Facilitating students creative writing (story writing) in English through \u27fields trips\u27

In our English classrooms, especially in the context of Chitral, teaching of writing is done in a very traditional manner where teachers focus onthe product rather than the process of writing. More importantly, they consider classroom as the only place for learning, and therefore, mostly neglect the extracurricular activities and informal spaces for innovations, thus making the students passive receivers of knowledge and imitators of what has been taught in the classroom. Children are unable to express themselves properly because they are not provided with opportunities to bring in their experiences and feelings into their writings. Thus, teachers need to utilize informal spaces and come up with innovative pedagogies to enhance students’ creative writing. The study aims to facilitate the teaching of writing stories in the lower secondary level by utilizing the informal spaces in the form of ‘field trips ‘in an English language classroom. Through using a qualitative method and collaborative action plan, the study was conducted in an English medium private school in the context of Chitral, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. The participants of this study comprised one section of grade eight students (n=16) and two English language teachers who were teaching English language to lower secondary level. Students’ work was analyzed to see whether there was improvement in their written stories after having field trips to the bank and the hospital. The use of field trips as a source of experiential learning was found to be an active pedagogy, as it raised students’ interest and motivation by actively engaging them in the process of learning. It was marked that children best learn to understand the elements of the story and bring in their creativity and imagination into their writings when they are given the opportunities to explore and inquire through using various sources like pictures and drawings in a natural setting. Therefore, through proper planning and adequate pre-instructions, field trip facilitates the teaching and learning of writing skills in an English language classroom