«The Sea Between Us»: A report on the teaching of creative writing to pre-service teachers in Tunisia and Switzerland

This report, which is the outcome of the work of a Swiss-Tunisian duo, seeks to investigate the effect of a series of creative writing sessions on a sample population composed of Tunisian and Swiss pre-service teachers. It also briefly describes the steps taken to organise a Slam Poetry Competition and the fruit it bore, i.e. an online booklet of winning texts written by Tunisian and Swiss competitors. The collected corpus of reflective accounts written by the study participants sheds lights on the importance of creative writing in building up humans’ personalities, blocking negative affective factors and developing future teachers’ competences. The difficulties that may be encountered when incorporating a creative writing course in a teacher education programme were also expressed. The findings were congruent – to some extent – with the literature review on creative writing. However, further investigation remains necessary to back up the interesting results found.