The Expressive Arts

Fred Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367457860
• eBook ISBN: 9781000044676
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1993, this book addresses the issue of the place of the expressive arts in primary schools in the years around and beyond the implementation of the National Curriculum. It comprises a set of case studies on the language arts, painting and drawing, dance, drama and music, that suggest ways forward in teaching these arts to children aged between four and eleven.

CHAPTER 1
Six Ways of Looking at a Torch

Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day. (Mr Weller in Pickwick Papers)

The first part of this chapter is an account of the writing of a poem.

Of course, that sentence immediately begs a huge question. According to the poet Vernon Scannell, children can’t write poems because they haven’t the necessary technique or experience: he says, in A Proper Gentleman, his delightful account of a poet’s residency in an Oxfordshire town, that very young children do not write poems; that to make a poem ‘demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft’.

It all depends on what you mean by poem. Scannell must be thinking of the dictionary definition ‘verbal artefacts of a high order’ — though there is clearly no objective account anywhere of what is a high or low order. Perhaps, in his phrase ‘knowledge of the craft’, he is really defending the territory he and his colleagues have staked out for themselves. Indeed, ‘craft’ sounds slightly masonic. It’s for us to know and for you to find out - if you can.

Stillman, in his ever-useful introduction to his Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary, offers a more inclusive definition than Scannell implies. After saying that verse is ‘composition in words that employs deliberate patterns of sound’, he goes on: ‘Poetry … transcends verse in a way that has escaped definition … [it] seems to partake of the miraculous … it adds up to more than the sum of its parts.’

In what follows, I admit that the definition of ‘poem’ is less than fully dealt with, as I try to tease out what children learn as they write in a purposeful and intense way. Indeed, at times, during work for previous articles on the teaching of poetry, ‘poem’ has seemed most helpfully defined at least partly in terms of learning - and not just by teachers. As the Czech poet and scientist Miroslav Holub has put it, ‘when I write a poem I do an experiment with a yes or no answer’. Writing a poem is about exploring, hypothesising, making little temporary resting places that give us pause in our frightened contemplation of our predicament. There is something miraculous in this, and the same is true for all art. Each painting, each dance, each drama, each composition says ‘So I am here. Where next?’

So I define poetry - and all art - as a teacher; the only teacher, Shaw commented somewhere, except torture. But my research into the entries to a national young people’s poetry competition (’The Sifter’s Story’, in The Cambridge Journal of Education, 1988) suggests that ‘poem’ is mostly defined by teachers as a harking back, through rhyme and archaic diction, to a sentimentally viewed past. Thus entries used rhyme, obscurity, quotation, and archaic and foreign references as indispensable conditions; the cultural definition of poetry implied by this exercise was emphatically about honouring a tradition.

And scannings of art society exhibitions, and sittings through amateur dramatic society productions suggest the same is true about the visual and dramatic arts. By contrast, in this case study, a child is experimenting, with her feelings, with the world around her, and with her language. Most of my early notes for what follows were made when I was Danielle’s headteacher.

Six way’s of looking at a torch

a spot light hitting on the star of our show.

a sense of ice cold apon the world.

the ripple’s on the water spalshing on rocks.

the sun with is hipasonik beam.

a spy on the loose looking for a rober.

a pool of blood the shimmer in it.

a golden morning that cant wate to begein

a robot when hes spoted his enamy the light sudden flash’s on.

a bandit running on the streets loose

a mass of coulers in a worl to make a gold couler

a silver ring lost reapet again in the light

a horomove moon showing up on every one

a holiday sun not in England this year

a mase of street’s I know hes here some were

a dico as the light’s flicer on and off

a help gaget all way’s ready to help unles the batary’s have run down,

a colarge just finished

a sad face with tear’s running dawn

a holow tree just wating to be choped down

a sound fadeing away in the disdence

a pair of eye’s blue green yellow

a spainish doll danceing

Using a suggestion of Sandy Brownjohn’s (in Does It Have to Rhyme?) I had tried to demonstrate to children that there is more than one way of looking at something. Brownjohn uses Wallace Stevens’ sequence of short lyrics Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. I held objects up, and showed how different they looked viewed from different angles: spider plant, shell, a bit of a car engine, a mirror. The children quickly saw the freedom this gave them to use words they may well not have used before. The shell, said someone, was like ‘a cat curled up by the fire’. ‘From behind,’ wrote someone else in her notebook, ‘the mirror is nothing at all.’ And another: ‘the cauliflower is a brain’. Danielle began writing with a frenetic speed that it is visible in her rough draft.

This was her tenth poem written with me. She was then a nine-year-old girl brimming with verbal ideas, which sometimes flowed all too prolifically from her, rich and unconsidered; colourful and well-lit, but ill-defined and formless. In the classroom, despite an occasional act of apparently not listening, once my preamble is over, it rapidly emerges that Danielle has been paying sufficient attention. You can tell from her writing. One foggy morning she had behaved in her usual half-present way as I tried to use the weather to capture the class’s imagination. She wrote (corrected version):

I pull the steel trap.

Step to find

a cold whisp shudder of mist.

The white flour is lumpy and cold and not

to taste. Pours out before me.

The freeze melts my face

but no water lies at my feet

It’s a white mirror you cannot touch.

Your brain drops out of your forehead with pain.

Your hand disappears in the light dark.

A tree glimmers still with fright.

An invisible man taps you on your shoulder.

A house, crooked and bent for doves

blends in with the colour of the mist.

Danielle has a different way of paying attention from most children, and I realised suddenly, while attending a lecture on the privatisation of groundstaff in schools, that it was the same as my way. I tune in to what I think I need, and let the rest go hang. I then concentrate on my private thoughts, or a book brought into the room for the purpose, or (on this occasion) a draft of this chapter.

Danielle is also a brilliant disco-dancer, as I’ve discovered while running money-raising sessions in the school hall at lunchtimes. Her sense of rhythm appears to be perfect, as she sings The Calypso Carol in the front row of the choir, her singing forceful and enthusiastic; her nodding head following the off-beat. This sense of rhythm appears in her writing in a grasp of cadence. Her phrasing is immaculate.

The uncontrolled piece with which I began this chapter was the work of about twenty minutes. Had I known I was going to get so involved, I would have checked all this, like a good number-crunching researcher: how long it took, how she went about the task, whether she talked most of the time, where she was sitting. I’d certainly have kept her manuscript. But all this was merely human life then, not the subject for a chapter in a book. So the details are lost. I just remember Danielle coming to the desk and saying ‘I’ve finished’. I said, after reading the poem, ‘This is brilliant, Danielle’ or words roughly to that effect and then (at this point the focus shifts from Danielle’s writing to my teaching) I corrected some of her mistakes, technical matters of spelling and punctuation. She stood impatiently by me, probably hoping that something more interesting would happen soon, like Adam coming in late, or the secretary looking in the door to call me to the phone, or the class clown, Jeremy, falling off his chair.

I was too quick to correct - almost all teachers are. And if I want to demonstrate how ill-timed technical correction can be, I can do no better than the following: I originally wrote this on an electric typewriter, and the paper gave me the last two paragraphs like this:

This rather wiuld, uncontrolled piece was the work, of about twenty minutes: if I8d know I was going to get so involved, I’d have checked all, this kind of studff at the time. I said This is brilliant, Danielle - let8s look at some of the mistakes’ - and then i went through it, correcting technical errors of spelling and punctuation. She stood impatiently by me, probably hoping something more interesting would happen soon.

I think I was too imediate on this correction thing. I think nearly all teachers are. And if I want to demonstrate this, I need lok no forward that the paper coming out of this typewriter right now: let me give you the last two paragraphs exactly as I typed them first:

I would be impatient if a reader were to respond to those quick-typed words as though I meant them. Or rather, as though the crudities of expression, let alone the grammatical mistakes, were what counted, were part of the essential me. In fact, the paragraphs were a netting of something before it escaped. They constituted a draft, and I didn’t worry about any technical inaccuracy, nor about any crudities of expression. As Frank Smith says in Writing and the writer, ‘composing and transcribing … can interfere with one another’. Where something has to be netted, correct transcribing has to wait for later, whether one is a child writing in the classroom or an adult working under different pressures in a study.

But because Danielle is a child, I had no worries about homing in, after the first verbal encouragement, on mistakes. I was concentrating on what the National Curriculum Council calls (following Frank Smith) the ‘secretarial’ side of writing, as opposed to the ‘compositional’ side. Smith points out that wealthy writers are lucky enough to be able to dispense with this aspect of writing: one thinks of linen-suited novelists and song-writers dictating their work to secretaries; letting them worry about punctuation, spelling and the right keys of the typewriter. The fact that this distinction can be made in writers’ lives should alert us to the existence of these two aspects of writing.

I would have said that I was almost entirely interested in the composition of Danielle’s work here - but, apart from the bland and unhelpful ‘brilliant’, I made all my initial comments on the secretarial si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Original Title Page
• Original copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• The Author
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Six Ways of Looking at a Torch
• 2 Where is the Age of Nine Gone?
• 3 Off the Wall and Out of the Frame
• 4 And in the Market Place
• 5 And I Celebrate All Rhythms
• 6 Why Don’t They Teach Us to Dance?
• 7 Drama’s Magic Box
• 8 Travelling Light in the Britten Room
• Notes Towards a Conclusion
• Reference
• Index