Combat Sports Bloggers, Mad Scientist Poets, and Comic Scriptwriters - Engaging Boys in writing on Their own Terms

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious

A community writing center program director examines how out-of-school-time writing instruction can better engage reluctant middle school boys. Drawing on practitioner research during the 2010–2011 Afterschool Matters Fellowship, she links engagement to Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, emphasizing small incremental steps, safety, encouragement, and critical feedback. The study highlights key engagement indicators and uses prior research on flow to frame practical strategies for sustaining participation, belonging, attention, and willingness to tackle challenging ideas.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time20 min

AccessFree to download

Flow and Engagement Foundations

Defining Flow and Its Indicators

Engagement Strategies and Learning Context

Applying Engagement in OST Programs

Program Context: Mighty Writers

Engagement Elements and Support Requirements

Combat Sports Bloggers, Mad Scientist Poets, and Comic Scriptwriters Engaging Boys in writing on Their own Terms by Rachel Loeper As the program director of a community writing center that serves children and youth ages 5–18, I see it all, from 15-year-old spoken word poets to six-year-olds whose first“books” are strung together with yarn. In all of my roles—administrator, teacher, volunteer trainer—I value engaging the most reluctant of young writers. I therefore began to focus on a few middle school boys who frequented the center, Mighty Writers in South Philadelphia. All were students of color; eight of the 10 were considered to be “at risk” in school because they received free or reduced-priced lunch. They were noisy, rambunctious, and disruptive to other writers. They tended to rush through their prewriting and were careless in their drafting. Revision was a struggle and proofreading barely a thought. They were most engaged when wrestling on the sidewalk or cheering one another on to the next level of a computer game. Although they were certainly writing, I didn’t see the same enthusiasm, focused attention, or motivation I saw in other Mighty Writers. I wanted to discover strategies to better engage these boys and others like them in writing in out-of-school time (OST) programs. When I participated in the Afterschool Matters Practitioner Research Fellowship during the 2010–2011 school year, Mighty Writers’ second year of operation, I had the opportunity to conduct research in my program to try to find such strategies. I wanted these boys to experience, as I had as a child, what Csikszentmihalyi (1975) calls flow: the feeling of being fully absorbed in a challenging but enjoyable task. No professional basketball player achieves the flow experience without taking thousands of shots from the foul line. However, those thousands of shots need not be tedious. In fact, they’re often communal and fun. In my research, I RACHEL LOEPER, is the founding education director of Mighty Writers in Philadelphia. She has taught English as a Second Language, remedial reading, and creative writing for children and adults. She offers presentations, consultations, and professional development on the writing process, as well as community writing programs for museums, K–12 schools, colleges and universities, and other nonprofit organizations. She participated in the Afterschool Matters Practitioner Research Fellowship in 2010–2011 and in the Level II fellowship the following year. found that, before flow can occur, students must be given the opportunity to take small, incremental steps toward engaging in the writing process with the support of adults and peers. They must go through the writing process in safety, with encouragement and real critical feedback from people they know. The onus then is on educators, mentors, parents, and other adults to create engaging and collaborative opportunities through which boys can experience the writing process. My inquiry into the experience of 10 boys in Mighty Writers workshops helped me identify some key indicators of engagement that can move boys toward the flow experience. Means to an End: Engagement Leads to Flow Csikszentmihalyi (1975) defines flow as an experience of participating in an activity—sports, crafts, academics, or nearly any other pursuit—in which the participant is highly engaged and enjoys the activity. Also key to the flow experience is challenge: The activity should be just beyond—but not far beyond—the participant’sskill set and knowledge. The identifiers of flow are involvement of both body and mind, deep concentration, clear intentions, and awareness of the quality of the performance. A person who is in a flow state has no fear of failure, no self-consciousness, and no awareness of the passage of time (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) . In a study of engagement and flow in OST settings, Shernoff and Vandell (2008) found that urban boys reported peak experiences of flow d

FAQs

What engagement elements are highlighted for OST programs?

Seven elements include reactions to teachers/classmates/curriculum, sense of belonging, value placed on learning, participation in academic and social activities, conduct, attention, and willingness to exert effort for complex ideas and difficult skills.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Pentious