30 October: I am with Cambridge PGCE trainees in the Donald Macintyre building. They have been looking at ways of teaching Jamila Gavin’s ‘Coram Boy’ and are now working in small groups of three, presenting their imaginative schemes of work to each other. Their ideas are fascinating, awash with inventive ways of discerning flow, theme and character, thoughtful ways of contextualising the book and dramatic ways of realising its concerns.
I realise that it is 40 years since I sat where they are sitting now.
I realise that it is 40 years since I sat where they are sitting now.
How little I knew then compared to what they know now. Their students are very lucky.
Alison, their mentor, encourages them; but she also emphasises the importance of seeing beyond the exercises and remembering to develop their students’ agency as readers. This is advice born from experience of understanding English teaching as a fundamentally ethical as well as a technical endeavour.
Alison, their mentor, encourages them; but she also emphasises the importance of seeing beyond the exercises and remembering to develop their students’ agency as readers. This is advice born from experience of understanding English teaching as a fundamentally ethical as well as a technical endeavour.
Now it is my turn to tell them a little about NWP – the importance of writing teachers practising what they teach. Before I begin, a trainee asks me if I am a writer = published/earning a living primarily from writing? Hm, well, not really in that sense. But aren't there other ways to understand and answer the question. We discuss briefly how we want all our students to see themselves as writers = people with the power to express, record, communicate their selves, and experience the power of language to explore, re-imagine and re-shape their worlds.
So, maybe I am. Maybe we all are.
If we think 'writers' are exclusively defined by obedience to convention, high exam results or by whether their work can be monetised, then it begs the question, 'why are we teaching every child to aspire to something which only a few percent will ever achieve?'
Words
First we celebrate the sound of favourite words and listen to how they bounce off each other – Michigan, pomplemousse, krankenwagen, crescent, hullabaloo, Zinedine Zidane ... Writing in schools is more often seen than heard. So often the music is part of the message, so often felicities and infelicities of shape, syntax and flow are readily revealed on the tongue or through the ears. Taking writing silently means so much learning is lost.
Each word has its own story, but we resist – for the moment.
Thoughts
We stay with our own thoughts, springboarding off a phrase suggested by Natalie Goldberg: ‘ I am thinking ...’, and we free-write for 5 minutes.
My writing begins in the now and in me, but moves into the past, to my mother, and then back to my son, thirty miles away. As John Hodgson observed (NWP residential 2017), we need to honour the unconscious workings of the mind as it weaves back and forth over the warp of our lives.
Attending to these fresh formulations of meaning can bring insight. For students wrestling with uncertainties and possibilities, unjudged free-writing provides space in which to become – and to learn. And that's useful knowledge for all teachers.
Stories
Finally we turn to Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘Gaelic stories’
1
A fisherman in wellingtons
and his sweetheart
and his mother
2
A story
about an old man
and a seal
3
A woman
reading a Bible for seven years
waiting for a sailor
4
A melodeon.
A peat stack.
An owl. ....
We unpack from our memories, four or five titles of some of our own well-known personal stories, anecdotes and incidents – the story of ...., the time when .... We talk together about what we have chosen – the comic, the tragic, the life-changing and the trivial. We each choose one of our titles to expand in a written re-telling; and then we write.
When we have written, we talk about the process – how it differs from talk - how the detail and emotion rush in, how we take unexpected turns, how we find ourselves living parts of our lives again. We do not assess our work, critique or even share it at all. We hold the experience. It is enough.
Read a student teacher's account here.
Reflections
These observations are important. If they matter to us, they will matter to our students. They remind us of the power of collaborative re-creation. Sometimes the process is more potent than the product – which can be hard to remember or even validate when so much emphasis in schools is on ‘outcome’. But it our professional duty not only to remember it but to act on it. No one else will.
As with reading, so with writing, we need to respect our hinterland, not just the prescribed enclosure. This is about choice and time and agency – for us as much as for our students. By writing only in other people's language and structures, our own voices and ideas are lost. And would it not be wrong to allow such oppression and waste to prevail if we had the power to prevent them?
This is about the quality of our shared lives and learning, not just the measurable speed of it. It is why NWP writing groups are both laboratories of writing research, and also havens in which teachers can restore themselves, mulling over how today’s experience can inform their classrooms of tomorrow.
Simon Wrigley
NWP outreach director
So, maybe I am. Maybe we all are.
If we think 'writers' are exclusively defined by obedience to convention, high exam results or by whether their work can be monetised, then it begs the question, 'why are we teaching every child to aspire to something which only a few percent will ever achieve?'
Words
First we celebrate the sound of favourite words and listen to how they bounce off each other – Michigan, pomplemousse, krankenwagen, crescent, hullabaloo, Zinedine Zidane ... Writing in schools is more often seen than heard. So often the music is part of the message, so often felicities and infelicities of shape, syntax and flow are readily revealed on the tongue or through the ears. Taking writing silently means so much learning is lost.
Each word has its own story, but we resist – for the moment.
Thoughts
We stay with our own thoughts, springboarding off a phrase suggested by Natalie Goldberg: ‘ I am thinking ...’, and we free-write for 5 minutes.
My writing begins in the now and in me, but moves into the past, to my mother, and then back to my son, thirty miles away. As John Hodgson observed (NWP residential 2017), we need to honour the unconscious workings of the mind as it weaves back and forth over the warp of our lives.
Attending to these fresh formulations of meaning can bring insight. For students wrestling with uncertainties and possibilities, unjudged free-writing provides space in which to become – and to learn. And that's useful knowledge for all teachers.
Stories
Finally we turn to Iain Crichton Smith’s ‘Gaelic stories’
1
A fisherman in wellingtons
and his sweetheart
and his mother
2
A story
about an old man
and a seal
3
A woman
reading a Bible for seven years
waiting for a sailor
4
A melodeon.
A peat stack.
An owl. ....
We unpack from our memories, four or five titles of some of our own well-known personal stories, anecdotes and incidents – the story of ...., the time when .... We talk together about what we have chosen – the comic, the tragic, the life-changing and the trivial. We each choose one of our titles to expand in a written re-telling; and then we write.
When we have written, we talk about the process – how it differs from talk - how the detail and emotion rush in, how we take unexpected turns, how we find ourselves living parts of our lives again. We do not assess our work, critique or even share it at all. We hold the experience. It is enough.
Read a student teacher's account here.
Reflections
These observations are important. If they matter to us, they will matter to our students. They remind us of the power of collaborative re-creation. Sometimes the process is more potent than the product – which can be hard to remember or even validate when so much emphasis in schools is on ‘outcome’. But it our professional duty not only to remember it but to act on it. No one else will.
As with reading, so with writing, we need to respect our hinterland, not just the prescribed enclosure. This is about choice and time and agency – for us as much as for our students. By writing only in other people's language and structures, our own voices and ideas are lost. And would it not be wrong to allow such oppression and waste to prevail if we had the power to prevent them?
This is about the quality of our shared lives and learning, not just the measurable speed of it. It is why NWP writing groups are both laboratories of writing research, and also havens in which teachers can restore themselves, mulling over how today’s experience can inform their classrooms of tomorrow.
Simon Wrigley
NWP outreach director
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