It is my firm belief that ‘those
who CAN, teach’. Equally, I would argue that ‘those who teach, should DO’. For
this reason, it is a central priority of mine to continue practising my
subjects alongside teaching them – and so I found myself, continually espousing
the joys and benefits of reading for pleasure as I do, at the 2015 Cheltenham
Literature Festival, in the children’s tent, eagerly awaiting the appearances
of Judith Kerr and Michael Morpurgo. I was there to boost my own enjoyment of
children’s literature, and to hopefully come away with new recommendations for
my classes.
However, what instead emerged
were insights into Morpurgo’s creative processes in the run-up to his writing
of new books. Somewhat surprisingly, I found that the author does not enjoy the
act of writing (a feeling certainly relatable, in my experience, to some
students) and that his real joy is to be found in the preparation phase of
writing, a so-called ‘Dreamtime’, in which music, art, sketching, reading and
other creative stimuli are used to facilitate imagination and to gather
together musings which might find use in the final work of fiction.
The way that Morpurgo described
this preparatory work appealed to me, and reinforced the fact that the fiction
writing we try to engender in classrooms is very often completely artificially
constructed, and devoid of the time required for a deep and mature formulation
of ideas. ‘Real’ writers rarely work under such constraints of time and space,
and it is surely unsurprising that student creative writing is sometimes
disappointing. Notably, Morpurgo mentioned that to prepare for writing, he
reads. It is of course true that voracious readers are exposed to numerous
ideas for the style and content of their own writing, and this struck me as
being a major disadvantage for my Year 11 class, featuring many proud and
self-professed non-readers, at the time.
Having a very short amount of
curriculum time available to improve a piece of GCSE writing coursework, I took
inspiration from ‘Dreamtime’ and put together an hour-long session in which I
hoped to bring my sixteen-year-olds back to their earlier childhoods, in which
the joys of exploration, imagination and discovery were foregrounded to a
greater degree. Students entered the room, with tables pushed to the side, and
sat on the floor, immediately transforming the space into something unusual.
Here, they heard a dramatic monologue read aloud. Next, we went around the
circle, creating a story one word at a time. After this, we moved into a corner
of the room lit only by desk lamps and read a short ghost story. There
followed, during the hour, further short readings, video clips, and pieces of
music. Crucially, there was time allowed after each episode for students to try
a very short mini creative writing task. These fragments were retained for
later use.
This was designed as a one-off
lesson, a bit of an experiment and certainly not something that I would
advocate without a very carefully planned structure. It is impossible to
measure the impact that this session had on the students’ writing, but what is
for certain is that the new piece of creative writing coursework produced in
the subsequent lessons was of a far higher standard, and notably featured far
more interesting and exciting content, than did their initial attempts. It is
purely my sense that this session, so far removed as it was from my students’
usual experience of lessons, at the very least served to alter their
perspective of the task, reminded them of the playful nature and freedom of
writing, and gave them licence to express their imaginative ideas, temporarily
liberated from the overwhelming strictures of technical accuracy – this would
come later, and indeed did come, as part of the redrafting process.
From this point onwards, creative
writing was tangibly approached with a more positive mindset and students asked
often for a repeat of the session. It makes sense to me that if we aim to
replicate a final product which is edging towards a professional standard (and
if we’re not then what is the aim?), then we ought too to try to replicate the
process which leads to that product. In this way, my glimpse into Michael
Morpurgo’s creative process of ‘Dreamtime’, something which has been proven to
achieve results for him, was the enabling process which led to improved final
products for my students.
