"Map writers": writing stories in Secondary Education due to narratological models

Abstract

Creative writing of literary texts is one of the competencies that students must develop as part of their linguistic and literary education, but also as a tool for artistic expression of their personal and social identity. However, these contents are often the subject of unstructured teaching (as reflected in the simple and imprecise proposals of Spanish Language and Literature textbooks), which makes it impossible for many students to develop them successfully. To improve the teaching-learning process of creative writing, we developed a learning situation called “Map writers” focused on the creation of literary tales and aimed at the first cycle of secondary education, which is based on structuring and dividing the creative writing process into tasks so that any student, regardless of their needs and abilities, can develop their narrative. This learning situation is based on the practical application of some of the best-known narratological models, such as Greimas’ actantial theory, Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” Genette’s theories on narrator and focalization, Forster’s character typologies, or Bajtin's concept of chronotope. Our learning situation, based on the didactic strategy of modeling, explicates the creation processes that writers undertake so that students gradually perform tasks until obtaining a product, the tale, because of a meaningful learning process. We aim for creative writing to become an essential instrument for the linguistic, cultural, artistic, and emotional education of our students.