Dramatic Inquiry a Pedagogy for Writing
Imagination, purpose, and meaning - making writing matter to children
Curriculum is the what, the why, and the when of education. It’s the bit the system has complete control over. Committees are formed, consultations are sent out, and drafts drawn up. Different factions argue over emphasis and detail, and then, after much toing and froing, a compromise is reached, which generally pleases no one entirely.
But curriculum, as any teacher knows, is only a fraction of the whole. What’s missing - the big part - is the how, the pedagogy. This is the messy bit, the wild jungle of complexity, involving the one constant untamed variable no system can completely account for: children.
Once children get involved, all bets are off. The younger they are, the less predictable they become. Just ask any teacher used to working with older students who has the opportunity to spend a day teaching in preschool. Children don’t know about the curriculum and they don’t care about it. Their experience is entirely removed from the motivations, ideologies, and intentions of the people who wrote the document. They just come to school.
It is, therefore, their teacher’s job to make the content meaningful, relevant, and something they might care about. Not by simplifying it, but by shaping the conditions in which students can engage with it purposefully.
How teachers do this, particularly in writing, is the focus of the course I’ve co-written with Viv Aitken for the Dramatic Inquiry Network Aotearoa Trust. Writing is not just about spelling, grammar, and punctuation (although all these elements are important); writing is about making meaning and communicating, self-expression, and making a difference.
This is not always easy to achieve in the classroom. There is a danger that writing can start to feel like practising for something that will be important one day, but not today. (They are called ‘exercise’ books for a reason.)
One way out of this is to create contexts for students’ writing. This is not a new idea. Writing always needs content, and teachers often create scenarios to give children’s writing a sense of context, frequently drawing on stories or picture books to do so.
What Dramatic Inquiry adds is depth and continuity. Rather than a one-off stimulus or a brief narrative hook, the imagined context is sustained over time and carefully developed. The story is not just a device for getting children to write (something they might consider a trick), but something they become invested in over time. Something they develop ownership of and come to see as important to them, even though they know the story is a fiction.
Within these imagined contexts, writing is not something done in isolation. It’s part of an ongoing process of co-creation, through talking, drawing, making, and doing. Students do not write as a classroom exercise; they write because the situation demands it.
This matters because it changes the status of writing. Writing becomes a way of thinking things through, of recording, of persuading, or of making sense of what has happened. It is not a thing on its own, but part of a larger project. As a result, students can see writing as something important to them and to others, and something they can use to make a difference.
Audience, too, becomes clearer. Writing is for the benefit of someone within the story: a team, a community, a client, or a group that needs information. The teacher is no longer the sole reader. Children care about how their writing sounds and what it achieves, because it has consequences beyond their exercise books.
In Dramatic Inquiry, students step into the story as a fictional team of experts, with responsibility both within their field of work and to the clients they are engaged with. The work they do for the client is their commission, and it is carefully planned by the teacher to create activities that develop students’ knowledge, skills, and understanding.
Let’s look at an example for younger children.
Imagine the teacher is reading Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. The children know the story well, and the teacher has reached the part where Max climbs into a boat. This time, instead of reading on, the teacher puts the book to one side and says, “What if we came into the story and helped Max sail his boat?”
Immediately, the children’s relationship to the story has changed. They are no longer outside the story looking in, but inside it, as people with the capacity to make a difference.
However, they are not yet a team. That still needs to be built. Teams are built through tasks.
The teacher continues, “Let’s all get to our feet. Does anyone know how to lift a sail?” She enacts pulling on a rope and asks for help. “Can you help me? This job is harder than it looks.” Next, they climb the rigging, steer the boat, and look through a telescope. In this way, the team is formed.
Working collaboratively with the children, the teacher develops the context and creates a sense of responsibility and investment in the team’s work supporting Max. They find the island, set up camp, explore the landscape, and watch the Wild Things from a safe distance.
Along the way, the children engage in curriculum tasks that have purpose inside the world of the story. Here’s a list:
Draw pictures of the Wild Things
Layout and draw the camp
Make a list of equipment
Count and order resources – food, clothing, tools
Keep a record of time spent on the island
Create the island using a large sheet and classroom resources
Map the island
Talk to Max and help him with his problems
Create a soundscape of sounds at night – the sea, the wind in the trees, the sound of strange creatures.
And here is a list of writing tasks, along with purpose and audience:
Labels for the camp and island map
Purpose: to identify key places and features clearly
Audience: the teamA short description of a Wild Thing
Purpose: to record observations and help others recognise them
Audience: the team, and MaxA simple record of what happened each day
Purpose: to remember events and track time on the island
Audience: the team, and MaxSigns around the island
Purpose: to inform and keep people safe
Audience: the team and MaxAn invitation to the Wild Rumpus
Purpose: to invite the Wild Things to the ‘wild rumpus’
Audience: Wild ThingsA letter to Max’s mum
Purpose: to let her know Max is safe and what he’s up to
Audience: Max’s mum
As children become more invested in the co-creation of the context, activities become more meaningful. They are no longer just classroom exercises, but purposeful work that can make a difference inside the fiction.
The writing course Viv Aitken and I have written for the DI Trust is designed as a guide to help teachers develop Dramatic Inquiry contexts in their classroom and use them to support writing that feels urgent and important for children. Writing becomes something they take ownership of, and something where they can see why it matters to communicate accurately and clearly. It is not a programme to be followed slavishly, step by step, or a prescription that tells teachers how they must teach. Instead, it offers a way of thinking about how to engage children in writing and how to make it something they enjoy and want to do.
The course is divided into eight units. The first two serve as an introduction. The remaining six are teaching units, each exploring a different aspect of writing: acquisition, application, and development; cognitive load; the importance of stories; self-expression; revisiting and revising; and creativity.
The course includes elements of theory, but it is predominantly practical, illustrated with real classroom examples from across the primary age range. We know teachers are busy, so there are plenty of ideas they can use straight away without needing to complete the whole course. Each unit takes around twenty minutes to half an hour to complete.
Our aim is not to colonise the curriculum, to bend it out of shape or trivialise it, nor to prescribe what teachers should do by turning them into technicians ‘delivering’ content.
On the contrary, our aim is to bring the curriculum alive and make it exciting and meaningful for children. To make learning something they can see has purpose, and something they can use right away to make a difference.
School should not be a waiting room. It should be an invitation to discover and explore, to make friends, to feel part of a community, and to learn how to imagine and communicate with others.
Writing is a communication system. It is more than the sum of its parts. Children do not need to know how to write before they can learn why writing matters. Stories can teach them that, and Dramatic Inquiry nurtures and developes that understanding.
