The Write Team: Creativity, Confidence and Challenge

 

Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the University of Exeter's CREATEseminar with Emma Metcalfe of Bath Festivals' Write Team on the impact of creative writers working in schools.

In particular we drew attention to the difference the project made to pupils' confidence and to changes in practice in participating schools. 

You can read the outline of our talk below.

The_Write_Team_Creativity_Confidence_and_Challenge_March_12_2012_Blog.ppt Download this file

Click on the following links for more details of the Write Team, including free downloadable resources and anthologies of students' work.

Click here to view a video about the work of Bath Festivals' education projects, including the Write Team.

Click here to download the full research report on the Write Team project.

Recent Research on Poetry in Education

Below is a summary of some recent research on progress in pupils' poetry writing and teachers' metaphors of poetry writing instruction.

Recent_Poetry_Research.ppt Download this file

 

On Saying Goodbye to Primary PGCE Students

Art: Children from Abbas & Templecombe C of E Primary School (Saturn House)

For the last nine years at the end of the first week in July I have been saying goodbye to Primary PGCE trainee teachers as they complete their initial teacher education.

It is a celebratory occasion, yet also poignant. We acknowledge and take delight in the resilience of these bright, energetic and creative people in achieving the status of Newly Qualified Teacher. But we are also sad to see them go. As we have endeavoured to shape them, they have shaped us.

 Many of them come to us having made decisions to change career and set up home in a new part of the country, in strange accommodation. Many come to us not really knowing what to expect other than that they are passionate about passing on their love of learning and teaching because someone passed it on to them first. They all want to be brilliant.

I am in awe of them and their positivity, their iron-clad faith in themselves as agents of change. They persuade me that I have the best job in the world. Watching and talking to them in school and at the university I am further persuaded that everything is going to be all right.

 

Reasons for Life 

after Mark Halliday 

 

Because of the desks.  And the luck.

And because there are too many eighteen year olds

running round with guns because Miss Eve said

‘Not now, Darren, let’s get back to the Pharaohs.’

Because: ‘Not one day went day went by

when reading was easy.’

 

And because Miss Brown ignored

the sunlight, filled with dust motes,

and had you sketching shells

from her Greek holiday instead.

And in spite Miss Janners in Geography and everyone in Physics,

there was Mr Lee in Chemistry and Mrs Crump in Spelling.  Especially

Mrs Crump. 

 

Because once, the classroom emptying,

the blackboard groaning with homework,

someone approached your crouching form

and said how pleased they were

you had attended their lesson

and had you considered reading Lawrence.

 

Because if they don’t get it from you,

who will they get it from?

Because of the desks of forgetting,

the sunlight filled with dust

of wanting to be outside

and the luck of finding someone who found you interesting

enough to believe in.

 

Because your dad was, or mum was

and the sight of a kitchen table piled high with blue books

appeals to you in the way computers and cars

sing to those you grew up with,

who now live in suburbs you avoid

because they are full of roundabouts.

 

Because you burn with it,

basically,

 

which brings you here

to this room, just one more filled with desks and sunlight and dust motes,

and because time means nothing to Isha, and Ashraf

is making plans to look nobody in the eye.

 

 first published in The North.

 

Put 'I' in GCSE to give pupils their own voice -by Amy Winston in the TES

Put 'I' in GCSE to give pupils their own voice

Comment | Published in The TES on 1 July, 2011 | By: Amy Winston

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"Are you writing down any of your ideas?" I ask a critically lazy Year 10 boy. He stares at me. "Well, Miss," he replies, "I've got words but I'm not sure where to put them."

I spend my time at school trying to teach meanings, impact, audience, purpose, structure and grammar. "Take scissors to that sentence!" I yell. "Bulldoze that paragraph!"

Some listen and really try to think about where to put their words, but others truly don't know how to choose their vocabulary to create an effect. Often it is too late by the time they are in key stage 4. The damage has been done after 10 years in a conveyor-belt system that rarely asks them to be independent.

They are frightened of failure and look to you for an answer. This neediness makes them good exam fodder, but can be death to effective writing. Our current GCSEs are stripping away pupils' ability to think independently - the very skill needed to succeed in all aspects of life.

It is almost as if we need a measure of achievement that requires pupils to think independently, where choice is paramount and imagination rewarded. Step forward the AQA IGCSEs in English.

If you work at an independent school, the chances are you have been teaching them since they were introduced a few years ago. But colleagues in state schools may not realise that the course is free from the constraints of national curriculum statutory requirements, while adhering to its general ethos.

Because it does not follow the curriculum to the letter, it allows pupils their own voice. They get to choose their own area of assessment and pursue independent research into it. Assessments aren't taught as a whole class, they are individual, leaving pupils the choice to examine a politician's speech or writer's body of work. The stabilisers are off.

Teachers of the standard English literature GCSE will be very familiar with the opening chapter of Great Expectations; Act I, Scene V of Romeo and Juliet; and Act I, Scene II of Macbeth. Why? Because there is so much to cover we have to reduce these great works to the analysis of extracts. Students are aware of the wider plot and themes, but most may only study a select few scenes or chapters, as required.

In contrast, for the AQA IGCSEs you study three or more whole texts. Yes, whole texts. Cover to cover and everything.

But if I went round state schools proposing that they switch to this qualification, most headteachers would laugh me out of the room. The reason for that lies in the dark core of our education system, the part that devours our schools from the inside. To put it plainly, this IGCSE still does not count in the main league table measure, the one for five A*-Cs including English and maths. So, for most schools, it might as well not exist.

If the Government is intent on sticking with such a simplified way of judging schools' worth, they should at least count these qualifications. Maybe then our pupils would learn not only where to put their words, but how to become the independent self-starters our society so desperately needs.

Amy Winston is an English teacher at a comprehensive in the West Midlands.

via tes.co.uk

Can Poets Teach?: On Writers Teaching Writing -by Joan Houlihan at Poets.org

Like a Jules Verne novel, Dana Gioia’s famous essay "Can Poetry Matter" got the future’s big picture right, but the particulars wrong. In 1991, when the essay was first published, Gioia thought that the newly burgeoning MFA programs were problematic because they prevented the poet from being the necessary outsider and because they encouraged the proliferation of poet-as-careerist in an academic setting, thus stifling the life experience necessary to refresh the art. As it turns out, the bigger problem is that in many programs the writing education itself is without standards of excellence or a basis in craft. How can you effectively evaluate writing without any standards? Furthermore, as the promise of so-called "language" and "post-avant" writing degenerates from a fresh approach into a redundant and prerequisite MFA house style, the evaluation of student work is dispensed with altogether. How can you evaluate what you can’t understand?

In a small informal survey I conducted recently on MFA programs, there was unanimity in the responses about several related problems in the four MFA programs represented: lack of standards in evaluating individual work; a lack of emphasis on basic writing craft; less-than-helpful feedback from peers in a workshop; assigned reading of mainly contemporary American poems; and, to pay the university’s bills, the admission of students lacking poetic sensibility and talent. Most telling, however, were the responses to this three-part question:

What’s the connection between poetic talent and a career teaching poetry? How about between poetic talent and critical/teaching ability? Do you think your program prepared you to teach?

"Looking at the people who are ensconced at various programs around the country, I would say that there is no connection whatsoever between poetic talent and a career teaching poetry. (Sometimes I think that there’s no connection between poetic talent and a career publishing poetry.) I do think that it’s more likely that a poet who is actively writing and who is doing interesting work will be at least a stimulating teacher, but teaching and writing are completely different skills, and to be good at one isn’t at all to be good at the other."
—University of Iowa student

"Although poetic talent can provide certain hands-on insights, I don’t think it’s required for a teacher to be good. The second case is a more interesting one. I would argue that unless a poet possesses some degree of critical faculty, their work would suffer. Not only will they be unable to revise, but to write clearly in the first place."
—Columbia University student

"I don’t think there’s a great connection. I don’t think you can look at a book of poems you love and assume that poet is going to be amazing teacher. From experience, I know that’s not always the case. And I also know that I’ve encountered some work that I’m not a huge fan of, and the authors of the work were some of the best teachers. I think teaching has a lot to do with caring about what your students learn and having the ability to reach them, and that doesn’t really connect, in my mind, with the writing of an amazing poem. One is very insular and the other very public."
—Bennington College student

None of the respondents felt their programs prepared them to teach, at least directly, and one respondent said, in effect, they learned about teaching only by the bad examples.

In his article "Creative Writing and Its Discontents," published in 2000, David Fenza, Executive Director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) observed, rightly, that "No credential makes one a successful artist; the proof is in the work."¹ He did not however, extend the logic to the teacher of an art, where the "work" is, in fact, successful teaching of one’s craft to others. He maintained that the creative writing MFA program is like MFA programs in the other arts—painting, sculpture, dance and music—and, since they are not blamed for inferior products or students, neither should MFA writing programs be blamed for bad writing. This is a faulty comparison for one reason: there is recognizable craft that is taught and evaluated in the other arts. However, in a poetry MFA program, writing craft is not taught either because it is not known or because literary theory and language writing have destroyed its relevance. The traditional standards for measuring a poem may have disappeared (does it rhyme? have meter? stanzas? and so forth), but the standards by which we measure any piece of writing have not. And while Ezra Pound’s dictum, "Poetry should be at least as well-written as prose," is an ironic affirmation that we expect more of a poem than we do of prose, it is also wise and true. In order for a poem to be better than prose it has to first be as good—and this requires craft.

It is one of the new millennium’s ironies that we have a simultaneous upsurge of MFA poetry programs, and therefore of poets, coupled with an even greater distance from the "intelligent, engaged non-specialist" reader that Gioia predicted losing in his essay. How can the numbers of poets, poems, and poetry publications, increase and, during the same time period, the influence of poetry (not counting "slam" or "performance") on the culture at large dramatically decrease?² Because, I believe, while the poets have multiplied, their writing skill has declined. The combination of ignorance of basic writing craft and the proliferation of Language writing and theory in MFA programs has been deadly for poetry. It means that teachers can not evaluate poems; therefore, students cannot improve their work. These students then go on to teach in MFA poetry programs themselves. While some would (and do) argue that there’s always been bad poetry, that it was just bad in a different way, I would argue that at least there was an attempt to achieve a level of known craft, and a way to evaluate that achievement (or lack of it). Now there is neither.

It is a well-known phenomenon that the creator of a work is not an objective evaluator of it. Every capable writer and poet knows that they need critical feedback on their work in order to improve it—even T. S.Eliot had Pound. But instead of such feedback, students report a lack of criticism, of having a "group hug" type of atmosphere or an overly subjective, mystical or impressionistic response to a poem. As one student surveyed observed: "Our writing was not so much evaluated as commented upon, and teachers tended to reveal their criteria only in scattered, isolated terms, when reviewing single poems. Always there seemed to be a great deal of concern over not hurting our feelings, so it was rare for even the worst poem in class to not receive a few empty compliments."

I believe that Gioia had it right in 1991, and that it is even truer now: "By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art." Without an education in craft, without a teacher’s attention to standards and an ability to use language purposefully, without "the hard work of evaluation," the loss to poetry is twofold: to the art and to the criticism of the art that would enable it to evolve.

In a time when there are no critical standards, only proliferation of more poems, each new poem can only matter less. Over a decade after his spookily predictive essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" Dana Gioia’s question has a troubling answer: it can, but more and more, it doesn’t.

¹"Creative Writing & Its Discontents," The Writer’s Chronicle, D.W. Fenza, March/April 2000.

² The NEA released a study that showed readership of poetry has gone down in the past three decades: 14.3% in 2002, down from 20.5% in 1992. During that same time period, an AWP study shows that the number of graduate writing programs in America increased almost 25%.

via poets.org