I've just heard that Bernard Newsome, a former colleague of my father at the London Institute of Education, died in April.
He was a friend of the family and I met up with him when I was in Australia in 1997.
I thought I would remind myself of some things that Bernard wrote and, as these things sometimes do, it instantly overlapped with my recent concerns with the SPaG/GPS papers for 10 and 11 year olds.
One of Bernard's concerns and areas of interest was 'narrative'. If we ask the questions, 'What is narrative?' and 'How can it be taught?', we get into some interesting areas: the main one being 'narratology' - how we make stories, whether that's in writing, script-writing, film, TV, non-fiction, ballet, opera, conversation and chat and much more. It's a huge and fascinating subject which, in spite of a century of research, has hardly percolated through to primary schools.
I've written in my booklet 'Why Write? Why Read? (available through my website) how you can analyse the opening of 'A Christmas Carol' using narratology in an age-appropriate way for upper primary and lower secondary students. Flip that on its head and you can see how you can use it in order to help students write.
What's this got to do with Bernard Newsome? Well, in looking at what he wrote, I came across this:
by Bernard Newsome and M. Mallett.
I don't have it, but I suspect it's in my father's library, so I've ordered it from eBay.
Now pause a moment. You'll see that this document came out of the 'Schools Council English'. This means that it was a piece of paid government research, entrusted to former English teachers, who (in Bernard's case) were in teacher training, in and out of schools working with teachers in schools and also through NATE and LATE.
That's how research into writing, reading and talk was done in the olden days! Then the results of the research were disseminated, discussed, adapted and applied. Since Kenneth Baker, later as weaponised by Michael Gove, this approach was junked, and the top-down, diktat approach was adopted. That's how and why we ended up with SPaG/GPS as the overriding theory and practice for Year 6 writing in schools in England.
So back with my question in my title. Writing is a lot more than grammar - not that you would know this from the so-called analysis of the gov.uk pages on 'exemplification' of expected levels of Dani's writing (see my previous blog for the reference) . The model there is that a teacher's job is to only look at approved structures. In other words, we have the farce that writing consists of producing these approved structures or grammatical features (though some of them are in fact 'stylistics').
The major absurdity about this is that there is no evidence that the person or people doing this analysis know anything at all about how to write. What a bizarre situation! People who don't do something teach students how to do it!
However, there is a theoretical problem too: what is writing? Is it slinging down approved structures one after another? Or something else? Clearly, anyone reading what I'm writing here will be an experienced reader and you will all have had pleasure from reading. You will have absorbed knowledge from reading. You may well have had a go at writing poetry, stories, plays, scripts as well as non-fiction reports, accounts and the like. You will have read articles in the newsapers and online for fun or even for masochistic reasons, when it comes to the daily news! This means that you will have a strong sense that writing is more than grammar and approved structures.
What might we talk of in this field then? What else might be in writing that we think of as important?
Emotion, understanding, ideas, speculations, imagination, investigation, evidence, use of the senses in order to evoke and convey.
Structurally, there'll be important matters to do with 'time' which can be expressed in many different ways: present, past, flash back, flash forward, continuous, non-continuous, in sequence, out of sequence.
There'll be matters of people's motives which are spread out in what script-writers call the 'story-arc'.
There'll be matters of how scenes build and end.
There'll be a antagonists and protagonists either for the whole piece and/or for particular scenes.
There'll be 'helpers' and people who are 'obstacles' or things/objects too of course like mountains, bogs, barbed wire or bombs.
There'll be the matter of how we reveal and conceal at the same time, as we write, a method that keeps readers wanting to know more. This will keep readers predicting and guessing. As writers, we may want to play with this by feeding in false hopes, false plotlines, red herrings and 'McGuffins'.
There'll be a shape overall in which we build to some kind of point or climax, though in a longer piece there may well be a false-climax, where probably we'll be disappointed that things don't work out.
We'll want to think about how we 'thicken' or 'deepen' characters. We can do that through flashbacks eg through ensuring that motives are clear.
Hiding behind all this are the 'intertextual' models that we adopt without knowing we're adopting them: the archetypes and stereotypes like 'rags to riches', hubristic hero, the lost soul, the haunted, the patriarch, the matriarch, the 'golden' spoiled child, sibling rivalry, the unrequited love (and 100s more).
There are the genres that we adopt deliberately ('I'm writing a thriller') and the genres that we may only be vaguely aware of: the adventure, the school story, the coming of age story, the buddy movie, the road movie, the rom-com. These have 'grammars' of their own which we can use, adapt, reject or subvert. We can even mix them up just as JKRowling did with the Harry Potter books - a school story mixed with fantasy.
There is the matter of evidence (and illustrative prose) whether that be in non-fiction or fiction. How much, how little, why and how?
So, the mystery is how and why did we end up with a dry, barren set of structures as the model of how to construct narrative when we have this huge resource at our disposal, all waiting to be given to children to help them write exciting, interesting, or accurate or well-constructed writing?
For an answer to that question we have to look at how it was that the ideas that people like Bernard Newsome, James Britton, Nancy Martin, Harold Rosen, Connie Rosen, Jane Miller and many more people who should be on this list, were thrown out and ruled out. That's the story of how people in the education department of Conservative and Labour governments wanted to take control of 'what is English?'
The answer to why did they want do that was made clear over and over again by Michael Gove: he understood very clearly that teaching English is political. In his case, he stated how he wanted to tie English to a national project based on a set of ideas taken from the US to do with 'knowledge' preceding competence. To get these into schools, he and his predecessors had to get rid of the old checks and balances structures in education. They worked on top-down, diktat approaches, sidelining teachers' and teacher-trainers' experience and research.
So when a child sits down to write a story, it's not about what they want to say. A teacher is not there to show them how the writers of the stories that the children love, write. The teacher is not helped to see how 'narrative' and 'narratology' can help children write - that's that fancy French and American stuff, we don't want that, do we?! And that all comes from what was in a sense a coup, the story of how the politicians took over the English curriculum.
When I get Bernard Newsome's and M. Mallett's book, I'll tell you what it says. I've already read one of Bernard's short papers on narrative and it's a lovely exposition of how you can help a child expand a narrative on the basis of how narratives are about sequences.
If you google "Bernard Newsome" and "Narrative", you'll be taken to an entry for a PDF at the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English and a great article by Bernard called: 'The Nature and Importance of Narrative'.
I highly recommend it.
