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This paper draws on findings of comparative international research on students' poetic writing about the natural environment in the context of the classroom and a naturalistic setting. The study involved 97, nine- to 10-year-olds in four classes: two classes were in an English primary school with their counterparts in a Western Australian primary school. One class in each school had vicarious contact with nature as a stimulus for writing, using a previously taught technique for writing poetry; the other class in each school used the same technique but had direct contact with nature. The study has implications for students' literacy development, creativity and agency and suggests that students' poetic writing is enhanced through direct contact with nature. Teachers in both England and Australia, countries where 'high stakes' testing dominates the literacy curriculum, may find that standards of writing improve when students are given direct contact with natural spaces and are scaffolded to elicit their poetic voice.

This article investigates the extent to which Year One B.Ed student teachers arrived at university already possessing self-confidence as writers. Both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were used to identify students' self perceptions and confidence as writers and their understanding of processes of written composition. The article argues that to consciously engage student teachers in the writing process and to require them to reflect on that process can lead to their self efficacy as writers. Evidence from this study suggests one's self-confidence, as a writer, is enhanced by explicitly engaging in self reflection of one's own approaches to writing. The findings have implications for course design of literacy components in teacher education internationally.

This study investigated the engagement with writing of reluctant writers in the contexts of home and school. A structured and semi-structured survey method was used to capture responses from 106 reluctant writers in 9 primary schools (age range 6--9 year olds) in the UK. Findings show that although these students were deemed to be reluctant writers by their teachers, the majority admitted to writing in a range of genres in the home context. It was found that these students had access to adult help with their writing in the home and also had ready-made audiences. A sociocultural perspective is used to explain the discontinuity in the writing behaviours of these students between home and school. The implications of this study are applicable to societies with highly prescriptive writing curricula in which transcriptional writing skills are privileged over creativity and compositional processes. The corollary is that schools need to adopt ethnographic approaches to literacy in order to capture the varied identities of students as writers, and provide the means by which students can freely apply literacy practices developed in the home to writing in school. (Contains 4 figures.)