Emergent Writing
In the olden days of pre National Curriculum, the school where I worked had two vital parts to the week. On one afternoon, the entire school would do “Writing Workshop”. For those unversed in such practice, this meant that everyone in the school was doing “free writing” simultaneously.
There were no rules to the writing. The children could write about anything that they wanted. Sometimes, we had group writing, where we might choose to write a story together. On such occasions, we had a wonderful collective think, where we composed a paragraph or two as a starting point for the children to then take the story wherever they wanted. Sometimes the collective brains working together was a good way in, especially for those children who found creative thinking a little difficult in the first instance.
The other wonderfully vital part of the week was DEAR – Drop Everything And Read. On a Thursday afternoon, for 30 minutes, you could walk around the school and hear a pin drop. Everyone, including the head teacher and the admin team would stop whatever they were doing, pick up a book or a newspaper and read, undisturbed, untested.
It was wonderful. Those children got used to the idea that reading was an individual delight and the teachers and other adults in the school became role models in reading for pleasure. Everyone cooperated with this. There was no penalisation. Everybody took part. It was never used as an excuse for catch up time or a quick 30 minutes for marking.
Everybody read.
And what peace there was. Nobody dashed madly out of school on a Thursday afternoon. Equilibrium broke forth merely down to the fact that everyone had been sitting quietly and had been transported into whatever world they were reading on the pages in front of them.
In many ways it was a sort of collective meditation; sharing and yet being totally within your own space and your own thoughts.
Many people now are advocating meditation in primary schools. The David Lynch Foundation is suggesting that this can be a wonderful way of relaxing young people, making them see sense in their learning and calming them so that they can appreciate the world around them.
Maybe back in those dim and distant times, we were beginning to see this through DEAR. We just didn’t go the extra step. We didn’t have the collective knowledge about meditation, at least not in our school.
Michael Morpurgo gave the Dimbleby Lecture this week, and in his final comments he too made reference to the need for shared reading at the end of the school day, just like the old days. Not only did we have DEAR but every half hour at the end of the day was spent doing some form of reading or another. It was a wonderful relaxing end to the day, and even the older children in the school would happily gather together on the mat to listen to a story being read to them.
Funnily enough, I can still remember my primary school teacher reading to us at the end of the day. Those books that he read are still very much at the forefront of my memory.
Precisely when and where did this practice disappear? I am pretty certain I know the answer to that one.
When SATs first came out, I was forced to disappear downstairs and become a KS1 teacher. It was completely out of my comfort zone but the head teacher felt as though it would be good experience for me, and he needed a trusted and capable teacher (so he said) to cope with the influx of testing.
In my second year, we had to test the children in English, Maths, Science, DT, History and Geography. I can still see the papers now because they were horribly etched in my mind. In history, the children had to compare and contrast a set of old irons! At the age of seven! Looking back now, it was complete madness, as indeed it was then. What on earth did those children get from this activity rather than being able to take them down to the British Museum to reflect on the colour, design and pure genius of artefacts from hundreds of years ago that were made with the most primitive of tools?
In DT, they had to design a card with all the annoying flappy bits that had not taken into consideration the fine motor skills of a child of that age. In geography, they had to design their own island. That was actually quite good fun but the fact that it was enforced upon us made it unnecessarily laborious.
However, it was the reading and the literacy that particularly saddened me, and according to the press at the time, infuriated some of our very best contemporary writers.
There we were in our Year Two classes the length and breadth of the country, inwardly digesting, separating, studying text and losing all sight of the purpose and pleasure of the books in doing so.
It was, and is sadly nearly twenty years on, sacrilegious. These incredibly gifted authors had composed brilliant books that were stories with meanings or stories for fun that someone in the Department of Education had deemed fit enough to rape into a study.
Michael Rosen, he of the wonderful “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” and “We’re going on a Bear Hunt” was incandescent with fury that his books were used in this way and levelled according to the text. He hadn’t written his books for such appalling purpose. He wanted children to enjoy reading.
Of course, his books were particularly useful to the bods in Westminster because they had fantastic repetitive text which would enhance a child’s learning and reiterate the flow and subtext of the book.
It shames me to think that as a profession we allowed this bastardisation of the purpose of reading. We should have collectively had a reading revolution there and then. As I said, twenty years later, books are still being used in this abhorrent way which is precisely what Michael Morpurgo was saying during the Dimbleby Lecture.
Although somewhat late in life, maybe that revolution ought to take place right now, led by those who understand what progressive education is really about, supported by those who could refuse to let their books be conditioned in this sort of pseudo education.
Reading and writing go hand in hand. And yet, we have crippled children in the art of free writing.
I remember sitting with some of my children who were struggling with the idea of not having a format to follow. We talked, we spent time together discussing the things that interested them that might inspire them to put pen to paper. We started with simple sentences or made rhyming couplets of nonsense. We even wrote about not being able to write so that I could prove to them that they had indeed contradicted themselves and written a perfectly good composition.
Nowadays, I fear that if I returned to the classroom and asked the children to write about anything that they wanted they may well sit there dumbfounded. The bright little sparks with plenty of imagination might have a go. The learned might start constructing their perfect sentences with appropriate connectives and well-structured sentences that have lost any sense of individuality. But I reckon that the majority are so indoctrinated into the process of writing that has been stagnantly taught to them, that they might not be able to break free of the shackles of the system to be able to even think about what to write for themselves.
Which is why it was so good to see on the news this week about a school in Lancashire who had embraced this magnificent form of writing that is the blog.
Just brilliant. Back to the good old days of emergent writing. The funny thing is that the Deputy Head who has introduced this in his school is under the impression that he is being innovative. How sad is that?
Of course, to some extent he is. He is embracing the technology of the age to do something new, breaking free from a quarter of a century of indoctrination. If he had come to my school, he would have seen for himself that this was happening without the aid of computers a long time ago.
Do have a look at some of the writing from the children. It is wonderful. And what is also wonderful is that like all good bloggers, there are occasional typos or spelling mistakes. I am SO glad that there is evidence there that the teacher has not been round with an electronic red pen before the child was allowed to post the piece of writing.
These children have had their individual voices returned to them. They have been enabled to express something about themselves in their writing without the need for prescription. This is absolutely what progressive education is about. Not only that, to appease the standards crew, their sodding SATs results in Level Five have increased from something like 7% to 60%.
And they are surprised? Surely when you enable young people to branch out with their interests, working at their own speed, thinking for themselves you are going to get this sort of progression.
If I was teaching now, I would get my class blogging regularly. I would have been doing it years ago as I know that blogging has developed my writing skills that had been lying dormant for too long.
Not only that, but I am confident that through this emergent writing back in the early nineties, I knew my children far better. I learned about them, had time to talk to them, encouraged them and praised them for them being them, not for them adhering to a set of standards that I could tick off in a specially designed book. My children wrote at their own pace, they had individual tutoring that suited them. It was gloriously deregulated.
And that isn’t to say it was a free for all. Each child was challenged to progress. Every child had individual ‘targets’ that never felt as though they were imposed because they were carefully agreed with every child, each one being unique.
And it isn’t to say that it was easy. In many ways the old Writing Workshops were extremely hard to manage as a teacher but the benefits were so great that a little extra effort of teaching on an individual basis was worth it.
I caught a quote from Samuel Johnson on “Start The Week” on Radio Four. He said that, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”.
Well, I hate to disagree with someone who was allegedly such a great linguist but he is wrong. I suspect that Mr Johnson might well have supported synthetic phonics had he been around nowadays.
Of course people should write for any purpose with any incentive. The very last reason I write is for money. The very last reason these children in Bolton write is for money. So perhaps the new phrase should be “No man but a Bloghead ever wrote, except for money”.
There is probably no money in blogging but there is a wealth of individuality that mere coffers could not possibly pay for. Writing is an art. It is a freedom that a dictionary compiler may not really understand. Writing liberates. Reading transports. These are essentials of life, and through reading and writing we become individuals not a conglomerate of standardised skills.
This is what the teaching profession should be fighting for because within the writing and within the reading you find the child, the person, the individual and you enable them to walk a purposeful pathway.
No comments:
Post a Comment