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?
