The Guardian asked me if I would to write a column for their Education page and I thought it would be interesting to write to Michael Gove. So here it is: a letter for him published in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/feb/06/michael-rosen-gove-curriculum-schools
Monday, 6 February 2012
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Structure-writing: how to escape it.
(These notes are expanded from some replies on a facebook thread)
1. The structures for writing that many young children in primary schools are offered are lies. They are told that stories have or should have a certain structure. The model they are given doesn't correspond to the stories they actually read.
2. Even if you did give them some supposed 'true' structure that did correspond to the stories they read, it would be such a piece of reduced 'formalism' as to be of no use to them as writers.
3. I suggest several other approaches: motif, parody, dilemma - not in any particular order.
Motif encourages children to 'spot' motifs from one story to another by calling on their own 'intertextual repertoire' responses 'Is there anything about this story that reminds you of anything else you've read or seen?' So you encourage children to draw on what they know about stories - which is already massive, if you include film and TV programmes. You encourage them to spot 'motifs' (scenes, moments, types of encounter) and to spot differences between them...with a view to using them adapting them for their own purposes eg child meets monster...or child runs away...or poor girl becomes rich...etc
Parody asks children to see if they can swap 'paradigms' to see what happens: . What would happen if Little RRH was waiting to catch a wolf who had to take some food to his granny? This is both ludic (playful) and subversive. Essentially, you ask children to 'write like' but swapping elements.
Dilemma-based writing suggests that most (not 100%) of stories that they come across have a key dilemma or problem which is 'solved' through the telling. In the usual skeleton or structure children are given, this problem doesn't turn up till after 'introduction', 'characters' and 'setting'. This is actually a lesson in bad writing! As my daughter says, (10) she really likes stories where you get the conclusion at the beginning and you read in order to find out how the characters got there! She is 'wrong' according to the systems they're given. The great thing about dilemma-writing is that you discover that writing is the work you do to solve the problem, You dig into the dilemma in order to dig out solutions. Your tools are the words you use.
Only when you've got people writing and talking about writing, do you need to get into talking about structures. In fact, it's much more exciting and much more complex than these prescriptive ones out of text-books and schemes.
The politics of prescriptive structures and writing:
The ideology behind this 'reduced structuralism' is that children are incapable beings; they are positioned as unknowing, waiting to be filled up with knowledge which is possessed ultimately by distant far-off gods called examiners, inspectors and ministers.
It leaves everything unequestioned - writing, stories, structures, the world, how we learn, the hierarchies between adults and children, between teachers and their bosses. It the theory of permanent non-revolution that dominates education. Nothing evolves or changes. Nothing is there to be questioned. You can't get round it or behind it. You just have to do it as systematised by my dear bro as 'Don't question it, just do it.'
In order to create passivity in the majority, these permanences are constantly being put in front of children on the basis that they're lower ability or that this will help them get through SATs or GCSEs or whatever. The 'help' is in fact a hindrance. It's a seminar in passivity.
1. The structures for writing that many young children in primary schools are offered are lies. They are told that stories have or should have a certain structure. The model they are given doesn't correspond to the stories they actually read.
2. Even if you did give them some supposed 'true' structure that did correspond to the stories they read, it would be such a piece of reduced 'formalism' as to be of no use to them as writers.
3. I suggest several other approaches: motif, parody, dilemma - not in any particular order.
Motif encourages children to 'spot' motifs from one story to another by calling on their own 'intertextual repertoire' responses 'Is there anything about this story that reminds you of anything else you've read or seen?' So you encourage children to draw on what they know about stories - which is already massive, if you include film and TV programmes. You encourage them to spot 'motifs' (scenes, moments, types of encounter) and to spot differences between them...with a view to using them adapting them for their own purposes eg child meets monster...or child runs away...or poor girl becomes rich...etc
Parody asks children to see if they can swap 'paradigms' to see what happens: . What would happen if Little RRH was waiting to catch a wolf who had to take some food to his granny? This is both ludic (playful) and subversive. Essentially, you ask children to 'write like' but swapping elements.
Dilemma-based writing suggests that most (not 100%) of stories that they come across have a key dilemma or problem which is 'solved' through the telling. In the usual skeleton or structure children are given, this problem doesn't turn up till after 'introduction', 'characters' and 'setting'. This is actually a lesson in bad writing! As my daughter says, (10) she really likes stories where you get the conclusion at the beginning and you read in order to find out how the characters got there! She is 'wrong' according to the systems they're given. The great thing about dilemma-writing is that you discover that writing is the work you do to solve the problem, You dig into the dilemma in order to dig out solutions. Your tools are the words you use.
Only when you've got people writing and talking about writing, do you need to get into talking about structures. In fact, it's much more exciting and much more complex than these prescriptive ones out of text-books and schemes.
The politics of prescriptive structures and writing:
The ideology behind this 'reduced structuralism' is that children are incapable beings; they are positioned as unknowing, waiting to be filled up with knowledge which is possessed ultimately by distant far-off gods called examiners, inspectors and ministers.
It leaves everything unequestioned - writing, stories, structures, the world, how we learn, the hierarchies between adults and children, between teachers and their bosses. It the theory of permanent non-revolution that dominates education. Nothing evolves or changes. Nothing is there to be questioned. You can't get round it or behind it. You just have to do it as systematised by my dear bro as 'Don't question it, just do it.'
In order to create passivity in the majority, these permanences are constantly being put in front of children on the basis that they're lower ability or that this will help them get through SATs or GCSEs or whatever. The 'help' is in fact a hindrance. It's a seminar in passivity.
Pick of the Week: future of radio
I've been in radioland this week picking slices of wireless programmes for the 45 minute show that is Pick of the Week (Radio 4 tonight 6.15).
Over on Comment is Free, there's a discussion going on about how come radio has survived the digital age. It's old tech, and 'technicist' interpretations of history usually come up with theories about technologies replacing each other. One way that radio has survived is that radio companies employ people who either have interesting things to say and/or people who think up interesting ways to use the medium. The big problem with that is that it requires radio bosses to accept that this requires them to give money, space and time to programme-makers. Like everywhere else, these radio producers and researchers are working longer and longer hours while spending less and less time to making each individual programme. Meanwhile, there's casualisation-creep with more and more parts of the business being done by people without pensions - and a lot else besides. Lean and hungry, get up and go, desperate to please - is one interpretation of that. Another is: insecure, worried, always aware of their own replace-ability.
As for the medium, one way to think of it from the production end is that what you're making is either noisy or silent. Noisy programmes are phone-ins which have settled into jousting matches between star presenters and callers. Anyone seriously trying to understand what function these are serving would have to look at the general cultural and political bias of the star presenters. Perhaps that's in a book I haven't read.
Silent radio is the kind that I am mostly involved in, which makes programmes and simply sends them off, ship-in-bottles, helium balloons. Apart from a handful of listener-comments and newspaper radio reviews, no one really knows what happens to these. I say 'happens' - I mean in people's minds and in what might be called a 'social response'. A close look at these programmes would, I guess,come up with a model of broadcasting and listening that corresponds to corridors. That's to say, there is a cultural corridor in which producers and audience mingle. This is the theory of specialised audiences - in whatever terms these specialisms are defined. To take an example that doesn't exist - people interested in deep-sea diving make a programme for deep-sea divers. Or Greens make a programme for Greens. Or fans of Musical Theatre make programmes for Musical Theatre fans. The question that has sometimes interested the people who run Radio 4 is whether Musical Theatre fans will hang about listening to a programme about deep-sea diving.
Of course, the typification of people by their special interest might be a red herring. The listening demographies might be determined more or less by the amount of education people received.
One last observation about silent radio. I've often been curious about the fact that I've sat about in radio studios when someone or some people have said something that I thought was easily as important as anything you read in broadsheets or say on TV and yet such things seem to have slipped away into silence. I used to work on the World Service book review programme and each week we interviewed major international authors - Nobel prizewinners - the lot. Presumably there were people somewhere in the world who heard these but the programmes appeared to be silent. At the same time, a broadsheet newspaper with a catchment area, tiny in comparison to the World Service's, would carry an interview with the same writer and in my parish people were chatting about it, and in weeks to come references to it would crop up in other newspapers and in years to come these crop up in books. This is not a complaint. Just an observation.
Over on Comment is Free, there's a discussion going on about how come radio has survived the digital age. It's old tech, and 'technicist' interpretations of history usually come up with theories about technologies replacing each other. One way that radio has survived is that radio companies employ people who either have interesting things to say and/or people who think up interesting ways to use the medium. The big problem with that is that it requires radio bosses to accept that this requires them to give money, space and time to programme-makers. Like everywhere else, these radio producers and researchers are working longer and longer hours while spending less and less time to making each individual programme. Meanwhile, there's casualisation-creep with more and more parts of the business being done by people without pensions - and a lot else besides. Lean and hungry, get up and go, desperate to please - is one interpretation of that. Another is: insecure, worried, always aware of their own replace-ability.
As for the medium, one way to think of it from the production end is that what you're making is either noisy or silent. Noisy programmes are phone-ins which have settled into jousting matches between star presenters and callers. Anyone seriously trying to understand what function these are serving would have to look at the general cultural and political bias of the star presenters. Perhaps that's in a book I haven't read.
Silent radio is the kind that I am mostly involved in, which makes programmes and simply sends them off, ship-in-bottles, helium balloons. Apart from a handful of listener-comments and newspaper radio reviews, no one really knows what happens to these. I say 'happens' - I mean in people's minds and in what might be called a 'social response'. A close look at these programmes would, I guess,come up with a model of broadcasting and listening that corresponds to corridors. That's to say, there is a cultural corridor in which producers and audience mingle. This is the theory of specialised audiences - in whatever terms these specialisms are defined. To take an example that doesn't exist - people interested in deep-sea diving make a programme for deep-sea divers. Or Greens make a programme for Greens. Or fans of Musical Theatre make programmes for Musical Theatre fans. The question that has sometimes interested the people who run Radio 4 is whether Musical Theatre fans will hang about listening to a programme about deep-sea diving.
Of course, the typification of people by their special interest might be a red herring. The listening demographies might be determined more or less by the amount of education people received.
One last observation about silent radio. I've often been curious about the fact that I've sat about in radio studios when someone or some people have said something that I thought was easily as important as anything you read in broadsheets or say on TV and yet such things seem to have slipped away into silence. I used to work on the World Service book review programme and each week we interviewed major international authors - Nobel prizewinners - the lot. Presumably there were people somewhere in the world who heard these but the programmes appeared to be silent. At the same time, a broadsheet newspaper with a catchment area, tiny in comparison to the World Service's, would carry an interview with the same writer and in my parish people were chatting about it, and in weeks to come references to it would crop up in other newspapers and in years to come these crop up in books. This is not a complaint. Just an observation.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Schools-libraries; libraries-schools. Make the marriage work.
Here it is again:
As part of every child's welcome pack when they enter state education, they should be given a library ticket with a map showing where they can find the nearest libraries or mobile library stops, along with a simple explanation as to what the library ticket entitles the child to. How many books, for how long and if there are fines (or not) for non-return.
It's as simple as that.
All it needs is for Nick Gibb to talk to Ed Vaizey and arrange it. In the last government all it needed was for Ed Balls to talk to Margaret Hodge to arrange it. I even wrote it out on a piece of paper and gave it to Margaret Hodge when she asked me for a paper for her libraries review. I now think I was asked to do it so that it could be ignored.
What is the matter with these people? They are paid large sums of money to run these services on our behalf. They should be doing everything they can to encourage people to want to use them. Why can't that simple piece of bureaucracy be done? There are many people who are print-phobic, form-phobic who imagine that going into a library and borrowing books would involve all sorts of passing across of information, some of which might compromise them in some way. This would help erode such feelings and misgivings.
A child entering school has proof of address and a named parent or guardian. Give them each, every single one of them, a ticket, a map and what they can get for it. Tell them it doesn't cost anything. They've already paid for it. It's that simple.
Just do it.
As part of every child's welcome pack when they enter state education, they should be given a library ticket with a map showing where they can find the nearest libraries or mobile library stops, along with a simple explanation as to what the library ticket entitles the child to. How many books, for how long and if there are fines (or not) for non-return.
It's as simple as that.
All it needs is for Nick Gibb to talk to Ed Vaizey and arrange it. In the last government all it needed was for Ed Balls to talk to Margaret Hodge to arrange it. I even wrote it out on a piece of paper and gave it to Margaret Hodge when she asked me for a paper for her libraries review. I now think I was asked to do it so that it could be ignored.
What is the matter with these people? They are paid large sums of money to run these services on our behalf. They should be doing everything they can to encourage people to want to use them. Why can't that simple piece of bureaucracy be done? There are many people who are print-phobic, form-phobic who imagine that going into a library and borrowing books would involve all sorts of passing across of information, some of which might compromise them in some way. This would help erode such feelings and misgivings.
A child entering school has proof of address and a named parent or guardian. Give them each, every single one of them, a ticket, a map and what they can get for it. Tell them it doesn't cost anything. They've already paid for it. It's that simple.
Just do it.
Sec Mod site - great new post
The Sec Mod site which is creating an archive of memories about Secondary Modern School education 1944-early 1970s is developing. There's a great new post up there from 'Archie'.
If you went to a Sec Mod yourself do contribute. If you know someone else who went to one, perhaps you could encourage them to contribute.
Here's the site link:
http://secmod.blogspot.com/
If you went to a Sec Mod yourself do contribute. If you know someone else who went to one, perhaps you could encourage them to contribute.
Here's the site link:
http://secmod.blogspot.com/
Inventing stories without meaning or feeling
Here's a serious question: do you think you could come up with a way in which a group of people could come together and either talk about, or write some stories and then spend an hour, say, talking about those stories, without at any point talking about the meaning of the stories?
One way, you could talk about 'structure' - but you would have to do it in such a way as to be so abstract that you couldn't ever refer to notions of good and bad, powerful and less powerful, individual versus the rest, the forces of nature appearing to be either easily dominated or overwhelming...none of that.
And you couldn't really talk about the 'little guy' or the 'big guy', or 'boy meets girl'. And you couldn't even talk about motifs like Cinderella or the deposed king or the wicked step-mother, or the robot that gets out of control. That's all forbidden.
In short, you must only talk about such things as 'the setting' or 'characters' or the 'introduction' as if these are god-given, essential parts of every story. In fact, it's a formula! And if it's a formula you can sell it!
Yes, you can dilute narratives down until all you have is this 'structure-without-meaning', package it up as if this is some form of sacred knowledge and flog it as a solution to Writing in schools.
And it makes the marking of Writing dead easy too. Has the child done the structure? Good if she has, bad if she hasn't.
Needless to say, this has absolutely nothing to do with how writers write or how readers read. Analysis of hundreds of stories, writers' methods, motives and intentions, readers' experience of reading will not deliver you these diy packages.
Instead, you'll hear writers talking about, say, catching a hint of something from what they've read, seen or heard. And this appeared to them to be some kind of problem or dilemma or oddity that needed solving or relating or unravelling. Sometimes writers will say that at some stage in the process they remembered things they had read and, yes, a structure or several structures appear to them from those read books or films or TV programmes or plays as they write. Or motifs from these sources appear to them, a 'search for the true king' or the 'lost child' or whatever. In these circumstances, writers are playing with the 'paradigm' - that's to say the 'syntax' of a story-form might stay the same but it's the elements that can be taken out and swapped. Thus: if you say the rom-com has a syntax - boy meets girl, boy (or girl) doesn't like the other party, they are in each other's company and sparks fly, the result is that the one or two in the relationship suddenly discover that they have a liking for each other. What a writer can do is take that syntax and change elements - the reluctant lovers are both divorcees instead of young inexperienced lovers; or there's a political element: the couple aren't of the same cultural group....that's the paradigm changing and not the syntax - a fruitful way to write but one that also involves talking about meaning. But, note, these story forms have different syntaxes - not one syntax!
These are some of the ways writers work. That's not to say they don't study or learn about 'structure', but that they learn about it in the context of trying to write stories with meaning and power. They discover that this or that structure might enable or hinder what they're trying to say. But, it's about meaning.
So how come schools, strategies, course plans in relation to the writing of stories are full of reductive crap about structure? How come such strategies demote or eliminate questions of meaning and feeling?
I believe it's a crisis in educational culture. It's a lack of belief in the human and in particular the human that is the child. It's an attempt to de-humanize narrative, purely so that these humans can be measured. And yet the thing that makes us human - our ability to make meanings and pass them on to each other - is being demoted or marginalised or eliminated from this activity.
So what's being measured? What possible worth can be placed on such measurement if the human has been subtracted from what is being measured? After all, we're not talking about something which is of itself an abstract process - like Maths. We're talking about a process which humans invented in order to pass on meanings and feelings.
There are people out there who have become afraid of children's meanings and feelings and these 'structures' are just right for them. Out go the tears and laughter, in come the marking systems.
Beware.
One way, you could talk about 'structure' - but you would have to do it in such a way as to be so abstract that you couldn't ever refer to notions of good and bad, powerful and less powerful, individual versus the rest, the forces of nature appearing to be either easily dominated or overwhelming...none of that.
And you couldn't really talk about the 'little guy' or the 'big guy', or 'boy meets girl'. And you couldn't even talk about motifs like Cinderella or the deposed king or the wicked step-mother, or the robot that gets out of control. That's all forbidden.
In short, you must only talk about such things as 'the setting' or 'characters' or the 'introduction' as if these are god-given, essential parts of every story. In fact, it's a formula! And if it's a formula you can sell it!
Yes, you can dilute narratives down until all you have is this 'structure-without-meaning', package it up as if this is some form of sacred knowledge and flog it as a solution to Writing in schools.
And it makes the marking of Writing dead easy too. Has the child done the structure? Good if she has, bad if she hasn't.
Needless to say, this has absolutely nothing to do with how writers write or how readers read. Analysis of hundreds of stories, writers' methods, motives and intentions, readers' experience of reading will not deliver you these diy packages.
Instead, you'll hear writers talking about, say, catching a hint of something from what they've read, seen or heard. And this appeared to them to be some kind of problem or dilemma or oddity that needed solving or relating or unravelling. Sometimes writers will say that at some stage in the process they remembered things they had read and, yes, a structure or several structures appear to them from those read books or films or TV programmes or plays as they write. Or motifs from these sources appear to them, a 'search for the true king' or the 'lost child' or whatever. In these circumstances, writers are playing with the 'paradigm' - that's to say the 'syntax' of a story-form might stay the same but it's the elements that can be taken out and swapped. Thus: if you say the rom-com has a syntax - boy meets girl, boy (or girl) doesn't like the other party, they are in each other's company and sparks fly, the result is that the one or two in the relationship suddenly discover that they have a liking for each other. What a writer can do is take that syntax and change elements - the reluctant lovers are both divorcees instead of young inexperienced lovers; or there's a political element: the couple aren't of the same cultural group....that's the paradigm changing and not the syntax - a fruitful way to write but one that also involves talking about meaning. But, note, these story forms have different syntaxes - not one syntax!
These are some of the ways writers work. That's not to say they don't study or learn about 'structure', but that they learn about it in the context of trying to write stories with meaning and power. They discover that this or that structure might enable or hinder what they're trying to say. But, it's about meaning.
So how come schools, strategies, course plans in relation to the writing of stories are full of reductive crap about structure? How come such strategies demote or eliminate questions of meaning and feeling?
I believe it's a crisis in educational culture. It's a lack of belief in the human and in particular the human that is the child. It's an attempt to de-humanize narrative, purely so that these humans can be measured. And yet the thing that makes us human - our ability to make meanings and pass them on to each other - is being demoted or marginalised or eliminated from this activity.
So what's being measured? What possible worth can be placed on such measurement if the human has been subtracted from what is being measured? After all, we're not talking about something which is of itself an abstract process - like Maths. We're talking about a process which humans invented in order to pass on meanings and feelings.
There are people out there who have become afraid of children's meanings and feelings and these 'structures' are just right for them. Out go the tears and laughter, in come the marking systems.
Beware.
Friday, 3 February 2012
So what happened when you met Nick Gibb?
I know you've been on the edge of your seats longing to know what happened up at the Department for Education.
Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, is collecting ideas on how to encourage children to read. He says that he's got the 'decoding' in place (acknowledging that we wouldn't agree about that). He said he wanted to tackle the syndrome of 'can't read, won't read'. What ideas did I have about that?
[small intermission while Rosen muses on the phenomenon of canny sods who go about collecting vast consultancy fees every time they open their gobs within a hundred metres of a government minister and idiotic mugs like himself who turn up, gas on about reading, poetry, writing, teaching, schools, children, life, beauty, truth, the meaning of life and the universe and we don't even get to keep the security badge they give you on the way in.]
So, I repeated pretty well everything I've said on this blog about reading, writing, schools, teachers - I raved on about the model of teacher INSET pioneered by the Language in the National Curriculum project - why not a 'Reading Project' on the same model? I handed Nick Gibb my 20 point plan to turn a school into a book-loving school with the strong proviso that this shouldn't be a directive, that it was something schools could adapt to suit local conditions. I mentioned the 'reading revolution' website. I talked about how every school should be legally entitled to issue a library ticket to every child when they enter schooling in reception or Year 1 with a map showing the nearest libraries. We talked about how teacher training should include a module on children's literature - on all courses, not just some. I talked about 'browsing' and how this is a form of abstract thought, when children 'sort' their books into categories, how reading a Greek myth with my daughter aged 7, led her to between concrete and abstract thought as she investigated the meaning of the word 'pity'. I provided the reference to the research I've written about on this blog (see 'Books, books, books') which showed that having 500 books in your home (could be library books coming through), guarantees your child getting 3 years more schooling. (Mariah Evans, University of Nevada 2010) and so on.
[second intermission while Rosen remembers this conversation going with Ed Balls and Jim Knights, being treated with mild disdain because NuLabour were 'levering up standards' using SATs.]
It was a conversation. Nick Gibb listened and talked. I think I listened and talked. He said he was very interested in all this. He said that he would convene a meeting of all the Children's Laureates. I said that they were all passionate about reading and it could be fruitful.
I left.
Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, is collecting ideas on how to encourage children to read. He says that he's got the 'decoding' in place (acknowledging that we wouldn't agree about that). He said he wanted to tackle the syndrome of 'can't read, won't read'. What ideas did I have about that?
[small intermission while Rosen muses on the phenomenon of canny sods who go about collecting vast consultancy fees every time they open their gobs within a hundred metres of a government minister and idiotic mugs like himself who turn up, gas on about reading, poetry, writing, teaching, schools, children, life, beauty, truth, the meaning of life and the universe and we don't even get to keep the security badge they give you on the way in.]
So, I repeated pretty well everything I've said on this blog about reading, writing, schools, teachers - I raved on about the model of teacher INSET pioneered by the Language in the National Curriculum project - why not a 'Reading Project' on the same model? I handed Nick Gibb my 20 point plan to turn a school into a book-loving school with the strong proviso that this shouldn't be a directive, that it was something schools could adapt to suit local conditions. I mentioned the 'reading revolution' website. I talked about how every school should be legally entitled to issue a library ticket to every child when they enter schooling in reception or Year 1 with a map showing the nearest libraries. We talked about how teacher training should include a module on children's literature - on all courses, not just some. I talked about 'browsing' and how this is a form of abstract thought, when children 'sort' their books into categories, how reading a Greek myth with my daughter aged 7, led her to between concrete and abstract thought as she investigated the meaning of the word 'pity'. I provided the reference to the research I've written about on this blog (see 'Books, books, books') which showed that having 500 books in your home (could be library books coming through), guarantees your child getting 3 years more schooling. (Mariah Evans, University of Nevada 2010) and so on.
[second intermission while Rosen remembers this conversation going with Ed Balls and Jim Knights, being treated with mild disdain because NuLabour were 'levering up standards' using SATs.]
It was a conversation. Nick Gibb listened and talked. I think I listened and talked. He said he was very interested in all this. He said that he would convene a meeting of all the Children's Laureates. I said that they were all passionate about reading and it could be fruitful.
I left.
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