Teaching Poetry in the Primary School

Perspectives for a New Generation

David Carter

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134103973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

First Published in 1999. Based on the author's experience of teaching poetry to children for more thirty years, this book offers guidance on engaging young children minds in poetry in line with the Literacy Hour.

Chapter One
Children and Poetry

‘When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing. Seeing and showing are phenomenologically in violent antithesis. And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know……… They demonstrate to the child that the earth is round, that it revolves around the sun. And the poor dreaming child has to listen to all that! What a release for your reverie when you leave the classroom to go back up the side hill, your side hill! What a cosmic being the dreaming child is!’ (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie)¹

Poetry and the National Curriculum

This book has grown out of the work of the Clwyd Poetry Project and, in particular, its dissemination book, The Power to Overwhelm² which was published in April 1997. In it I attempt to reconcile what some observers would call the irreconcilable. On the one hand there are the demands made by poetry, the spirit of creativity and the nature and needs of children. On the other there are those made by the Education Reform Act of 1988 with its National Curriculum and, more recently, by the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) with its ‘Literacy Hour’. Unless these contrary forces are reconciled, however, the future of poetry in schools and, more importantly, the future development of children’s sensibilities are grim indeed. In order to make such a reconciliation here in this book, those two forces need to be examined.

The story begins in late 1992, by which time the National Curriculum for English was in operation but had not yet been reviewed by Sir Ron Dearing. I launched the Clwyd Poetry Project at that time as a research and development project in the teaching of poetry in primary schools. It aimed to review current practice and to broaden approaches, and it started from the hypothesis that the demands of the more formal aspects of National Curriculum English were driving teachers to neglect the subject’s aesthetic elements.

The 1995 (Dearing) version of the National Curriculum for English refers to poetry here and there, but fails to consider its potential contribution to the development of pupils’ language, sensibilities and dream-power. So, no rationale for the place and value of poetry in children’s education appears in it. Indeed, an examination of the Level Descriptions shows that poetry was not in the minds of those who composed them. The descriptions for ‘Writing’, for instance, always refer to prose, as here at Level 4: ‘Pupils are beginning to use grammatically complex sentences, extending meaning.’³

The reference here is to pupils’ handling of syntax, which is the stuff of prose. Poetry, however, is written - and extends meaning to its audience - in more than grammatically complex structures. But the Level Description here makes no reference to pupils’ use of imagery, rhythm, rhyme, personification, alliteration or any other poetic device. It goes on to indicate how pupils ought to spell, punctuate and do their handwriting.

To neglect poetry in this way, within the legally-binding manual for primary teachers’ work in English, is to assign it minor status. Poetry is treated there as a fringe activity, one that is unlikely to figure in the ‘main findings’ or the ‘key issues’ of an Ofsted report. It was, therefore, one main aim of the work of the Clwyd Poetry Project to claim a major status for poetry in the primary school.

The minds of young children

The mind of a young child is a medium with infinite possibilities. It possesses its unique properties, drawn from its birthrights and experiences. These are beginning to make shapes. It is a mind that is acutely tuned, and it uses words acutely - as when a three-year-old draws Daddy on a pad, lifts the page, sees the imprint on the next page and calls it ‘a bruise of Daddy’. What I want to emphasise by this example is the fact that a child is born with a poetic voice, which is manifest very early. It is there, for instance, in an infant’s need to play with a cry or with bodily rhythms. It is there in the toddler’s instinct to make a metaphorical comparison as a way of experimenting with sound and sense. When, for instance, another three-year-old calls sunlight streaming through a glass ‘an angel’, she is exercising her poetic voice.

The acute tuning between a young child’s mind and language endures well in early life. So, by the time children come to school, their teachers’ concern should not be focused exclusively on introducing them to poetry but should be equally aimed at letting loose each child’s poetic voice into a poetic environment. This means not only providing poetry books and lessons but also encouraging an excited awareness of the play of language. The poetic voice exists as much in conversations as in the business of writing a poem; in the perceptions brought in from street and field as in great works of literature.

Any work of literature, whether it be written by Shakespeare or a six-year-old child, is made from a dynamic interaction between the writer (or speaker), the world and words. But the post-Dearing document and the NLS ‘Framework’ treat all the results of such interactions as mere language units for study. And the great weakness of such an approach to English, which seeks to describe exactly what children should be able to do at each level of their development, is that language is treated simply as a tool, and literature simply as material on which to hone it. In these two documents no aim is poetic. The whole approach is driven by programmed functions. Hence, literature is seen as having value in its fixed meanings and uses rather than in its openness to personal interpretation and response. But poetry has a far greater value than this view implies. The poetic voice in action may be more important for the future of society than most kinds of prose. This is because the poet is doing something quite different from the writer of, say, the instructions accompanying a fitted kitchen assembly kit.

When the eleven-year-old writer of the following poem, Neil, presented it to me in this ‘first draft’ form one morning many years ago, with pride and excitement, he was participating, at his tender age, in an ancient process by which language is replenished and renewed. Here he writes about some of the effects of the miners’ strike of 1972:

’Power Cuts’
Electricity pulsates through cables,
beating in time with the turning generator.
Click! The terrible, exciting switch
that cuts out light and warmth.
Tarvin blacks out, candles light up rooms.
A candle-lit pork sausage dinner.
Grumblings as ‘Dr Who’ blacks out.
Washing up done in a meagre flame.
Fullup, fullup, the cards smack on the table.
’Hearts for trumps’.
Cards are played. Lost. Lost. Won.
The games go on.
The flames burn at the wick.
Wax slowly diminishes, dripping balls
of heat fall into the plate.
Feet sound on stairs, water in the basin.
Then sleep snores.

The poetic voice here re-enacts experience through the medium of language and makes of it something newly real. The value - indeed, the very existence - of such a process, as part of children’s education in school, is insidiously undermined by the approaches imposed by the post-Dearing document and the NLS’s ‘Framework’. This book is dedicated to its defence.

Poetry in the primary school

In school, language development starts with the children’s own language - the noises they make, the words they speak, the stories they tell. It is a foolish teacher who thrusts too much other language on them (even in the form of poems) too early. Children need to feel a sense of affirmation for the language and its stories that they already carry with them. Then they find it easier to absorb new language, new stories, new sounds and new worlds.

So, in seeking to develop a poetic way with language, a teacher needs to respond to the child as much as the child responds to the teacher. It is a two-way process, always. But the wise teacher will introduce plenty of poetry into the process, regularly involving the children in hearing it, reading it, writing it, speaking it and engaging with it in other ways. The essential aim is to foster each child’s sense of poetry as sounds in the air as well as words on the page, and their sense of themselves as being dreamers, readers and makers of poetry.

Collections of books in primary schools are dominated by stories and non-fiction. The poetry section is often small, with a few books of comic verse well-thumbed. Ideally, there should be greater provision, so that a child would be almost as likely to encounter a book of poems as a book of stories or information. The same can be said of displays in school. In the plethora of signs, sayings, instructions and pupils’ work, poetry is often absent. It deserves a more significant position in the visual life of schools, a number of locations where children can reflect on a piece of poetry, places for them to ‘stand and stare’.

One of our major duties is, of course, the teaching of reading; and reading is more than just decoding. In a written text there is always a complex structure of awareness, attitude, know-how and sensitivity. In any poem this structure is specially important: and it is essential that we awaken children’s feeling for it as we teach them to read a poem as well as how to decode, to read stories and how to use information books. Reading a poem should arouse feelings and opinions in a child and lead to the need to express and share them. So the teaching of poetry should involve the young reader in a wide variety of experiences - not only in reflective reading but also in recitation, in enactment through dance and drama, in setting lyrics to tunes, in painting imagery and in playing with ideas as well as weighing the meanings in words.

In close partnership with the teaching of reading is the teaching of writing. But, again, the highest priority here should be on equipping children with a vital means to develop their own dreamings, thoughts and feelings into active communications. Whilst being of increasing importance to the development of civilisation, writing is basically a form of expression. Everybody needs it and when children gain it they become significantly empowered members of their culture and civilisation. Without it they are reduced, and the NLS is quite right to lay so much emphasis on raising standards of achievement in writing as well as in reading.

However, there are grave dangers in an approach to teaching writing which is so obsessively focused on prose and, in particular, transactional prose. Of course, we all need to be able to negotiate the practicalities of our lives through writing as well as through talking. Yet there is a stronger demand within us to find our own characteristic voice in writing. Standardisation may oil the machinery of everyday life with its needs to earn a living and provide for our families, but without that sense of our own individual worth in the world life itself is reduced. One would only have to listen to the despairing voices of individuals calling the Samaritans to realise how profoundly important this is.

Primary schools have a unique influence in this respect, far and above any other single institution outside of the family. An individual’s sense of selfness and of self value develops early and, if abused in the primary years, its recovery requires a great deal of investment. Writing, perhaps more than any other single skill, offers children in their primary schools the most powerful way of developing this sense of selfness and self value, but not if writing consists merely of answering questions and working entirely within the frame of reference provided by others.

The self-expression movement of the sixties and seventies in writing may have got the balance between the transactional and the expressive wrong in favour of the expressive, but now we are in danger of doing the same thing the other way round. Children, therefore, demand more than exercises and models provided by other people’s texts. A classroom where good writing takes place will accommodate this but also the habitual opportunity to give voice to the dreamings from children’s inner worlds and to the world which they share with each other.

For the teacher, the most important single feature in teaching reading and writing in the ways implied above is to be reflexive. In other words, teachers need to develop the habit of giving and receiving, receiving and giving, by which a reciprocal way of working is established with children. At times this may even mean relinquishing your prepared lesson because the children come to you full of something else. Daring to do that, on occasion, is a vital part of teaching poetry, which is a mutual, imaginative engagement in meaning-through-language that transcends the mere drilled study of poems written down in a book or, worse still, the filling in of cloze procedure worksheets. Unfortunately, reflexiveness is somewhat undermined by the NLS’s proposals for the ‘literacy hour’ in which short bursts of whole class teaching are organised around longer periods of group and individual work. However, it will be in the teacher’s use of her own time in that longer period where her reflexiveness will count.

The work of Clwyd Poetry Project

With such attitudes towards poetry and with these aims in mind, in late 1992 I attempted to design a more comprehensive approach to poetry in primary schools than the one promoted by current English regulations. This consists of a framework of eight modes of encounter between children and poetry as follows:

1. Listening: children listening to teachers and others reading poetry in a range of situations.
2. Speaking: speaking or singing poems or songs learnt by heart and the reading out loud from scripts.
3. Reading: poetry for teaching reading skills and for developing reading as a leisure activity.
4. Memorising: learning poetry by heart for a variety of classroom and whole-school performances.
5. Creatively conversing and conferencing: talking to learn or the exploration of meaning in poems by groups of readers, sometimes in classroom ‘conferences’.
6. Expressively engaging: exploring meaning in poetry through expressive response in the artforms of dance, drama, music, visual art and writing.
7. Composing or making poems of one’s own: the oral composition of poems, including young children’s spontaneous poetic utterances, and composition through writing.
8. Performing/exhibiting/publishing: making work public through a wide range of performances, displays in exhibition spaces around the school and the publication of children’s poetry in magazine and book form.⁴

Three surveys were carried out during 1992 and 1993: of poets working in primary schools in the United Kingdom; of the primary schools of Wales; and of the local education authorities in the United Kingdom. I believe that, taken together, these may amount to the largest survey of poetry in primary schools ever carried out. The main findings from the surveys are as follows:

• Schools and local education authorities believe that poetry deserves a higher status in primary schools. However, only a minority of schools have a policy for the use of poetry and the poets believe that the status of poetry is rather low, even though they are invited to work in schools. Teachers often leave the poets to ‘get on with it’.
• Most believe that the 1988 Act had only marginal effects on the status of poetry in primary schools. Of these, half believe it was positive because of greate...