• creativity as learning, research, and social practice

Rather than offering recipes or quick fixes, the chapter invites educators to reflect carefully on why they teach creative writing and how their underlying purposes shape pedagogy, assessment, and student experience.

Accessing the chapter

The full chapter is published in The Oxford Handbook of Creativity and Education and is copyrighted by Oxford University Press.

I am able to share a PDF of the final draft of the chapter (with one figure missing), which gives access to the core argument and most of the content. You can download that draft here:

For the fully typeset and final published version, please refer to the handbook itself:

Oxford University Press
Print ISBN: 9780197698181
Online ISBN: 9780197698211
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197698181.001.0001