Reading, writing
Bands A+,B,C,D

What is it?

Imaginative recreation is re-creating a literature text or part of a text in a way that helps students to both deepen their understanding and appreciation of a text and express a considered response to it. When students retell part of a text from the point of view of a minor character, or change the time or setting, for example, they are engaging in imaginative recreation. Originally presented by Leslie Stratta, John Dickens and Andrew Wilkinson in England in 1973, it has been developed by Australian educators such as Peter Adams, Wayne Sawyer and Ken Watson.

What is its purpose?

Engaging in imaginative recreation helps students to explore many aspects of a text in some depth. It assists them in working through a response to a text. It also supports them in constructing their own imaginative texts.

How do I do it?

The first choice teachers make is to decide what form or forms the imaginative recreation is to take, depending on what is appropriate as a development of the original text. Teachers choose forms that are plausible and that lead to a deeper understanding of the text. The following examples show how students can use imaginative recreation to explore and express their responses to texts.

• retelling a short story or a picture book as a poem - helps students to interpret themes, to focus closely on word choice, to develop their understanding of the features of both literary forms
• changing a newspaper report into a short story or a short story into a television news item - helps students to investigate how genre helps to determine emphasis
• preparing a script based on an incident in a novel - helps students to develop interpretation of characters and their relationships, to investigate differences between spoken and written language
• changing the narrative point of view of the printed text of a picture book - helps students to explore the interplay between written and visual text.
• retelling a scene from a film as narrative fiction or creating a video drama from an incident in a novel - helps students' to develop their understanding of elements such as mood, setting and point of view.
• creating a map of the setting of a text - helps students to read or listen to or view the text in a close and purposeful way.

Teachers explain clearly to their students what the purpose of the chosen re-creation is. All of these possibilities have a range of benefits for students and they all help students to move toward analysis of texts, but a clear explanation will help students to understand what their focus is in working with the text.

To demonstrate how imaginative re-creation works, the teacher can prepare a re-creation to share with the students, based on a text shared previously, or work on a short re-creation together with the whole class.

Students work on their re-creations individually, in pairs or small groups. The re-creations are shared with other students or groups. Collections of re-creations make excellent group or class publications to share more widely.

How can I adapt it?

Students can imaginatively recreate:

• using a particular medium - television, radio, newspaper
• with a different literary genre - poetry, drama script, monologue, diary, letter
• with a different setting - time, place
• using a combination of genres - as in The Jolly Postman, but based on the same text
• from the point of view of a minor character

How can it be used to evaluate students' language learning?

Imaginative recreation can help students to explore and demonstrate their contextual understanding, and their knowledge of particular linguistic structures and features. Imaginative recreation is itself a strategy for interpreting layers of meaning in texts, involving close re-reading or re-viewing of texts. The student's text and the student's explanation of choices made to produce the text both provide opportunities for evaluation.

Where can I find out more?

Adams, P., "Imaginative Re-creation of Literature: A Critical Examination from the Perspective of the 90s" in Sawyer, W., Watson, K., and Gold, E. (eds.) (1998) Re-Viewing English, St Clair Press, Sydney.