The 8th Harold Rosen lecture
Simon Wrigley, NATE Conference 27 June 2015, Newcastle
The occupation of writing
Thank you Andy, and thank you NATE for inviting me to deliver this lecture, and thank you friends and fellow teaching travellers for coming. It is a great honour to be connected like this with the work of Harold Rosen.
I want to explain how Harold’s work has influenced me in creating and shaping NATE’s national writing project, why an understanding of Harold’s work is desperately needed now, and why teachers of writing should ‘occupy’ writing and let it occupy them. It is our occupation, after all. Teachers of writing should write, and they can grow personally and professionally from writing together. Our grass-roots, teacher-led research project is owned entirely by teachers, and explores the power of such free and autonomous CPD. The results so far are encouraging. The evidence is growing. Together, we are developing confidence in writing and the teaching of writing. Together, we are slowly changing the landscape.
But before I talk further, I want to thank Betty Rosen, Harold’s widow, who is here today. Last month she very kindly invited me to her home to talk about Harold and lend me some of his books. I learnt more about how she and Harold shared a fascination in autobiographical narrative as a place in which identities are shaped, values are expressed and where learners can be re-engaged in a proper sense of themselves in the world. Similarly, in NATE’s national writing project , sharing writing has been an affirmation, and has frequently been what has touched teachers most deeply. Reflecting upon its significance and dynamic has often led them to change their practice.
Betty also kindly lent me a book of Harold’s poems and I am going to honour her by reading one which Harold seems to have addressed to her:
Honey Bee.
Bedraggled blob
Found in the sink
Turned out to be a dead bee
She didn’t think so
Put it on a sheet of kitchen roll
To dry off
Took it into the garden
Nudged it on to a nasturtium leaf
In the sun
In the morning she is straight outside
To see if her dead bee
Has resurrected itself and gone
But there it is still
On its green leaf
Can’t she see it’s dead?
She has detected
Or thinks she has detected a twitch
In one leg
I manage a quiet snort of impatience
Another piece of kitchen roll
And she’s putting back her corpse
On the window ledge in the sun
Soon she’s sure it’s moving
Finds the honey and puts a little near it
And waits and waits and then –
Out of the lifeless body
Comes the tongue thin as a hair
Taking its invalid’s breakfast
I’m interested now
She puts it in an upside down jamjar
A little more honey
The sun warms the jar
Another slow feed
Its black and yellow body is fluffing up
It buzzes in the jar
Released it’s a bee again back from the dead
Out of the window it takes flight
I find this poem both touching and humorous. I love the way it starts so dismissively – ‘Bedraggled blob’ – I hear the open ridicule, and recognise the self-righteous impatience – ‘the quiet snort’ -, and become willingly complicit in his mockery of her lost cause
‘Can’t she see it’s dead?’
But then, out of a body still described as lifeless,
Comes the tongue thin as a hair
Who’s the joke on now? I ask myself somewhat ashamedly, as, through Harold’s eyes, I concentrate on Betty’s magic touch which I, too, had doubted.
By the time the ‘dead bee’ takes flight at the end, even if there isn’t actually an apology for judging too quickly, there is a tenderness and an admiration in what remains unspoken about this so-called resurrection, that was in fact an example of belief, patience, understanding and care – all of which I too often lack. This is a poem of tremendous hope, of second chances. This is a poem which celebrates those who keep faith when all seems doomed. This is a poem about an education in love. This is a poem about never giving up.
It seems to say: Don’t despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up!
How appropriate for these trying times! This Brave New World. For such an example, thank you Harold and thank you B.
Maybe it’s to the trying nature of our times that the title of this conference refers? Brave New World - a dystopian novel from the 1930s by Aldous Huxley – its title a sarcastic rendition of Miranda’s line in the Tempest. Huxley imagined a future world of genetic engineering and social conditioning, where all bar a few free-thinkers, and John Savage in the reservation beyond the barbed wire, know their places – alpha to epsilon. Most people have been infantilised and drugged senseless by consumerism and soma. It could never happen here. Huxley actually taught George Orwell at Eton. (Standards have fallen since). You can see a similarity of mindset in ‘1984’, though each dystopian novel offers a different critique of pre-war and post-war Britain respectively. Every creative act is a critical act, in these cases extrapolating the consequences of the over-controlling state. And they later exchanged opinions on each other’s fiction. Orwell wrote in 1946, in his essay ‘The Prevention of Literature’
“Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer … into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above, and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.”
He goes on to describe how publishers (of the 1940s) feed the appetite for mechanical writing by selling cheap, ready-made plots. “Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others … a sort of algebraic formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others offer packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination – even consciousness, so far as possible – would be eliminated from the process of writing.”
from ‘The Prevention of Literature’: ('George Orwell- Essays'. Penguin Classics 2000. ISBN 0-14-118306-3)
You’d never have thought that nearly 70 years later we might witness the following guidelines in the mark scheme for the KS2 Level 6 writing test:
Mark scheme for 2013 KS2 Level 6 writing test:
‘AF1 – write imaginative and thoughtful texts no longer constitutes part of the mark scheme as the task’s focus is on grammar, punctuation, vocabulary and appropriacy. AF1 will be assessed by teacher assessment of pupils’ compositional writing only.’
Apart from the stupidity of atomising the living dynamic of writing and assessing each part separately, the backwash effect on the curriculum weakens teachers’ and pupils’ ability to create communities whose identities might be founded in meaningful personal writing. It feels almost as if the authorities have enclosed and privatised the common language. Almost as if it has been occupied and we need to take it back.
It was precisely such a distorted view of writing which Michael Rosen, Harold’s son, laid into in his Harold Rosen lecture at last year’s NATE conference – if I wasn’t such a goy I’d feel almost part of the family! – and at the end of his lecture, Michael suggested that, as an antidote to the product-oriented system which pixillates and homogenises writing at the expense of meaningful and authentic processes, NATE should ask ‘published writers’ about how and why they write; and what suggestions would they give to students and teachers on how to do it.
However, we do need to pause and consider what we mean by ‘published writers’. The field of published writers is fairly wide and uneven. We’re all writers now. Do we mean Malorie Blackman or Michael Gove? Both are published writers, and both have given writing suggestions to teachers.
We’ve heard enough from one of those, so here are the suggestions of Malorie Blackman, the children's laureate 2013-2015. She recommends reading as a prime support for becoming a writer. And she goes on to say to writers:
Develop your own style. Don’t copy anyone else’s. Your own voice is individual and unique so don’t be afraid to use it.
Try to get into the habit of writing every day. Keeping a diary is an excellent way of doing this.
Write from the heart as well as the head. Write about what makes you angry, what moves you to tears, the things about which you feel passionately. If you feel it when you write, others will feel it when they read.
Don’t fake it!
http://www.malorieblackman.co.uk/index.php/category/malorie/writingtips/#sthash.YgSS5mfi.dpuf
She also admits
" When I first started writing, I found joining a supportive writing group invaluable."
Now there’s a good idea!
But we need to be careful not to dismiss young writers – or sideline writing teachers - by bowing too low to published writers – of any generation.
In schools as well as colleges, there are a number of initiatives to bring living, published writers into schools. This is often described as 'curriculum enrichment'. I am not against this, provided it does not leave the teacher disempowered, or the children falsely reverential of others or distrustful of themselves - or become something which is 'bolted on' to a curriculum experience rather that deeply rooted in it.
I prefer to see a class of 30 children as one which already contains 30 writers - 31 including the teacher. Here are 31 people who use and share words to story the world and their witness of it, 31 readers and 31 co-respondents. Some may be 'writers' like Benjamin Zephaniah who termed himself a writer (meaning a composer of ideas in words) before he was adept at all the transcriptional niceties. Conversely, although publication carries the blessing of power (somebody believes in me), it does not come with a guarantee of quality - enduring or transient (other people may not): we probably all know several examples of publications of doubtful worth or terrible effect, and plenty more pieces of unpublished writing that have moved us deeply.
We also need to be careful of normalising judgements: they can blind us to the diverse complexities and various 'affordances' of writing. Writing enables discovery, it reifies and makes manageable our traumas; it allows us to hold on and to let go, to revisit our lives and reflect on them; free writing helps us trawl the subconscious; craft and editing give us the space to negotiate meaning; writing helps us keep in touch with long ago and far away . It is an invaluable tool for learning, not just evidence of it.
Of course, all language is metaphor. One of NWP’s most insightful exercises is to test the affordances of writing by finding new facets in unusual places and random objects. Here’s an example from the NWP website :
Writing is like a tiny plastic red car. It has wheels that are a bit stiff, you can push it along and it goes, reluctantly, where you want it to go. There’s no steering wheel, no delicate system of hydraulics that allows you to point it towards your goal with the merest touch of your hand. Steering is achieved by brute force. You really have to push.
Then you discover that if you do something counter-intuitive, say, like holding it down and dragging it backwards, it builds up a momentum all of its own, and you can simply let it go and try to keep up. It might not go where you think it will, it might go round in circles for a while and then shoot off in a totally unexpected direction, but that’s what brings a smile to your face.
You don’t know what happens inside the tiny plastic red car. There’s some mechanism that stores the energy gained from going backwards and releases it in a forwards direction. Someone, somewhere, designed that mechanism. Someone else put it together. You, all you can do, is pull back, then let go, and see what happens.
(To see this writing in context go to http://battypip.wordpress.com/)
Alongside instructional lessons, NWP teachers champion the imagination.
They provide pupils with writing notebooks in which they are free to jot down observations, try out ideas, and have go - and find their own voices and surprise themselves. The result? Fewer 'reluctant' writers, more fluent and original writing.
Hanif Kureishi , 2014, talking about his latest novel -'Last Word', said this:
"Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge knew that the imagination was as dangerous as dynamite, not only politically – the populace might have new, important but dissident ideas – but also inside an individual. The imagination can feel like disorder when it is, in fact, an illumination."
Although - and perhaps because - people's imagination is powerful, they may be schooled to distrust it in favour of normalised/standardised/'elevated' ideas, and the opportunities for them to exercise it may become very circumscribed. Such schooling has the short-term effect of apparently stabilising society, provided enough people conform. In the long-term it is unenlightened, infantilising, unsustainable, socially destructive, and condemns the society to a poverty of ideas, the alienation of individuals and minorities, and the squandering of creative talent. In such a society, 'My Beautiful Laundrette' might never have been published or screened.
NWP is a writing community of teachers owned by teachers. Beholden to no one, it is shaped by the testimony of all participants rather than by an elite of publishers, bureaucrats or politicians. No worthwhile education, least of all in writing - a classic way of teasing out thought and exchanging of views - should ever be determined by commerce or political ideology; it must be openly negotiated - and better understood.
As we know only too well, measurements are everywhere, while things of immeasurable importance are being daily ignored.
Few seem to question what 'writing' actually is, or how notions of it have been culturally constructed. Keats said that writing was ‘the best thing in the world’, by which he meant the expressive and compositional process, the first definition in the OED. But in English schools the term ‘writing’ more frequently denoted, not an active conversation about meaning, but a written product or outcome that can be weighed and measured on a single scale. How are writing processes and products changing in 21st century UK? Why is there such a disjunct between school and university practice? Where does the teaching of writing feature in teacher education? Would the teaching of writing improve if writing teachers had recent and regular experience of writing themselves and of reflecting on the process – as reading teachers had? When ‘reading for pleasure’ is so widely endorsed, why does ‘writing for pleasure’ remain problematic? And what say do writing teachers have over the way in which writing is defined and policed in schools? I don't have answers. That's mainly what motivated me to set up NWP (UK) with Jeni and to find out what willing writing teachers could do for themselves and their pupils through the collective action of simply writing together.
Even though we had no money, and little power, we had ourselves.
So I thought: Don’t despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up.
So, Jeni Smith and I knew we had to take action. We would found a writing project for teachers that would insulate them from de-professionalisation. Writing would literally be in their own hands. They would become agents of change. We gathered quotations from great teachers and writers which could be used to illustrate the thinking which informed the project. That was when I came across these words of Harold’s:
‘Classrooms would be transformed if children wrote the stories they wanted to write rather than the stories teachers asked them to write.’ (1969)
And when I read this, I thought, yes, he’s right. Writing shouldn’t be merely about the acquisition of forms, but, more importantly, it should be about expressing things of significance. How had we lost sight of that? Writing should not be merely about being all dressed up, it should be about having places to go. That should be its driving force. Of course children should learn about conventions and structures which support thinking, but not at the expense of their own energy and self-confidence. Not at the expense of meaning. And children should be listened to for what they want to say, not just marked for how they spell it. When someone cares about their message, they will care more about the medium. Otherwise what you get is what I call connective soup: “Moreover’, ‘Furthermore’, ‘Consequently’, ‘Finally’ can I go out to play now? I’ve done what you asked me to.” The teaching of writing should involve the cultivation of authentic voices, the validation of honest witnesses of the human condition. And to learn, children need to feel that sense of agency and authority from their language use. Merely following orders or conventions is to sell them short for the demands of tomorrow. It is, after all, their language too.
And then Jeni shared with me some words from Harold’s colleague, Jimmy Britton:
‘If you limp around long enough in someone else’s language, you may eventually learn to walk in it.’
Absolutely! I didn’t want children to limp, or merely walk, but to hop, skip and run about to their hearts’ content.
As Professor Ron Carter said, ‘Creativity is not the capability of special people. It is the special capability of all people.’ If you accept we are each created different, by design rather than by accident, then you might conclude that every child matters. As Margaret Meek once said at a LATE conference in the 90s, ‘Every child is nature’s gift to correct culture’s error’. Yes, the children are the real data – that which is given. Unto us a child is given. In which case, we each of us have a moral duty to declare our witness and to respect each other’s truth. Such creativity brings change and threatens the social order, because, every creative act is inevitably an act critical of the context from which it emerges, so it’s not popular with the authorities. That can be why they ‘allow’ it unequally. As teachers we have to be careful that we resist another Anglo-Saxon mantra – that you can’t have your pudding before you’ve eaten your greens. You can’t do your ‘creative’ writing, before you’ve acquired my rules. Phonics first and phonics fast. – a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nonsense words. Especially if you’re in special measures.
If children from certain language backgrounds and aptitudes never get to exercise their creative birthright, then their language learning will be restricted. We each of us need to discover the dynamic of expression and being listened to. Of course it’s a struggle, and of course there are compromises, but it really is all right to be you.
‘I realised that it was all right to be me’. That’s a year 6 girl talking about what it meant to keep a writing journal as part of the dot com foundation work in Birmingham. The dot com foundation operates as part of the Prevent strategy. Their findings are that when children are encouraged to write and discuss things which really matter to them, with the emphasis not on getting things ‘right’ but getting them ‘true’, then they become more confident and, as a key part of the foundation’s work, more resistant to grooming from those with extreme or evil intentions.
And what is true for children, is also true for teachers. To preserve freedom of thought against educational ‘grooming’, they may also benefit from writing themselves out in writing journals, from reading about different approaches, from listening to and encouraging each other, from experimentation, from practice and from collaborative reflection.
Teachers needed help too. Teaching had become encumbered by writing frames, it had been shackled by scaffolding. Many teachers were second-guessing ‘next steps for learning’ without listening to where the writers wanted to go, and the children’s writing was stumbling, tangled in targets. Some in the profession had become dependent and infantilised by prescription from the centre. (Does any of this sound familiar?)
Teachers had been told what to do so often that they could no longer hear themselves think. They needed space. They needed to rediscover their own power to shape their own stories. They needed to practise the writing that they preached. They needed to gather together in writing groups and feel the fear and do it anyway. They needed this for their own mental health. But also, if they developed the necessary empathy with their pupils, they would feel within themselves how classrooms could be changed for the better - as Harold had encouraged. And teachers, rather than managers and bureaucrats, would become the agents of change.
And here’s Harold again, 25 years ago, on the politics of writing:
“ ... it is necessary to insist again and again on the need to disrupt the authoritative voice with the unheard voices of our students (so difficult for all of us) to articulate, develop, refine and advance their meanings as against the mere reproduction of the words of the textbook, the worksheet, the encyclopedia and the guides. To insist on this involves squaring up to the oppressive power of authoritative language.”
So we squared up. We particularly squared up to those in the National Literacy Strategy who saw no benefit in teachers writing together and owning their own project , which, they said, would never improve writing. This flew in the face of the evidence Professor Richard Andrews presented to them that 40 years of the National Writing Project in the US had raised writing standards in US schools.
In fact, when the National Strategies in England were promoting, separately, Every Child a Reader and Every Child a Writer, at the same time, in the US there was an integrated programme known as ‘Every Child a Reader and Writer’. (Do you see what they’ve done there?) But the critical difference lay in how the programmes in England and the US were differently evaluated. In England the programmes were evaluated by how far pupils levels rose. But that wasn’t the criterion for evaluation in the US. The US programme was evaluated by how meaningful pupils found their own reading and writing to have been. Pupil voice. Yes. In the US, with 40 years of a national writing project, with teachers like George Hillocks, Don Murray and Peter Elbow reflecting on the writing process, there’s a longer tradition of looking at the kernel of writing rather than its shell.
NWP UK borrowed from the US experience, and from the work of Pat D’Arcy who, in 2000, had recommended that the process of meaningful, personal writing should be more explicitly taught in schools. Paul Gardner re-emphasised the same point in 'Who am I? Compositions of the self' (English in Education Vol 48 No 3 2014):
In the UK, this dual purpose of writing, the process of learning and the communicative function, is perhaps in danger of becoming lost in an increasingly prescriptive curriculum, which attempts to frame teachers as technical deliverers of language skills.... (this) dislocates (students) from the social contexts of their lives and the functions of writing to 'understand and be understood'. (pp230-231)
You don't need a referendum to know that language is culturally complex, or to realise the risks to young learners of distancing them from their local, social and personal contexts by insisting only on the speedy acquisition of one privileged dialect.
Peter Elbow, a writer whose thinking informs the work of NWP US and NWP UK alike, warned 40 years ago of the dangers to democracy of killing writing with 'correction' and failing to cultivate individual voices.
'The habit of compulsive, premature editing doesn't just make writing hard. It also makes writing dead. Your voice is damped out by all the interruptions, changes, and hesitations between the consciousness and the page. In your natural way of producing words there is a sound, a texture, a rhythm--a voice--which is the main source of power in your writing. I don't know how it works, but this voice is the force that will make a reader listen to you. Maybe you don't like your voice; maybe people have made fun of it. But it's the only voice you've got. It's your only source of power. You better get back into it, no matter what you think of it. If you keep writing in it, it may change into something you like better. But if you abandon it, you'll likely never have a voice and never be heard.'
'Writing Without Teachers'. New York: Oxford UP, 1973, 1-7
The goodwill of creative group leaders in NWP UK has meant that in the last 6 years, 100s of teachers have been involved in writing together and listening to each other and laughing and crying and talking and bonding, and 1000s of their pupils have benefited from the permission to own their own writing, and reluctant writers have rediscovered the joy and power of writing.
You may say you haven’t time or that this won’t raise standards, but NWP teachers do find time to write alongside their pupils. They know that pupils are more influenced by what their teachers do than by what they say. Familiarity and confidence with the messy and unpredictable dynamic of writing – the relationships within it and the conversations around it – are very much needed now. And there really is no short-cut to doing this yourself. For a teacher of reading to read would be readily accepted and encouraged. Why is it not the case that teachers of writing might be expected to write? It’s not an indulgence, it’s a necessary professional act. And you can get a long way with 5 minutes a day. Most NWP groups meet for a couple of hours on a Saturday once a half-term. And they’re revived by it. Unfortunately, under pressure to ‘raise standards’ in tests, much CPD money is wasted on patronising training schemes, structures and conventions which, while they enrich the providers, turn pupils off learning and teachers off teaching. Meanwhile teachers could do themselves and their pupils more lasting good by joining an NWP writing group. And it’s free.
We must not let others tell our story. We must get into the habit of telling it ourselves. All that needs to happen for bad things to prevail, is for good people to do nothing.
Do not despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up.
I’d like to give you all a taste of NWP writing and talking together in a few minutes. We’ll have a go. But first let me tell you something about what such writing and talking can do for you – both personally and professionally.
In ‘Talk as Autobiography’ May 1991, Harold explores the power of anecdote and the power of memory in re-shaping experiences. Everyone has powerful memories; everyone learns how to select and frame moments, events and sequences from their own experience, establish them as sites for the definition of self-image, for the crystallisation of values, for a conversation with meaning and culture. Sharing them not only defines and affirms the self, but it also bonds and defines a group. Reflecting on such memories is an education in narrative.
Autobiographical storytelling belongs with trust, informality and conviviality and most easily comes into its own when people are comfortable with each other and do not feel constrained to be on their best behaviour... To make a space for students to tell their personal stories is above all to affirm the worth of their own culture and at the same time make discoveries about it.
Harold remembers one apocryphal story polished over many tellings, about visiting a manor house in Devon.
After looking over the house we settled down on the lawn to eat our lunch. Major-whatever-he-was came charging out and said, ‘Do you usually eat your meals on other people’s lawns?’ and we crawled away: that was only the coup de grace after a series of devastating put-downs.
Harold outlines how familiarity, feelings, audience response and time may all affect the length and detail of different iterations of the same story.
Harold also observes how stories told in social situations may be more or less prominent parts of conversations, triggering memories, or conferring permissions to embark on yet more stories. Harold’s story triggers this one from me:
My father lived in a house in Switzerland. One day he had asked a Swiss workman to come and mend the window shutters. Our family was in the middle of lunch, when, much to my father’s surprise, the man suddenly appeared at the window, rather than ringing the doorbell. My father stormed out of the house demanding angrily in broken French, and an English accent, ‘Est ce que c’est naturel promenader dans les jardins des autres personnes dans l’apres-midi? Est ce que c’est naturel?’ It was unfortunate that the dodgiest phrase was the one that my father repeated. The man was taken aback. My father had meant to imply that the man’s behaviour was abnormal to the point of rudeness. But the man felt that my father was implying he was some sort of nudist. A further irony was that my father’s job was with the United Nations.
Now it’s your turn. You’ll need a pen and paper. I’d like you to reflect on your writing history – how you became the writer you are today. What significant moments can you remember – as a child, at home, at school, college or in teaching, in your personal or professional life – when writing really mattered for any reason. You’ve got two minutes to jot down the brief headlines for three or four moments that stick in your mind.
Now I’d like you to briefly compare notes with your neighbour. What similarities and differences are there? Have any of your memories anything in common? 3 minutes
Now choose ONE of those moments to write about. Once you have decided, silence the critic in your head and write quickly and freely, without stopping, not crossing out or editing. You will not be sharing this with anyone, unless you want to. 4 minutes.
Let me finish by looking at what one outstanding Primary school found when they had set up their own teachers’ writing group
· Teachers and senior leaders wrote and shared their writing - and found the experience rewarding.
· They found writing surprisingly emotional - and they empathised with children who found writing hard.
· They learnt that freedom is useful when you're trying to gather your thoughts and experiment. If you experience how confusing and distracting it feels to be 'over-directed' and cajoled when you're writing, you probably won't do this to others you're trying to help towards fluency.
· Teachers gave children their own writing notebooks, and the children (in classes from year 1 to year 6) became writers of their own stories, rather than scribes of other people's.
· Almost all children became more engaged as writers.
· At playtime, some year 5 writers asked, "Can we stay in and write?"
· Children talked more easily and intelligently about writing; they did not have a checklist of things to listen for; they listened attentively to each other's writing and were more prepared to work on improving the quality of their writing after they had received feedback from their peers.
And what conclusions did the senior leaders draw?
1. Teachers who write together discover aspects of writing which help them improve their own teaching of writing. .
2. By reflecting on differences between a teachers’ writing group and their classroom contexts, teachers learn important messages about reader-writer relationships.
3. Less confident pupils grow as writers when their teacher writes alongside them.
4. Pupils, particularly boys, benefit from regular opportunities to write freely
Let me finish with one teacher’s evaluation of the power of NWP:
I really can’t understate the impact the NWP has had on me, personally and my professional practice. Like many teachers of English, the last time I ever did any “proper” creative writing was when I was in primary school myself. So, over XX years on (!), I remember very clearly coming along to that first session of the NWP group at the MK Art gallery one rainy, dismal autumn Saturday. I was really looking forward to the prospect of writing again but felt so inhibited by worries that my standard of writing wouldn’t be “good enough,” that I wouldn’t have anything “meaningful to say” that I spent most of the session chewing my pencil, crossing out initial scribblings and moving around the art gallery trying to find somewhere to sit comfortably, just like the reluctant writer in a class. (I settled on an air vent in the end but was never sure if it was an exhibit or not). It was a huge relief that we weren’t expected to read our work out to the whole group but it was important that we shared in pairs because we were then reassured that there was nothing to fear, this was just “work in progress”, a starting point, etc. the key thing was we had just had time and space to try things out and get something, anything, on the page.
Don’t despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up!
Jeni and I have a book about the project coming out in December called ‘Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups’. Published by Routledge.
In the meantime please visit the nwp.org.uk and join an NWP group – and help us write the next part of the story together.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you Andy, and thank you NATE for inviting me to deliver this lecture, and thank you friends and fellow teaching travellers for coming. It is a great honour to be connected like this with the work of Harold Rosen.
I want to explain how Harold’s work has influenced me in creating and shaping NATE’s national writing project, why an understanding of Harold’s work is desperately needed now, and why teachers of writing should ‘occupy’ writing and let it occupy them. It is our occupation, after all. Teachers of writing should write, and they can grow personally and professionally from writing together. Our grass-roots, teacher-led research project is owned entirely by teachers, and explores the power of such free and autonomous CPD. The results so far are encouraging. The evidence is growing. Together, we are developing confidence in writing and the teaching of writing. Together, we are slowly changing the landscape.
But before I talk further, I want to thank Betty Rosen, Harold’s widow, who is here today. Last month she very kindly invited me to her home to talk about Harold and lend me some of his books. I learnt more about how she and Harold shared a fascination in autobiographical narrative as a place in which identities are shaped, values are expressed and where learners can be re-engaged in a proper sense of themselves in the world. Similarly, in NATE’s national writing project , sharing writing has been an affirmation, and has frequently been what has touched teachers most deeply. Reflecting upon its significance and dynamic has often led them to change their practice.
Betty also kindly lent me a book of Harold’s poems and I am going to honour her by reading one which Harold seems to have addressed to her:
Honey Bee.
Bedraggled blob
Found in the sink
Turned out to be a dead bee
She didn’t think so
Put it on a sheet of kitchen roll
To dry off
Took it into the garden
Nudged it on to a nasturtium leaf
In the sun
In the morning she is straight outside
To see if her dead bee
Has resurrected itself and gone
But there it is still
On its green leaf
Can’t she see it’s dead?
She has detected
Or thinks she has detected a twitch
In one leg
I manage a quiet snort of impatience
Another piece of kitchen roll
And she’s putting back her corpse
On the window ledge in the sun
Soon she’s sure it’s moving
Finds the honey and puts a little near it
And waits and waits and then –
Out of the lifeless body
Comes the tongue thin as a hair
Taking its invalid’s breakfast
I’m interested now
She puts it in an upside down jamjar
A little more honey
The sun warms the jar
Another slow feed
Its black and yellow body is fluffing up
It buzzes in the jar
Released it’s a bee again back from the dead
Out of the window it takes flight
I find this poem both touching and humorous. I love the way it starts so dismissively – ‘Bedraggled blob’ – I hear the open ridicule, and recognise the self-righteous impatience – ‘the quiet snort’ -, and become willingly complicit in his mockery of her lost cause
‘Can’t she see it’s dead?’
But then, out of a body still described as lifeless,
Comes the tongue thin as a hair
Who’s the joke on now? I ask myself somewhat ashamedly, as, through Harold’s eyes, I concentrate on Betty’s magic touch which I, too, had doubted.
By the time the ‘dead bee’ takes flight at the end, even if there isn’t actually an apology for judging too quickly, there is a tenderness and an admiration in what remains unspoken about this so-called resurrection, that was in fact an example of belief, patience, understanding and care – all of which I too often lack. This is a poem of tremendous hope, of second chances. This is a poem which celebrates those who keep faith when all seems doomed. This is a poem about an education in love. This is a poem about never giving up.
It seems to say: Don’t despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up!
How appropriate for these trying times! This Brave New World. For such an example, thank you Harold and thank you B.
Maybe it’s to the trying nature of our times that the title of this conference refers? Brave New World - a dystopian novel from the 1930s by Aldous Huxley – its title a sarcastic rendition of Miranda’s line in the Tempest. Huxley imagined a future world of genetic engineering and social conditioning, where all bar a few free-thinkers, and John Savage in the reservation beyond the barbed wire, know their places – alpha to epsilon. Most people have been infantilised and drugged senseless by consumerism and soma. It could never happen here. Huxley actually taught George Orwell at Eton. (Standards have fallen since). You can see a similarity of mindset in ‘1984’, though each dystopian novel offers a different critique of pre-war and post-war Britain respectively. Every creative act is a critical act, in these cases extrapolating the consequences of the over-controlling state. And they later exchanged opinions on each other’s fiction. Orwell wrote in 1946, in his essay ‘The Prevention of Literature’
“Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer … into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above, and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.”
He goes on to describe how publishers (of the 1940s) feed the appetite for mechanical writing by selling cheap, ready-made plots. “Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others … a sort of algebraic formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others offer packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination – even consciousness, so far as possible – would be eliminated from the process of writing.”
from ‘The Prevention of Literature’: ('George Orwell- Essays'. Penguin Classics 2000. ISBN 0-14-118306-3)
You’d never have thought that nearly 70 years later we might witness the following guidelines in the mark scheme for the KS2 Level 6 writing test:
Mark scheme for 2013 KS2 Level 6 writing test:
‘AF1 – write imaginative and thoughtful texts no longer constitutes part of the mark scheme as the task’s focus is on grammar, punctuation, vocabulary and appropriacy. AF1 will be assessed by teacher assessment of pupils’ compositional writing only.’
Apart from the stupidity of atomising the living dynamic of writing and assessing each part separately, the backwash effect on the curriculum weakens teachers’ and pupils’ ability to create communities whose identities might be founded in meaningful personal writing. It feels almost as if the authorities have enclosed and privatised the common language. Almost as if it has been occupied and we need to take it back.
It was precisely such a distorted view of writing which Michael Rosen, Harold’s son, laid into in his Harold Rosen lecture at last year’s NATE conference – if I wasn’t such a goy I’d feel almost part of the family! – and at the end of his lecture, Michael suggested that, as an antidote to the product-oriented system which pixillates and homogenises writing at the expense of meaningful and authentic processes, NATE should ask ‘published writers’ about how and why they write; and what suggestions would they give to students and teachers on how to do it.
However, we do need to pause and consider what we mean by ‘published writers’. The field of published writers is fairly wide and uneven. We’re all writers now. Do we mean Malorie Blackman or Michael Gove? Both are published writers, and both have given writing suggestions to teachers.
We’ve heard enough from one of those, so here are the suggestions of Malorie Blackman, the children's laureate 2013-2015. She recommends reading as a prime support for becoming a writer. And she goes on to say to writers:
Develop your own style. Don’t copy anyone else’s. Your own voice is individual and unique so don’t be afraid to use it.
Try to get into the habit of writing every day. Keeping a diary is an excellent way of doing this.
Write from the heart as well as the head. Write about what makes you angry, what moves you to tears, the things about which you feel passionately. If you feel it when you write, others will feel it when they read.
Don’t fake it!
http://www.malorieblackman.co.uk/index.php/category/malorie/writingtips/#sthash.YgSS5mfi.dpuf
She also admits
" When I first started writing, I found joining a supportive writing group invaluable."
Now there’s a good idea!
But we need to be careful not to dismiss young writers – or sideline writing teachers - by bowing too low to published writers – of any generation.
In schools as well as colleges, there are a number of initiatives to bring living, published writers into schools. This is often described as 'curriculum enrichment'. I am not against this, provided it does not leave the teacher disempowered, or the children falsely reverential of others or distrustful of themselves - or become something which is 'bolted on' to a curriculum experience rather that deeply rooted in it.
I prefer to see a class of 30 children as one which already contains 30 writers - 31 including the teacher. Here are 31 people who use and share words to story the world and their witness of it, 31 readers and 31 co-respondents. Some may be 'writers' like Benjamin Zephaniah who termed himself a writer (meaning a composer of ideas in words) before he was adept at all the transcriptional niceties. Conversely, although publication carries the blessing of power (somebody believes in me), it does not come with a guarantee of quality - enduring or transient (other people may not): we probably all know several examples of publications of doubtful worth or terrible effect, and plenty more pieces of unpublished writing that have moved us deeply.
We also need to be careful of normalising judgements: they can blind us to the diverse complexities and various 'affordances' of writing. Writing enables discovery, it reifies and makes manageable our traumas; it allows us to hold on and to let go, to revisit our lives and reflect on them; free writing helps us trawl the subconscious; craft and editing give us the space to negotiate meaning; writing helps us keep in touch with long ago and far away . It is an invaluable tool for learning, not just evidence of it.
Of course, all language is metaphor. One of NWP’s most insightful exercises is to test the affordances of writing by finding new facets in unusual places and random objects. Here’s an example from the NWP website :
Writing is like a tiny plastic red car. It has wheels that are a bit stiff, you can push it along and it goes, reluctantly, where you want it to go. There’s no steering wheel, no delicate system of hydraulics that allows you to point it towards your goal with the merest touch of your hand. Steering is achieved by brute force. You really have to push.
Then you discover that if you do something counter-intuitive, say, like holding it down and dragging it backwards, it builds up a momentum all of its own, and you can simply let it go and try to keep up. It might not go where you think it will, it might go round in circles for a while and then shoot off in a totally unexpected direction, but that’s what brings a smile to your face.
You don’t know what happens inside the tiny plastic red car. There’s some mechanism that stores the energy gained from going backwards and releases it in a forwards direction. Someone, somewhere, designed that mechanism. Someone else put it together. You, all you can do, is pull back, then let go, and see what happens.
(To see this writing in context go to http://battypip.wordpress.com/)
Alongside instructional lessons, NWP teachers champion the imagination.
They provide pupils with writing notebooks in which they are free to jot down observations, try out ideas, and have go - and find their own voices and surprise themselves. The result? Fewer 'reluctant' writers, more fluent and original writing.
Hanif Kureishi , 2014, talking about his latest novel -'Last Word', said this:
"Romantics such as Wordsworth and Coleridge knew that the imagination was as dangerous as dynamite, not only politically – the populace might have new, important but dissident ideas – but also inside an individual. The imagination can feel like disorder when it is, in fact, an illumination."
Although - and perhaps because - people's imagination is powerful, they may be schooled to distrust it in favour of normalised/standardised/'elevated' ideas, and the opportunities for them to exercise it may become very circumscribed. Such schooling has the short-term effect of apparently stabilising society, provided enough people conform. In the long-term it is unenlightened, infantilising, unsustainable, socially destructive, and condemns the society to a poverty of ideas, the alienation of individuals and minorities, and the squandering of creative talent. In such a society, 'My Beautiful Laundrette' might never have been published or screened.
NWP is a writing community of teachers owned by teachers. Beholden to no one, it is shaped by the testimony of all participants rather than by an elite of publishers, bureaucrats or politicians. No worthwhile education, least of all in writing - a classic way of teasing out thought and exchanging of views - should ever be determined by commerce or political ideology; it must be openly negotiated - and better understood.
As we know only too well, measurements are everywhere, while things of immeasurable importance are being daily ignored.
Few seem to question what 'writing' actually is, or how notions of it have been culturally constructed. Keats said that writing was ‘the best thing in the world’, by which he meant the expressive and compositional process, the first definition in the OED. But in English schools the term ‘writing’ more frequently denoted, not an active conversation about meaning, but a written product or outcome that can be weighed and measured on a single scale. How are writing processes and products changing in 21st century UK? Why is there such a disjunct between school and university practice? Where does the teaching of writing feature in teacher education? Would the teaching of writing improve if writing teachers had recent and regular experience of writing themselves and of reflecting on the process – as reading teachers had? When ‘reading for pleasure’ is so widely endorsed, why does ‘writing for pleasure’ remain problematic? And what say do writing teachers have over the way in which writing is defined and policed in schools? I don't have answers. That's mainly what motivated me to set up NWP (UK) with Jeni and to find out what willing writing teachers could do for themselves and their pupils through the collective action of simply writing together.
Even though we had no money, and little power, we had ourselves.
So I thought: Don’t despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up.
So, Jeni Smith and I knew we had to take action. We would found a writing project for teachers that would insulate them from de-professionalisation. Writing would literally be in their own hands. They would become agents of change. We gathered quotations from great teachers and writers which could be used to illustrate the thinking which informed the project. That was when I came across these words of Harold’s:
‘Classrooms would be transformed if children wrote the stories they wanted to write rather than the stories teachers asked them to write.’ (1969)
And when I read this, I thought, yes, he’s right. Writing shouldn’t be merely about the acquisition of forms, but, more importantly, it should be about expressing things of significance. How had we lost sight of that? Writing should not be merely about being all dressed up, it should be about having places to go. That should be its driving force. Of course children should learn about conventions and structures which support thinking, but not at the expense of their own energy and self-confidence. Not at the expense of meaning. And children should be listened to for what they want to say, not just marked for how they spell it. When someone cares about their message, they will care more about the medium. Otherwise what you get is what I call connective soup: “Moreover’, ‘Furthermore’, ‘Consequently’, ‘Finally’ can I go out to play now? I’ve done what you asked me to.” The teaching of writing should involve the cultivation of authentic voices, the validation of honest witnesses of the human condition. And to learn, children need to feel that sense of agency and authority from their language use. Merely following orders or conventions is to sell them short for the demands of tomorrow. It is, after all, their language too.
And then Jeni shared with me some words from Harold’s colleague, Jimmy Britton:
‘If you limp around long enough in someone else’s language, you may eventually learn to walk in it.’
Absolutely! I didn’t want children to limp, or merely walk, but to hop, skip and run about to their hearts’ content.
As Professor Ron Carter said, ‘Creativity is not the capability of special people. It is the special capability of all people.’ If you accept we are each created different, by design rather than by accident, then you might conclude that every child matters. As Margaret Meek once said at a LATE conference in the 90s, ‘Every child is nature’s gift to correct culture’s error’. Yes, the children are the real data – that which is given. Unto us a child is given. In which case, we each of us have a moral duty to declare our witness and to respect each other’s truth. Such creativity brings change and threatens the social order, because, every creative act is inevitably an act critical of the context from which it emerges, so it’s not popular with the authorities. That can be why they ‘allow’ it unequally. As teachers we have to be careful that we resist another Anglo-Saxon mantra – that you can’t have your pudding before you’ve eaten your greens. You can’t do your ‘creative’ writing, before you’ve acquired my rules. Phonics first and phonics fast. – a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nonsense words. Especially if you’re in special measures.
If children from certain language backgrounds and aptitudes never get to exercise their creative birthright, then their language learning will be restricted. We each of us need to discover the dynamic of expression and being listened to. Of course it’s a struggle, and of course there are compromises, but it really is all right to be you.
‘I realised that it was all right to be me’. That’s a year 6 girl talking about what it meant to keep a writing journal as part of the dot com foundation work in Birmingham. The dot com foundation operates as part of the Prevent strategy. Their findings are that when children are encouraged to write and discuss things which really matter to them, with the emphasis not on getting things ‘right’ but getting them ‘true’, then they become more confident and, as a key part of the foundation’s work, more resistant to grooming from those with extreme or evil intentions.
And what is true for children, is also true for teachers. To preserve freedom of thought against educational ‘grooming’, they may also benefit from writing themselves out in writing journals, from reading about different approaches, from listening to and encouraging each other, from experimentation, from practice and from collaborative reflection.
Teachers needed help too. Teaching had become encumbered by writing frames, it had been shackled by scaffolding. Many teachers were second-guessing ‘next steps for learning’ without listening to where the writers wanted to go, and the children’s writing was stumbling, tangled in targets. Some in the profession had become dependent and infantilised by prescription from the centre. (Does any of this sound familiar?)
Teachers had been told what to do so often that they could no longer hear themselves think. They needed space. They needed to rediscover their own power to shape their own stories. They needed to practise the writing that they preached. They needed to gather together in writing groups and feel the fear and do it anyway. They needed this for their own mental health. But also, if they developed the necessary empathy with their pupils, they would feel within themselves how classrooms could be changed for the better - as Harold had encouraged. And teachers, rather than managers and bureaucrats, would become the agents of change.
And here’s Harold again, 25 years ago, on the politics of writing:
“ ... it is necessary to insist again and again on the need to disrupt the authoritative voice with the unheard voices of our students (so difficult for all of us) to articulate, develop, refine and advance their meanings as against the mere reproduction of the words of the textbook, the worksheet, the encyclopedia and the guides. To insist on this involves squaring up to the oppressive power of authoritative language.”
So we squared up. We particularly squared up to those in the National Literacy Strategy who saw no benefit in teachers writing together and owning their own project , which, they said, would never improve writing. This flew in the face of the evidence Professor Richard Andrews presented to them that 40 years of the National Writing Project in the US had raised writing standards in US schools.
In fact, when the National Strategies in England were promoting, separately, Every Child a Reader and Every Child a Writer, at the same time, in the US there was an integrated programme known as ‘Every Child a Reader and Writer’. (Do you see what they’ve done there?) But the critical difference lay in how the programmes in England and the US were differently evaluated. In England the programmes were evaluated by how far pupils levels rose. But that wasn’t the criterion for evaluation in the US. The US programme was evaluated by how meaningful pupils found their own reading and writing to have been. Pupil voice. Yes. In the US, with 40 years of a national writing project, with teachers like George Hillocks, Don Murray and Peter Elbow reflecting on the writing process, there’s a longer tradition of looking at the kernel of writing rather than its shell.
NWP UK borrowed from the US experience, and from the work of Pat D’Arcy who, in 2000, had recommended that the process of meaningful, personal writing should be more explicitly taught in schools. Paul Gardner re-emphasised the same point in 'Who am I? Compositions of the self' (English in Education Vol 48 No 3 2014):
In the UK, this dual purpose of writing, the process of learning and the communicative function, is perhaps in danger of becoming lost in an increasingly prescriptive curriculum, which attempts to frame teachers as technical deliverers of language skills.... (this) dislocates (students) from the social contexts of their lives and the functions of writing to 'understand and be understood'. (pp230-231)
You don't need a referendum to know that language is culturally complex, or to realise the risks to young learners of distancing them from their local, social and personal contexts by insisting only on the speedy acquisition of one privileged dialect.
Peter Elbow, a writer whose thinking informs the work of NWP US and NWP UK alike, warned 40 years ago of the dangers to democracy of killing writing with 'correction' and failing to cultivate individual voices.
'The habit of compulsive, premature editing doesn't just make writing hard. It also makes writing dead. Your voice is damped out by all the interruptions, changes, and hesitations between the consciousness and the page. In your natural way of producing words there is a sound, a texture, a rhythm--a voice--which is the main source of power in your writing. I don't know how it works, but this voice is the force that will make a reader listen to you. Maybe you don't like your voice; maybe people have made fun of it. But it's the only voice you've got. It's your only source of power. You better get back into it, no matter what you think of it. If you keep writing in it, it may change into something you like better. But if you abandon it, you'll likely never have a voice and never be heard.'
'Writing Without Teachers'. New York: Oxford UP, 1973, 1-7
The goodwill of creative group leaders in NWP UK has meant that in the last 6 years, 100s of teachers have been involved in writing together and listening to each other and laughing and crying and talking and bonding, and 1000s of their pupils have benefited from the permission to own their own writing, and reluctant writers have rediscovered the joy and power of writing.
You may say you haven’t time or that this won’t raise standards, but NWP teachers do find time to write alongside their pupils. They know that pupils are more influenced by what their teachers do than by what they say. Familiarity and confidence with the messy and unpredictable dynamic of writing – the relationships within it and the conversations around it – are very much needed now. And there really is no short-cut to doing this yourself. For a teacher of reading to read would be readily accepted and encouraged. Why is it not the case that teachers of writing might be expected to write? It’s not an indulgence, it’s a necessary professional act. And you can get a long way with 5 minutes a day. Most NWP groups meet for a couple of hours on a Saturday once a half-term. And they’re revived by it. Unfortunately, under pressure to ‘raise standards’ in tests, much CPD money is wasted on patronising training schemes, structures and conventions which, while they enrich the providers, turn pupils off learning and teachers off teaching. Meanwhile teachers could do themselves and their pupils more lasting good by joining an NWP writing group. And it’s free.
We must not let others tell our story. We must get into the habit of telling it ourselves. All that needs to happen for bad things to prevail, is for good people to do nothing.
Do not despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up.
I’d like to give you all a taste of NWP writing and talking together in a few minutes. We’ll have a go. But first let me tell you something about what such writing and talking can do for you – both personally and professionally.
In ‘Talk as Autobiography’ May 1991, Harold explores the power of anecdote and the power of memory in re-shaping experiences. Everyone has powerful memories; everyone learns how to select and frame moments, events and sequences from their own experience, establish them as sites for the definition of self-image, for the crystallisation of values, for a conversation with meaning and culture. Sharing them not only defines and affirms the self, but it also bonds and defines a group. Reflecting on such memories is an education in narrative.
Autobiographical storytelling belongs with trust, informality and conviviality and most easily comes into its own when people are comfortable with each other and do not feel constrained to be on their best behaviour... To make a space for students to tell their personal stories is above all to affirm the worth of their own culture and at the same time make discoveries about it.
Harold remembers one apocryphal story polished over many tellings, about visiting a manor house in Devon.
After looking over the house we settled down on the lawn to eat our lunch. Major-whatever-he-was came charging out and said, ‘Do you usually eat your meals on other people’s lawns?’ and we crawled away: that was only the coup de grace after a series of devastating put-downs.
Harold outlines how familiarity, feelings, audience response and time may all affect the length and detail of different iterations of the same story.
Harold also observes how stories told in social situations may be more or less prominent parts of conversations, triggering memories, or conferring permissions to embark on yet more stories. Harold’s story triggers this one from me:
My father lived in a house in Switzerland. One day he had asked a Swiss workman to come and mend the window shutters. Our family was in the middle of lunch, when, much to my father’s surprise, the man suddenly appeared at the window, rather than ringing the doorbell. My father stormed out of the house demanding angrily in broken French, and an English accent, ‘Est ce que c’est naturel promenader dans les jardins des autres personnes dans l’apres-midi? Est ce que c’est naturel?’ It was unfortunate that the dodgiest phrase was the one that my father repeated. The man was taken aback. My father had meant to imply that the man’s behaviour was abnormal to the point of rudeness. But the man felt that my father was implying he was some sort of nudist. A further irony was that my father’s job was with the United Nations.
Now it’s your turn. You’ll need a pen and paper. I’d like you to reflect on your writing history – how you became the writer you are today. What significant moments can you remember – as a child, at home, at school, college or in teaching, in your personal or professional life – when writing really mattered for any reason. You’ve got two minutes to jot down the brief headlines for three or four moments that stick in your mind.
Now I’d like you to briefly compare notes with your neighbour. What similarities and differences are there? Have any of your memories anything in common? 3 minutes
Now choose ONE of those moments to write about. Once you have decided, silence the critic in your head and write quickly and freely, without stopping, not crossing out or editing. You will not be sharing this with anyone, unless you want to. 4 minutes.
Let me finish by looking at what one outstanding Primary school found when they had set up their own teachers’ writing group
· Teachers and senior leaders wrote and shared their writing - and found the experience rewarding.
· They found writing surprisingly emotional - and they empathised with children who found writing hard.
· They learnt that freedom is useful when you're trying to gather your thoughts and experiment. If you experience how confusing and distracting it feels to be 'over-directed' and cajoled when you're writing, you probably won't do this to others you're trying to help towards fluency.
· Teachers gave children their own writing notebooks, and the children (in classes from year 1 to year 6) became writers of their own stories, rather than scribes of other people's.
· Almost all children became more engaged as writers.
· At playtime, some year 5 writers asked, "Can we stay in and write?"
· Children talked more easily and intelligently about writing; they did not have a checklist of things to listen for; they listened attentively to each other's writing and were more prepared to work on improving the quality of their writing after they had received feedback from their peers.
And what conclusions did the senior leaders draw?
1. Teachers who write together discover aspects of writing which help them improve their own teaching of writing. .
2. By reflecting on differences between a teachers’ writing group and their classroom contexts, teachers learn important messages about reader-writer relationships.
3. Less confident pupils grow as writers when their teacher writes alongside them.
4. Pupils, particularly boys, benefit from regular opportunities to write freely
Let me finish with one teacher’s evaluation of the power of NWP:
I really can’t understate the impact the NWP has had on me, personally and my professional practice. Like many teachers of English, the last time I ever did any “proper” creative writing was when I was in primary school myself. So, over XX years on (!), I remember very clearly coming along to that first session of the NWP group at the MK Art gallery one rainy, dismal autumn Saturday. I was really looking forward to the prospect of writing again but felt so inhibited by worries that my standard of writing wouldn’t be “good enough,” that I wouldn’t have anything “meaningful to say” that I spent most of the session chewing my pencil, crossing out initial scribblings and moving around the art gallery trying to find somewhere to sit comfortably, just like the reluctant writer in a class. (I settled on an air vent in the end but was never sure if it was an exhibit or not). It was a huge relief that we weren’t expected to read our work out to the whole group but it was important that we shared in pairs because we were then reassured that there was nothing to fear, this was just “work in progress”, a starting point, etc. the key thing was we had just had time and space to try things out and get something, anything, on the page.
Don’t despair. Think again. Keep faith. Stick together. Never give up!
Jeni and I have a book about the project coming out in December called ‘Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups’. Published by Routledge.
In the meantime please visit the nwp.org.uk and join an NWP group – and help us write the next part of the story together.
Thank you for listening.