Scotiabank Write Away! Young Adult Literature Project 2022

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About the project

Writing is life! Whether you get excited by the idea of writing, or not so much, you can’t get through life without it – at least not well. The Write Away! Young Adult Programme offers engaging digital content to support online English classes, available to all secondary schools via the Ministry of Education’s School Learning Management System.

Produced by the Bocas Lit Fest and sponsored by The Scotiabank Foundation, the project is designed to keep students and teachers motivated and engaged in reading, writing and online learning.

This year, the Write Away! focuses on Non-Fiction Writing, preparing students for real life and work. How do you write a business proposal or report? How do you become a great feature, news, commercial or technical writer or editor? What are the tools for succeeding as a professional creative practitioner?

The project includes an engaging, fun 5-part video series. Throughout the video series, non-fiction practitioners of different genres (e.g. journalism, advertising, academia, comedy, music etc.) will appear to give snippets of expert knowledge. The series will be accompanied by a Workbook featuring key exercises, tips and lesson notes from the video series. This package will be available on demand for all Caribbean secondary school teachers and students.

There will also be ten free professional non-fiction writing training workshops conducted by faculty at COSTAATT at the beginning of the school year to hone your professional writing skills project.

The project will culminate in internships for students at media houses, advertising and marketing companies and other sectors utilizing non-fiction

Last year, the Write Away! focused on reading and writing poetry .The project included a 9-part video workshop series available on demand for all Caribbean secondary school teachers and students, as well as free interactive online workshops throughout the school year for budding young poets. Young poets participating in the project this year were invited to submit their poetry.

In the 2020 – 2021 academic year, Write Away! looked in-depth at reading and writing fiction. The project included a virtual creative writing workshop series, as well as a teacher’s guide and a digital booklet of excerpts from award-winning Caribbean YA books, giving students access to exciting, culturally-relevant books of all genres. Led by the award-winning author Lisa Allen-Agostini, the fiction workshops broke down the essentials of creative writing, and covered everything from character building to planning your plot

Write Away! Fiction material from the past two years is still available via the Ministry of Education’s SLMS. We will announce when registration for this year’s Non-Fiction Writing programme begins.

“On behalf of my students and my department, I want to express my gratitude for this resource. It is the type of resource I have been eager to find and make available to my students. Additionally, I want to thank Bocas Lit Fest for including St. James Secondary in this workshop. It has been a memorable and enjoyable experience.”

“Before I wouldn’t write dialogue a lot because it wasn’t something encouraged in school, but once I had that video in my hands, I got to watch it over and over to get an idea of the dos and don’ts, now I write dialogue in all my pieces.”

Our priority at this time is ensuring that no student is left behind in this new digital learning space. We are pleased that our sponsorship of the Write Away! Young Adult Literature Project will provide secondary school students with a platform to foster a love of creative writing and reading.”