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From “Write What You Know” to “Write What is Relevant”: Deepening Connections with Students’ Worlds through The Writing Fortune Teller

Dr. Katie Sciurba, assistant professor of Literacies and Children’s Literature at the University of Georgia, recently joined Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) to host the webinar Beyond the Writing Prompt: Engaging Students Through Relevance. In both the webinar and this post, she explores how educators can move beyond the familiar advice to “write what you know” and instead help students write about what is truly relevant to their lives. Readers will learn how connecting writing to students’ identities, experiences, and communities can deepen engagement and strengthen literacy development. She also shares a practical classroom activity, the Writing Fortune Teller, that invites students to generate their own story ideas. This approach reflects RIF’s commitment to helping children see themselves and their worlds reflected in meaningful literacy experiences. 

As a student of creative writing and as a participant in writing workshops, I have, countless times, heard the ubiquitous phrase, “Write What You Know.” At the age of 22, while pursuing my MFA in Writing for Children in New York City, I didn’t know if my own life, what I knew personally, would be worth including in a book, but I did know a lot about the sensational Celia Cruz and decided to write about her.  

What I also didn’t know, even as my first picture book, Oye, Celia!: A Song for Celia Cruz became published, was just how deeply this book reflected my world at the time, or more precisely, what was relevant to me. I have defined this term, “relevance,” in my scholarly work as “the condition of being practically, socially, and/or conceptually applicable to one’s life,” and it consists of four dimensions:identity, spatiality, temporality, and ideology (Sciurba, 2024, p. 7). Oye, Celia! focused on the emotions evoked by Celia Cruz’s lyrics, the “sadness” of leaving one’s country, the “happiness” and joy of song and dance, the “people” who shape us (Sciurba, 2007). Had I not been from a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, new to NYC and missing home, a Spanish learner, part of the salsa community, and connected to the music of Celia Cruz through my closest friends, my picture book would not have been written as it was.   

Throughout my 20+ years of working in the field of education, – as a writing instructor, a classroom teacher, a teacher educator, a literacy clinician, and a scholar, I have heard and used the phrase, “Write What You Know,” in attempts to support students by encouraging them to write about their worlds. I have learned, however, that the act of knowing is typically reduced to topics or subjects with which students are familiar, just as I knew about Celia Cruz, but not why she or her story was so meaningful to me. If we shift, collectively, to facilitating K-12 students’ abilities to “Write What is Relevant,” we can more deeply engage them in writing that reflects and enacts the fullness of their identities and the lives they are living, including the spaces and places they have been (or imagine going), their temporalities (age, generation, pop culture, etc.), and the frameworks of thought they utilize to make sense of their worlds.    

One activity I have developed to enact relevance in narrative writing is an origami (“cootie-catcher”) Writing Fortune Teller. This project emerged directly from my work with children in an NYC writing program, and I have used it successfully with students in and beyond K-12 contexts for over 20 years. The Writing Fortune Teller is a writing prompt that is entirely student-generated. To begin, everyone must fold a (large) square sheet of paper into a fortune teller. (See my recent MAT student, Autumn Rennie’s, “Story Magic Fortune Teller” adaptation on Teachers Pay Teachers!)  

All four dimensions of relevance: identity, spatiality, temporality, and ideology, shine through as students select four settings, eight characters, and eight writing “fortunes” (or plot points) for stories they write. These dimensions of relevance show up in various ways: 

  • Identity: selecting friends and family members as “characters,” including pop culture figures (like Celia Cruz!) who perform in their home languages or who are favorites in their communities, writing stories that include people who share their racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and other backgrounds
  • Spatiality: setting their stories in local places they know (e.g., a corner bodega, urban centers, rural communities), their schools, countries they have visited, places they would like to explore, locations they invent or imagine
  • Temporality: including characters their own ages, current events, historical figures they have learned about, political leaders with which they are familiar
  • Ideology: navigating story problems, demonstrating their understandings of “right” and “wrong,” putting characters in predicaments that reflect what they do and do not “deserve,” including messages about how the world can be “saved” or improved, integrating tones that reflect their current ways of seeing the world, including the ways in which they construct humor  

The possibilities of the Writing Fortune Teller are endless, just as we all, collectively, have endless ways of demonstrating through our writing what is, as well as what was or what might become relevant to us. There is always room to write beyond the limits of what we think we know, about ourselves and the worlds to which we belong.     

 

References:

Sciurba, K. (2024). Reading and relevance, reimagined: Celebrating the literacy lives of young men of color. Teachers College Press.  

Sciurba, K. (2007). Oye, Cclia!: A song for Celia Cruz. Henry Holt.  

 

Biography:

Katie Sciurba, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of Literacies and Children’s Literature in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. Her publications have appeared in such venues as Journal of Literacy Research, Research in the Teaching of English, Teachers College Record, and Journal of Children’s Literature. Her book, Reading and Relevance, Reimagined: Celebrating the Literacy Lives of Young Men of Color (Teachers College Press, 2024) was the 2025 winner of the National Association for Multicultural Education’s Philip C. Chinn Multicultural Book Award. Connect with her at katiesciurba.com.