"A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy"Creative Writing as a teachable artistic practice, and reinforcing its identity with an appropriate pedagogical approach, has been a vibrant research area for some years now. Yet, despite a strong increase in writing courses all over the globe, there has been little research into how creative practitioners can actually contribute to facilitate the process of skill development in higher education learners, especially in the public sector universities across Sindh, Pakistan. In an effort to introduce Creative Writing as an academic discipline to government universities in Sindh, the present research sought to observe the impact of a training programme on English fiction on a sample of native learners. A total of thirteen students volunteered for this project. The research sample was selected from a population of second year undergraduates, enrolled in literature courses at the Institute of English Language and Literature (IELL) in the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan (USJP); wherein Creative Writing had hitherto been a non-existent area of studies. Students were offered a twenty-nine session modular-workshop, aimed at exploring and expediting their artistic abilities in the short time span of a single semester. To ensure the trustworthiness of findings, the entire procedure was documented under the guidance of the researcher’s supervisory team. A post-workshop evaluation survey was also used for attaining student feedback. The setup of assessment items and analysis constructs of students’ narrative portfolios were adapted from validated sources and aligned with the context of this study.However, neither the feedback nor the assessment of students’ work was counted as the findings of this research. Unlike non-artistic inquiries, the post-training creative output gathered from project participants was interpreted as the final research outcome. Methodologically, this process was conducted following a matrix of three practice-oriented research paradigms; whereas “performative research” was selected as the principle data creation and presentation strategy. The resulting research insight has exhibited an in-depth understanding of approaches that could facilitate fiction composition abilities of learners from different language backgrounds, while writing in English. It also allows practitioners to consider non-typical methods of research to contribute holistically to the existing body of knowledge in the field
