Wednesday 22 February 2012

Creativity, Confidence and Challenge: The Write Team Research Report

 

‘I’ve learnt to be more confident with my ideas, because sometimes you have an idea that you just sort of hide away, because you think no one will like it, but this has taught me that even if no one likes it, you won’t know till you’ve asked.’ 

Write Team pupil


Write Team Project Manager Emma Metcalfe Writes:

 

The Write Team was a creative writing project designed to develop pupil confidence and engagement in their learning. The project, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation brought together an arts organisation, local authority and schools to share experience and skills, in the support of those pupils who ‘play truant in the mind’.

(Collins. J (1998) Playing Truant in the Mind: the social exclusion of quiet pupils. BERA).The project aimed to engage pupils ‘who keep a low profile; invisible pupils who are quiet and undemanding’ (‘Keeping Up’, DfES, 2007). The project provided a weekly programme of creative writing workshops led by the Project Coordinator and developed by writers to engage pupils, develop their confidence, and readiness to write. The Write Team lead teachers attended these weekly workshops, and used reflective diaries to record both their own creative writing and thoughts on writing and impact of the teaching of writing. 

Eleven schools took part, eager to use the project to address the ‘guilt that the majority of teachers have about those pupils whose name they still do not know in the fourth week of term’ (Write Team lead teacher) and five of these schools took part in the project for more than one year.  In a local authority with high achieving schools, this project focused on a key area for the Local Authority School Improvement Team, namely how to support pupils who were not achieving their potential.

The programme of weekly workshops were developed into schemes of work by professional writers: poets, novelists, sports writers and dramatists. The aim of the scheme of work was to provide creative activities for the pupils to enjoy and activities that the teachers could incorporate into their teaching practice and share with colleagues. A writer also visited each school every term to work with the Write Team pupils and lead teachers who, by the time the writers arrived, were already accustomed to creative writing.

 

 

‘I have been more confident with my work. (Now) I say my ideas even if they might not be right’.

Write Team pupil

 

Key Findings

  • In Year 1 - 86% of pupils made a link between a change in their perception

of themselves (e.g. ‘improving’, ‘getting better’, ‘more enjoyment’, ‘better at

learning’, using ‘before and after’ statements) and participation in Write

Team activities .

  • In Year 2 - 70% of comments made by pupils made a link between a change

in their perception of themselves (e.g. ‘improving’, ‘getting better’, ‘more

enjoyment’, ‘better at learning’, using ‘before and after’ statements) and

participation in Write Team activities.

  • In Year 2 - 87% of comments by teachers about their pupils made a

link between increase in confidence and engagement with learning to

participation in Write Team activities.

 

You can download the Write Team research report on the Write Team link at at the top of this page, or by visiting the Write Team website here.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

What I have learned about cancer

Shot_1328092876515

 

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of my diagnosis with non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (NHL), an aggressive cancer of the lymphatic system. I was told I was in remission from this disease in October 2006.

Here is what I have learned about cancer since my diagnosis.

1. As a culture we still prefer to use war metaphor when we talk about cancer. Witness all the tributes to the plucky 'battles' of celebrities and 'fighting' the disease, nearly always in the past tense, as though we are World War II Sptifire pilots dashing off to our planes to give Jerry hell.

2. My attitude to cancer is still partly superstitious. When I was dignosed with NHL I assumed, irrationally, that I had used up all of the bad luck of my friends and family. I was wrong. Since I entered remission three good friends and one family member have been diagnosed with cancer, one of whom has died. If your life has not yet been touched by cancer the chances are it will be. There is no way you can prepare for this.

3. Eventually your friends, family and colleagues will stop using the word 'cancer' around you. Eventually you will follow them. I promised myself this would never happen but now surprise myself by referring to my cancer as 'when I was poorly' or 'when I was ill'. When you meet friends you have not seen in a long time they ask how you are with fierce concern in their eyes. But they do not use the word 'cancer'.

4. I am not angry that I had cancer, though I understandand that many people do not share this attitude. The closest to anger I get is when I reflect that my being ill forced my children to grow up more quickly than they would perhaps have done otherwise. There is no way of knowing if this statement is true. So much of what we say about cancer is not empirical, though we pretend it is.

5. You find out who you friends are when you are diagnosed with cancer. These are the people who show up, offer lifts and leave tins of brownies on your doorstep. The people who write, the people who make CDs. And those who, six years later, still say 'How are you?' or 'Tell me how you are.'

6. Once cancer touches your life you are never done with it. From the overheard plotlines of soap opera characters to the death and relapse of close friends, cancer is never far away.

5. Even if you have surivived cancer you do not think about it all of the time. You compartmentalise; and, as Buddhists say, you  practise acceptance.

7. When you are told you are in remission from cancer you do not feel like celebrating. Not one of my friends or aquaintances has held a party on being given this news. Personally speaking I am no nearer to cracking open the champagne even six years after my original diagnosis. My gratitude at still being alive is deeply felt, closely matched by my relief. Neither of these emotions approximates to a celebration.

 

Sunday 5 February 2012

On waiting to be diagnosed with cancer

Shot_1328098452952

Six years ago I began writing the journal which has become my forthcoming memoir of my experience of cancer. It is called Love for Now and will be published by Impress Books in September.

By this time in February, 2006 I had been in hospital three times, had had two ultrasound scans on different parts of my body, plus a CT scan. As I left the Radiography department after the latter I was informed that it would take two weeks to learn of the results. Twenty four hours later the phone rang. It was my GP, inviting me to see him that morning.

A day afterwards I underwent a biopsy under X-ray conditions. The pain I had woken up with on New Year's Day was on my side but the so-called 'abonormality' in my body could only be reached through my back. I was told it would take two weeks to find out my results, but that if I wanted to I could ring them on Friday afternoon in case they got them done before the weekend.

'At what point did you know?' my friends asked me, when I told them the news of my formal diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The truth is I knew when I went to see my GP. That was the first time the possibility of Lymphoma was discussed. But it was not his use of the word (I only knew it meant 'bad') which frightened me, it was his eyes, a tiny flicker, not of doubt, but recognition.

Looking back at it now I think I knew even earlier in the process. It was another man's eyes, the radiographer who conducted my first ultrasound scan, which alerted me to the seriousness of my situation.

Long before he used the word 'abnormality' I saw them darting backwards and forwards with a kind of rapt wonderment in front of the screen (which I could not see) as his hand pushed the sensor around, not on my side, where I hurt, but on the lower right of my tummy, which felt fine.

Signed off temporarily from work so I could undergo these tests, I absolutely knew I would not be returning for a long time. Friends and colleagues, none of them doctors, reassured me with the mantra that it was 'probably nothing' and that the mass inside me was most likely a polyp, filled with liquid. 

The friends I looked forward speaking to the most were those who gave me advice in the forms of specific questions to ask or actions I could take, the best of which was to invest in a box-set of the American sitcom of my choice ASAP.

 

Tumour

 

You gave me time to notice –

apple blossom, hand movements,

the light taking leave of rooms.

I would like to claim

new attention to my children

but the truth is they grew up

whether I watched them or not.

Mostly I slept.

You began in midsummer.

It took till February to find you.

By then all I knew were symptoms:

insomnia, night sweats, a cough I could not shake off.

Because of you I revisited old Lps –

I did not want to die

not having fried onions to Grover,

made bubbles to This Mortal Coil.

The script writers of Frasier

helped me recover from you,

plus condensed milk and broccoli –

though not at the same time.

Eventually I drank coffee again.

You reacquainted me with my guilt –

the way I glared at S

after she’d poured out her heart

in the autumn of endless nights

with nothing but the wind for company.

I chose songs, having you,

and invented ceremonies by rivers.

(But I found no poetry in you.)

 

You saved me from talking about house prices.

You obliterated my craving for alcohol.

I would say I am grateful

but am not ready for that, just yet.

 

 

from Riddance (Worple Press, 2012)