The mainstream and the movement

Working class writing workshops were infused with a sectarian spirit of being alternative and they actively challenged elitism in favour of a participatory ethic. A national debate flared up over the decision of the Arts Council not to award a grant to these workshops on the grounds that its work was of ‘no literary merit’. From the 1990s, relations thawed and a widening acceptance of worker writers came into being across many cultural and educational institutions. The movement of workshops changed into a broader inclusive network while attempting to retain an element of distinctiveness. Survival itself proved extremely difficult in these circumstances.

Chuck out the teacher: critical pedagogy in the community

The internal workings of working class writing and publishing groups reveals important insights about the nature of democracy. The attempt to form collective and co-operative groups that supported everyone led to an active re-making of educational relationships along democratic lines. The insistence upon equality between writers, irrespective of individual ability, was a cardinal principle. However, in a changing funding climate, workshops came under pressure to formalise relationships, professionalise and introduce management structures. This had mixed results as groups attempted to negotiate these tensions. The example of the Fed brings into question some key aspects of critical pedagogy which privileges the role of tutors and education as a whole and, in some cases, assumes that learners have internalised dominant ideas.

The workshop and working-class writing

The writing produced in workshops explored varied forms of expression including autobiography, short stories, dialect, drama, poetry and novels. Overall there were significant debates about the nature and meaning of working class writing and whether it had any distinctive features. Divisions between forms of writing were actively challenged and new forms of subjectivity and ways of representing experience were developed. However, there were also pressures to write within existing forms. New modes of expression could become tiring after a time when different approaches were required. Overall writing in the Fed was marked by the creative interpretation of experience and vernacular voice. It reveals tensions between bearing witness and creative interpretation and between representing a collective social experience and the individual life story.

Conclusion

Working-class writing and publishing workshops are an underexplored phenomenon that has featured very little in contemporary debates on culture. They have offered spaces for people on the margins of society to articulate their feelings, beliefs and experiences. The contours of the movement have been determined not only by power, resources and institutions but by a shared commitment to democratic culture, an inheritance that remains a resource for the future. The advent, development, successes and defeats of these workshops represent an important phase in the history of working-class creativity....

Sources of radicalism

Working class writing and publishing workshops had their origins in the counter cultural trends of the late 1960s. By the 1970s they engaged with urban communities where there was a strong class consciousness. This chapter charts the way in which working class culture became a significant source of new ideas and practices. In particular, the cultural role of schools, adult education, community organising, adult literacy, popular history and the labour movement are examined in relation to the emergence of a movement of working class writing and publishing workshops. In each of these areas, ideas about culture, technology and tradition were being reworked in order to foster popular cultural participation.

A beginner reader is not a beginner thinker

The writing produced by adult literacy students emerged out of a distinct educational and cultural setting. Student writing itself represented a significant example of learning. The writing itself tended to be simple and clear representations of working class life and voices. The experience of ‘failure’ in education was a powerful one that formed the basis for personal expression. Experience was seen to put the student in control. Political issues and writing beyond the third person were also encouraged, with mixed results. In the changed context of the 1990s, new stories based on humorous episodes helped to represent students as normal rather than oppressed. Yet social justice continued to inflect the writing and there were attempts to move students into the wider network of writing groups.

The good old days?

A significant body of written work was produced by older people in the 1970s and 1980s reflecting back on the early twentieth century. Through the individual voice, wider social contexts were explored. Writers focused upon some key themes in order to achieve this, including childhood, work, family, the individual and politics to achieve this. The insistent belief in care and community in times of hardship is understood as a contradictory structure of feeling which spread widely during this time. Contrary to ideal type definitions of community, a close reading of texts reveals actual meanings and practices which have often been ignored in the historical record. Silences and tensions are also explored.

Young people’s writing

The writing of young people in London expanded significantly in the 1970s and 1980s. A number of key strands can be identified: the work produced around Stepney Words and the school strike leading to work on youth culture; the writing of migrants who reflected on past and present; and three longer pieces of autobiography and novels. The ways in which these young people engaged with writing revealed links to wider literary models as well as an ambiguous sense of self. Overall, it poses challenges for our understanding of the history of childhood and assumptions about maturity. Distinctions between the learning of young people and adult education revealed considerable overlap rather than a sharp distinction.

Introduction

During the 1970s, working-class writers entered the cultural landscape in ever greater numbers. ‘Ordinary’ people formed writing and publishing workshops in which they explored ideas, histories and feelings. A great variety of people started writing, including school children, housewives, black and minority groups, unemployed people, retired workers as well as those still in work. Writers of all ages were examining personal experience with fresh eyes and renegotiating their place in the world. Over the coming decades, thousands of publications would be produced, with an estimated readership in the millions. Autobiography, poetry, short stories and drama were consumed avidly by those within the writer’s immediate vicinity as well as by more general readerships. In 1976, the working-class writing and publishing groups, which were proliferating across the country, established a national network, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP or ‘the Fed’), that would later add the strapline ‘to make writing and publishing accessible to all’....

Class and identity

The history of working class writing workshops provides a fascinating example of how changes in class and the emergence of new identities were handled in cultural terms. It challenges the view that a straightforward dichotomy arose between class and other forms of identity based upon race, gender, sexuality and disability. Workshops defended their devotion to working class writers and organisation and were were wary about the involvement of middle class people. But multiple versions of class were in play and this would be complemented by the development of women’s, black and lesbian and gay writing groups. Intense and, at times, acrimonious debates over the nature of class and identity took place. Some writers re-defined class in terms of a specific identity group. As a whole, the movement held together diverse streams of activity which challenged simplistic ideas that class no longer played a role in cultural life.