Whenever I go into schools to run
workshops I establish three rules at the outset:
- Respect
- Give It A Go
- Have Fun
I always explicitly designate the last
of these rules as the most important. I want the pupils to enjoy the process of
writing and manipulating ideas, and I want them to leave with positive memories
of me and my visit.
Once I have established these rules the
pupils are divested of any notion that I am there to ‘judge’ or to ‘inspect’
them and their work. As a consequence they are often less inhibited when it
comes to exploring ideas and getting some words down on the page. It is often
the case that previously reluctant pupils find it within themselves to write
and perform things that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise have, but my emphasis on
having fun can, occasionally, have an unintended consequence: pupils are so
busy laughing and being likeably silly that they forget to come up with quality
work. Sure they’ve enjoyed the process, but no teacher would want to show their
finished product to an Ofsted inspector!
It is never my purpose to grind such
work out of pupils, so on the one hand this doesn’t bother me too much: able
pupils can come up with ‘quality work’ anyway and are given an excuse for the
moment to let their hair down, and for less able pupils freedom and fun are
surely the first steps on the road to producing quality work. But on the other
hand it does raise something of a dilemma. Of course I want pupils to have fun
with me, but I also emphatically do want
them to produce work that they and their teachers can be proud of. I want
pupils to write with a sense of liberation from expectations, but I want their
work to have lots of lovely examples of simile, metaphor, alliteration, personification,
onomatopoeia and the like. Similarly, I want pupils to find their own voice,
but I do not want them to come up with stuff that is infantile, platitudinous
or nonsensical. I’m sure a lot of visiting authors would claim to find
themselves in a similar position.
I haven’t researched any of this; I
haven’t read the relevant articles in the relevant journals or anything like
that, but I suspect that, like so many other things when it comes to the
classroom, it is all about striking a balance. How might one do this? Well, it
seems obvious yet crucial to note that visiting authors are not teachers (they
may well be qualified to teach, but they do not tend to visit schools in that
capacity). Given this, it is to be expected that the general tone of the
session is different to that of a normal school lesson. As I mentioned earlier, I set the tone explicitly at the beginning of each workshop. Once
one has established a certain atmosphere by explicitly emphasising the
important of having fun, then the rest of the session takes place against this
backdrop. Steps can then be taken to direct pupils towards a satisfactory
outcome. Perhaps these steps look a bit like what teachers would tell pupils in
a normal literacy lesson: use at least two similes, use at least two instances
of alliteration, or whatever. The issue may not be the content of the workshop
so much as the tone with which it is conducted.
But it must be admitted that something
about this continues to grate with me. If I am telling pupils how to write
their poems, then are they really giving a part of themselves in their writing?
If not, then surely the whole beauty and point of poetry is lost. Perhaps the
thing to do is to make suggestions rather than give orders. And perhaps one
also needs clearly to identify the purpose of the visit. Is the visit intended
to promote poetry/writing as catharsis, or is it intended to raise standards in
literacy? If the former, then perhaps no prescriptions or limits need be set at
all; if the latter then maybe they do. In all likelihood schools will simply invite
a poet in to run poetry workshops, having no more explicit expectations than this.
The onus then falls on the poet to decide what sort of workshop leader they
want to be, and in turn how they want to market themselves. Speaking for
myself, I want to be someone who promotes both fun and high literacy standards; I want to have my cake and eat it too
(of course I would never encourage a pupil to use a cliché such as this in
their writing!). As I develop and grow, perhaps I will get close to achieving
this aim.
