Exploring sentient imagination with a secondary school English language arts creative writing group

This research study describes and interprets the exploring of sentient imagination with a creative writing group of five volunteer students in Secondary School English Language Arts 20-1. The volunteer participants did writing assignments in open journal writing, biography, narratives, and poetry and I provided written feedback for each of their pieces of writing. I was a participant and an observer with the group and in this study which focuses on the following question: How do Secondary School English Language Arts 20-1 students explore sentient imagination through writing in a group?;From this research study, I learned that an emphasis on sentient imagination can be a strong component of creative writing, that it can enable writers to awaken a post-Cartesian expression of their senses in embodied writing, that it can assist writers to explore and become more aware of their own identity and the environmental contexts around and in them. The participants emphasized that in order to draw out their sentient imagination, they needed freedom in choosing topics, modes and genres for writing. They wanted to be given the right and the respect to open their voices for matters and issues that were of concern to them. Participants demonstrated in our writing research sessions that open writing could provide a helpful mode for releasing urgent and/or spontaneous issues in order to make room for new creations to form. This writing group taught me that while some of them liked it quiet to write at times, others were quite comfortable or even preferred a situation with music or other sound activities in the background. Participants of this writing research felt that it was important that I wrote when they did rather than simply watching them as they wrote. They found that forming writing groups to work both individually and together could help them as writers to receive feedback, encouragement, criticism and inspiration. The participants appeared to value the creating worlds through sentient activity and as we dared to touch the earth in our writing research, an apparent reciprocal growth in sentient ecological intercommunications was shown, embodying a melding of the beauty of both environment and art in our work.