Building culture from the bottom up: the educational origins of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers

This paper charts the emergence of community publishing and worker writer groups in England in the early 1970s. These workshops supported working class and marginalized people to express their personal experience through poetry, prose, autobiography and history, a process with significant educational, cultural, political and social implications. From the 1970s these activities developed in a range of settings including schools, adult education and adult literacy as well as community campaigns and the traditional labour movement. In 1976 these groups came together to form the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. Although it often appears as a unique uprising, the movement drew on a wide range of broader intellectual influences and social movements.