Why doesn't the Dept of Education ask poets who do poetry writing workshops, to tell them how we get children to write poems?

 So here's a mystery: for as long as I've been writing poems for children, I've been doing poetry writing workshops for primary and secondary school students. So that's since about 1971, when I did it first on BBC School Radio Programmes, and then from 1974 onwards, in schools, and at festivals.

While I've been doing it, 100s of other poets have been doing it too. There is a huge body of experience there. Some of us have written books based on our experience. Some of us have worked alongside teacher training institutions who've produced booklets based on our work, sometimes publishing the work that the children have done, when we've done our visits. 

That is a huge body of work and experience. It's not all the same - far from it. For example, (using me as the example) for a few years I worked alongside teams of other poets at the Barbican in London, while 100s of children came in from local schools. There, we could see how we all worked in huge variety of ways, to help and encourage children to write. On one occasion the Barbican produced a beautiful book based on the work and there was a proper formal evaluation done of what we were doing. On another occasion, I worked at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education for a year with primary teachers who met every few weeks, having tried out ideas with their classes. They came to the meetings,  shared their ideas, and developed as the year went on. We produced a book that came from that year. Last year, we repeated the process, we worked with a group of teachers across the year. They're busy writing up their work and of course the children's work, right now.

And one more example: for nearly 10 years I've been working with schools in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire on local history, Holocaust Memorial Day, and awareness of refugees. I've done research, written poems (as in 'On the Move', (and just last week a book came out based on some more research 'One Day'). In that time, Professor Helen Weinstein things that we've worked with something like 20,000 school students. On her website, History Works TV, there are many examples of what we've been doing.

I've also supervised MA students at Goldsmiths University of London, doing poetry workshops in schools as part of their MA studies, whether that's with their own poems or with others. Their work has appeared in our book, 'Children's Literature in Action'. 

I know that if I'm doing this, so are hundreds of other poets. I don't want to steal their thunder so I can't write up what they've been doing. 

Now for the mystery: why has the Department for Education never thought to pick our brains, bring us together for conferences, to talk about what we do, show what we do, demonstrate what we do? 

Why are we are we marginal to the 'conversation' about writing in schools? We know that most of us are not classroom teachers - though some of us are and others have been - but we've been working alongside teachers. We are, if you like, analogous to peripatetic musicians and artists who come into schools to teach children singing, playing musical instruments or who do projects like making a mural.

What is it about poetry that is somehow so precious (?), or so much part of that hyper hyper hyper regulated section of the curriculum - writing English, that we who have this huge range of experience and knowledge are left outside of the discourse.

Please note, this isn't about picking monitors or experts, or hand-picked 'trusties'. This is about spreading the net much, much wider than that, grabbing the expertise of the huge diversity of voices and methods that we have. No one person, no one small group has the complete answer, for the simple reason that poetry is and has to be diverse! 

Think of the vast amounts of money that have been spent by the government on telling teachers how to teach writing. Right from the National Literacy Project (a largely anonymous, mysterious bit of top-down diktat, on how to make children write), through to the SATs and the ludicrous 'expected levels' of writing which are based on arbitrary and bogus notions of 'grammar', and are largely about enforcing and reinforcing ideas about why Standard Written English is the best and only proper way to express oneself, (even though that Standard is evolving under their noses, accepting non-Standard aspects more and more, every day!) 

So though 'poetry' or 'children writing poetry', seems like an utterly non-political area, what has happened is that by excluding this vast body of experience from the discourse, is clearly political. There is obviously suspicion, wariness, guardedness in relation to us. Why? What's the problem?

And what happens in our place? As I've written in the previous blog, I have recently been doing a poetry session with some student teachers (students doing primary school teacher-training). I did this as part of their PGCE at Goldsmiths University of London, where I'm a Professor of Children's Literature. 

I asked the students to say what kind of poetry lessons they had observed as part of their training. Quite a few of them reported that the schools where they had been based used worksheets and 'schemes' which seemed to them very formulaic, very limited, very much about 'filling in the blanks'. This was explained to the students is because children need 'scaffolds' and can't think of their own ways of writing and don't have enough language or 'vocabulary' to write their own.

I can't speak for my fellow-poets, but speaking from own experience, I can say that that this isn't true. Firstly, in the case of the quick one-off workshop, yes, I sometimes give triggers that involve working with some kind of 'shape' or 'pattern' for a poem eg a call and response form or a verse and chorus form. But primary teachers have a class for at least one year. If we think poetry is part of development - with language and with, social, personal, emotional and cognitive development that what my year long workshops have shown is that it's important to work much more deeply than that. This involves exploring a wide range of poems, a wide range of ways of working, a wide range of producing poems whether that be on screen, on paper, on posters, in powerpoints, in performance, with art, with dance, with drama, with music and so on. 

Some of us have done these longterm workshops across several weeks, a whole term or, if we're lucky, for a whole year. We can help with thinking this through. 

Interesting? 

Poetry teaching in primary schools. What's going on?

In a session with teacher trainee students on Friday, I asked them to talk about the poetry sessions they had observed in schools. Many of them reported schools buying 'courses' or 'activity sheets' which involve highly controlled, restricted exercises - filling in gaps etc.
The basis of these starts from 'cultural deficit theory' which assumes that children can't write poems unless you give them poems with gaps in. That's to say, they haven't 'got language' to write poems in. The second assumption is that you can't write poems unless you have 'knowledge' of poems which has an element of truth in it, but this has to be immediately qualified by what it is these courses and activity sheets are dishing up as the 'knowledge'...and how that 'knowledge' is transmitted.

The trainee students sounded quite unhappy by how restricted and controlled it all was.

I'm concerned by that, but also with the idea that educators should assume that the children don't have language and/or culture and that there should be any restriction on what poetry is, in terms of resources, books, collections and so on.

There are other ways of helping children write poems on the basis of eg the languages children bring to the class, the shapes and structures and themes and voices of a wide variety of poems, which we can introduce to children through regular classroom 'slams' or 'shows' put together in a matter of minutes. 

We can use freeze frame, hot seating as a way of encouraging children to improvise or write monologues from within characters they already know from the stories/books that teachers are reading with the children. There are many traditional forms like 'call and response' and techniques of repetition and choruses/refrains that can give shape to children's improvised lines 'in between'.

We can ask children to write in the way that adult writers write poems ie wondering if they could write a poem 'like that' ie like the poem they've just read. If we're open and flexible about this, 'like that' can refer to 'like the shape', 'like the pattern', 'like the theme', 'like the tone', 'like the pictures in the poem' or 'like' any other aspect that a child notices about the poem. In fact we can do 'noticing' sessions where we ask children to talk about anything they've 'noticed' about a poem and would they like to have a go. And when we ask that we don't all have to write the same kind of poem! The children can be encouraged to go off where they want or how they want based on what they've 'noticed'.

This takes us into the question of what poetry is for? Is it for exercises? Is it for 'filling in gaps'? Or is there some other purpose? 

Broadly speaking, let's remind ourselves poetry is to amuse, entertain, enlighten, intrigue and engage us.

It can do this in many different ways, using selective ways of using language through eg repetition of phrases, sounds, meanings, images (pictures): these include rhyme and rhythms which are of course forms of repetition; through patterns - and there are hundreds of these in terms of verses, rhyme schemes, changes in rhythms; another way is to create 'figurative' language where one 'thing' is like another 'thing' as with metaphor, simile and personification; another way is through 'movement' in which the sense of a poem changes - ie something 'develops' as with poetry about place, person, or feeling and a picture of the place, person and feeling 'grows'; another way is through a 'turn' (or more than one turn) when one part of the poem develops and then something is introduced that counters it with the sensation of 'but'....and many more.

The easiest way for children to discover and use these many different ways is through my 'secret strings' game, which I've described on this blog several times, and in my book: 'What is Poetry?'.  

I gather that one of the reasons justifying the use of these 'courses' and 'activity sheets' is that it takes the children through the 'expected levels' which I've written about many times before on account of the fact that they are based on bogus ideas of what grammar is, and that applying these bogus ideas to writing has next to nothing to do with children finding out what good writing is - that's to say, writing that can move us, entertain us, intrigue us and perhaps ultimately teach us things about ourselves or the world we live in. 

The Jewish Socialist Group have a Chanukah Party 'two days early'?

The Jewish Socialist Group (JSG) held a Chanukah party on Sunday Dec 23. People who don't like the JSG have objected to this, mainly on the grounds that it was allegedly several days early. In other words, the claim goes, Chanukah this year begins on Dec 25 but this party was before Dec 25. Quite learned people including a KC have voiced this objection on X (formerly Twitter).

What's strange about the objection is that Jews have held Chanukah parties 'early' or even 'late' for a long time. My parents couldn't find a way to square their political beliefs with what they saw as religious ceremonies, celebrations, Holy Days etc. though there were remnants at Chanukah in that my father insisted on cooking latkes. (I had to grate the potatoes, he said, a principle based, I think, on a reading of Marx which said that children could and should shell peas. He never showed us this bit of Marx but he often quoted it when saying that my brother and I had to wash the dishes.)

Anyway, back with the allegation that the JSG held a Chanukah party 'early'. It took me about ten seconds of googling to find very religious Jews holding Chanukah parties early - particularly in the States. This should come as no surprise. It doesn't matter what orthodoxies and conformities that people invent, there are always others who ignore them or invent others. One tiny example: the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Christian tradition often/usually takes place on Christmas Eve. When I was at school (and because we broke up before Christmas Eve) the school did that Festival 'early'.

So why would these learned (and not-so-learned) people object to the JSG holding a Chanukah party 'early'? There's a principle here: 'any stick to beat a dog'. Once you've decided who is the dog, then any stick will do, even if it doesn't make sense, it's illogical, and the 'wrong' you've identified is committed by your side at the same time.

Meanwhile. the idea of demanding conformity in the 21st century is just a little bit on the sad side. As religions divide and change, as people invent new groups within religions or across religions, there are people standing in the middle demanding conformity to something. As people will know, the history of religions is dense with these pleas for this or that conformity at the very moment big divisions take place. The seventeenth century is one huge example for Christianity.

Further, I've seen in London alone that there are groups of Jews who have set up their own forms of meeting and celebrating the festivals and interpreting Judaism. There is no Jewish Pope to say they can't. Same goes for Christian groups I've heard about even though (of course) there is a Pope and the other established groups (Protestants, Evanglicals etc) have their religious leaders.

The JSG incidentally doesn't spring up out of nothing - not that that would be a bad thing in itself! It owes its roots and inspiration in part (perhaps mostly, as they can tell us better than I can) from the 'Jewish Labour Bund' commonly called the 'Bund'. There are brief summaries of them on wiki and many books. My mother's father, my father's father and my father's maternal grandfather were all involved with the Bund and its sister organisation the Workers' Circle or Workman's Circle or Arbeter Ring, though my parents' Communism (members of the Communist Party (1936-1957)) blotted out these traditions in our family (I mean the family of my parents, my brother and me). In fact, I think that my father's parents split over that kind of disagreement, and it's how my father ended up in England and his father stayed in the US...(!)

The histories of Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists hardly gets a hearing these days. There are several reasons for that, the main ones being the Holocaust, that wiped out many European Bundists and Jewish socialists. And the other is that the axis of Jewish identity and politics shifted once Israel was founded.

As I've recorded elsewhere but I'll tell it again. When I went to secondary school, I met non-Communist Jewish kids for the first time (!). (Our family circle and friends was full of Jewish Communists!) One of these non-Communist Jewish secondary school folks, was my friend Dave who told me that the good news that he had been on a kibbutz in Israel and that's how socialism was going to happen. I came home and told my father, who said, 'Who can be a member of these kibbutzim?' I went back and asked Dave. He explained to me that kibbutzim were Jewish (this is in about 1959/1960 when this conversation was taking place). I told my dad the news. The kibbutzim are for Jews. My father said, 'Socialism for one people? How does that work? Isn't socialism supposed to be for everyone?' (Apologies if you've heard/read me telling that story before.)

Anyway, in that little conversation (particularly the one (and others) that I had with Dave, are also reasons for how the conversation about Jewish socialism or socialism and Jews changed once Israel was founded.

Have a great holiday, Christmas, Chanukah, or any other festivity you fancy. 'Gut yontef (or yontov)' It means in Yiddish, literally, 'good holiday' and, as it happens, it was one of the bits of Yiddish that my father retained in spite of him not knowing what to do with the traditions. Enjoy!

Words versus Deeds - at times of great crisis, which is the more important?

Strange as it may seem, for someone like me to say it, but there are times when I think that words have very little or no importance. Start with Blair and Corbyn. Let's say, I think that Blair is great and Corbyn is terrible. Now let's put them each through the mincer which I'll call 'Words or deeds?' In terms of actions, Blair did a lot, Corbyn did very little (he was never in power). So for me to say, Blair is great and Corbyn is terrible, I'm in effect saying that what Blair did is great, what Corbyn said is terrible. In other words, I am in effect comparing the Iraq War with the fact that Corbyn opposed the Iraq War (one example of the Words or Deeds ledger).

Even as this supposedly enthusiastic Blair supporter (in this scenario), can I say that the two are really comparable? In terms of effect or consequences, one involves the deaths of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people. The other involves speeches and articles.

Now let's widen this. In the world at the moment, governments are carrying out mass murders. Sitting here in the comfort of my house, nothing I say comes anywhere near the importance of those deaths. And if we widen that out to the mass of verbiage (of which I'm part), streaming out of our TVs, on the pages of newspapers, on the radio airwaves...from politicians, journalists, commentators, social media posters (in our millions)...surely again, none of it matters like the deaths of those civilians.

And, I suggest, our governments know this. They operate with a clear view that what they do is more important than what they or we, or anyone says. And the situation in Gaza is one example of this. The doing has happened, is happening, goes on.

In viewing the world and the fate of the human race, the doing is a million times more important than the saying.

A separate, ring-fenced, open-ended 'interpretation' time for schools?

I wish there could be a space for pupils of all ages called 'interpretation' in which it was accepted that there will be a variety of ways of responding to a book or text and it's not a matter of being right or wrong. All interpretation questions would be open-ended.

Comprehension would 'do' 'What is Humpty Dumpty sitting on?' ('Retrieval').
Interpretation would do 'Why did Humpty Dumpty fall?'

Comprehension could go on in comprehension sessions but there could be a separate, ring-fenced time for this 'Interpretation' time. Open-ended questions only. Interpretation to include comments (written or spoken), drawing, videos, photos, dance, creative writing or any kind, any form.

Thoughts on 'The History Boys'

I watched 'The History Boys' for the first time last night. I asked myself, why is this the first time? It's because when it came out, first as a play and then as the film, all the write-ups made it sound so close to my own schooling that I think I was almost afraid to go and see it. And I was right! There were so many overlaps and coincidences that I was wincing - all exacerbated when I realised (nearly 10 years later than anyone who went to my school!) that many of the scenes were shot at my old school. This made it feel even more as if I was in the scenes. I realise that this is absurdly egotistical, but then I thought again: maybe it's much better to think of it as a play/film that captured something (but what?) of that tiny, tiny layer in society that I belonged/belong to. (For my last two years at school, I went to Watford Boys Grammar and then I went to Oxford University (via doing a year at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. ).

This then led me to wonder about why or how this tiny fraction got to be amplified and sanctified by this play and film. And from there I got to thinking about how (or why not) the film dealt with the matter of class. In one sense, the whole film is about class though a lot of it seems to be about how England creates an 'intellectual' along with a particular view about sex (in that environment).

I've always been of the view that society creates education rather than education creates society, though as Marx puts it (or something like it) 'Even the educator is educated'. In other words though society creates education, there is a way in which the education that society creates, does its bit of creating of society in return. Within the scope of this play/film it was hard to see how the big motor of society creating education (this specific form of education) ever appeared. The one moment when it could have done, perhaps, was at the end when we hear (in a flash-forward form) what happened to the boys in later life. In fact most of them are shown to have ended up in middle class jobs - not even what we might call upper-middle class jobs.

So here's the class bit. These old grammar schools and foundation schools do succeed in getting students into Oxbridge in what used to be a largely private ('Public') school enclave. Why? What function does it all serve? Why does this society like this, and encourage it? Presumably because there is some kind of consensus that this is a good way to create a 'cadre' of 'top' scientists, administrators, lawyers, judges, and CEOs. ``But more than that, this 'cadre' has learned how to reproduce itself (see Pierre Bourdieu). In other words, the 'cadre' (in this case 'grammar school boys') keeps the institutions and the channels open. Sons follow in fathers' footsteps.

So then we come to the matter of what appears to be the substance of the film (I'm not sure it is, and if it is, I'm not sure it actually dealt with it!) 'what is history?' and 'how do we teach it?'. Imagine for a moment if the action of the film was taking place during a major war, then 'history' would have been coming in through the windows. The issue of recruitment and training an officer class for that war, would have been central to everything. The boys would have been divided between jingoists, accepters and rejecters. 'History' wouldn't have been something abstract or even cynically reduced by the Rudge character to 'one thing after another' (or some such).

Perhaps I missed it, but we didn't get a sense of the boys reflecting on how they were being 'made' for a particular niche or place in society. As it happens, my year and the year above me at Watford did reflect on those things, did try to work out how the actual nature of the knowledge and the teaching methods and exam systems they were giving us, was a preparation for roles in society they thought we should or would take up. We even figured out that things like the Prefect system were part of how they were trying to train us for this cadre and some of us (well me) refused to become a Prefect.

The sexuality issue was interesting in that though the story is set in 1980s, it was certainly a live issue in the early 60s when I was in the sixth form. It was an issue in different ways, in that we were openly homophobic. In fact, there was a way in which we policed ourselves to be homophobic. Meanwhile, there was one teacher who was understood to be what we would now call a 'molester'. So there's a contradiction there: we were intolerant of homosexuality but the authorities were tolerant of someone molesting students.

Finally, the Jewish boy. I'm afraid I may have dozed off at one point where the plotline that involved him came into play but this too was very near to home. As far as I ever understood at the time, I was the only Jewish boy in the Watford Sixth Form at that particular time (1962-64). It's possible there were one or two others who had learned how to keep out of sight so they could avoid having it being used as part of low-level jibing and mocking. So I arrived into a school, that didn't seem to 'know' Jewish students. I came with my own version of Jewishness (historically aware, coming out of the radical, Communist, and 'Bundist' (Jewish Socialist) traditions) a nuance that the jibers and mockers didn't 'see'. Within weeks of my being at the school, I was on the receiving end of jokes that I had never heard before. Two of my year group would throw money on the floor and say, 'O you better not do that, he'll pick it up and you won't get it back.' (there were variations on this.) At that moment, I didn't even really know the trope (in face to face terms in London 1962) that Jews and cash in your pocket was a thing. I didn't know that there were jokes that someone who wasn't Jewish could say against someone who was Jewish, along those lines.

As it happens, because I didn't rise to the bait (mostly because I didn't 'get' it), this stuff dissipated after a few weeks, and never came back. It was more of an opening salvo in the male jostling for the upper-hand than a consistent piece of insulting or persecution. Far from it. And, confession: I was as much part of that male jostling if not more so, as anyone else. I'm not some innocent party in this. The play/film captured some of that quite well. If anything though it could be more brutal than it showed and someone who is one moment on the receiving end, can easily be the person dishing it out later. There's some kind of mutual corruption goes on there. This too is part of 'education' of course.

Well, if a play/film gets you thinking, The History Boys certainly did that. As you can see, it got under my skin in uncanny ways.

Final comment added later:

Of course another way the play/film doesn't notice 'history' is in that even as they're talking about history, we don't see the history being enacted through there being no sight of all the other boys/girls going to schools or apprenticeships or work at that precise moment at the same time! What are all the other 18 year olds doing? One thing we learned through doing the 11-plus and going to grammar school (or could have learned if we didn't resist it) was to fear and despise those who went to Secondary Modern Schools, and envy those who went to private schools ('Public Schools). This was subtle, persistent, never-ending, often played out within families as well as between them, (one child going to the 'grammar', one to the 'sec mod', and even one going private and the others not. But socially and society-wide, the filtering, selecting, and segregating was (and is) going on throughout our schooling. As do the expectations, the style of education and indeed the content. 

Though it's rarely admitted, the strange, inconsistent and historically odd way in which education is delivered to the whole cohort year by year produces what is in effect the horses for courses of a class society. However you describe the hierarchies or systems of control or systems of exploitation and class, you can find ways in which mostly (not entirely or always consistently) the school system has ended up matching it and helping to reproduce it. You can map on to society the different kinds of secondary schools, showing how more or less they do the job of making sure the round pegs go into the round holes and the square pegs go into the square holes.

I was asked to comment on a 'teacher model' for writing in a primary school. I did.

 

This is a tweet I received.

I replied like this:

1. It's a nonsense. It's no help for children to write interesting stories or non-fiction. It is overly, misleadingly and mistakenly focussed on sentences and not on themes, or characters' dilemmas/motives. And fails to talk of 'story' grammar eg reveal-conceal, story arcs, obstacles.

2. If you want to help children improve their stories, you have to deal with motive, which then leads to how do we know motives, often through flashback and 'interiority'. Again: nothing here on narration. Ominiscient or first person? Omniscient with p.o.v. of one character or more?

3.Another point: most modern fiction is about enabling the reader or taking the reader 'there', to the mindset or place or time of the story. How do you do that? Through the eyes of the protagonist or through narration or both? Help children to do that!

4.In sum, the advice coming from government about story, is ignorant and irrelevant. That's because they won't (and never do) talk to writers about writing. It's absurd.

5. When it comes to sentences, the advice we got in the 1950s is more helpful. Sentences are made up of phrases (groups of words with no verbs) and clauses (groups of words with verbs). That simple advice, helps you construct sentences.

6. As for 'fronted adverbials' and 'expanded noun phrases',. they are neither good or bad. They can be either. Telling children they are good is a nonsense. What matters is choosing when to use them and not use them. Same with similes (which are nothing to do with grammar).

7. I'm glad there's advice about the senses but this misses out other motors for writing: namely memory, imagination and knowledge of images, scenes and motifs from other 'texts' (stories, songs, films etc) that you can adopt, adapt and recycle in your 'text'.