Creativity and Writing

Developing Voice and Verve in the Classroom

Teresa Grainger,Kathy Goouch,Andrew Lambirth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134332816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This clear yet authoritative book affirms the vital role of creativity in writing and considers and encourages flexible, innovative practices in teaching. Importantly, the book reflects upon teachers' imaginative and artistic involvement in the writing process as role models, collaborators, artists, and as writers themselves.

Arguing that children's creative use of language is key to the development of language and literacy skills, this book focuses on the composition process and how children can express their own ideas. In addition, the authors consider the many forms of creative language that influence the inner and outer voice of children, including reading, investigating, talking and engaging in a range of inspiring activities.

Illustrated throughout with many examples of children's writing and drawing, this book also provides suggestions for classroom activities and is a source of inspiration and practical guidance for any teacher looking to deepen their understanding of literacy theory and practice.

Chapter 1
The potential of creativity

Teaching is an art form, an imaginatively engaging and creative endeavour, which relies upon the creative capacity, autonomy and intuitive knowledge base of the profession. Yet in recent years pressure on the curriculum has arguably resulted in a narrowing of learning experiences, so that emotional engagement, full participation, experiential and inquiry based learning, as well as spontaneity and creativity have been pushed to the margins of learning (Sedgwick, 2001; Craft, 2000; Puttnam, 1998) As the Design Council (1999:83) state, ‘the more prescriptive the curriculum, the greater the need to be explicit about creativity and not leave it to chance’. If teachers are to find innovative ways forward in teaching writing, they need to recognise that the currently directive discourse and imposed assessment structure demands an imaginative and enterprising response. Teachers need to be encouraged to take part in professional dialogue, to seize opportunities to assert their knowledge and understanding and to develop new insights in order to plan more holistically and creatively. Professional aspirations to increase creativity and raise test results are not irreconcilable, but we need to be convinced of this in order to find effective and inspiring ways forward.

To increase their flexibility, teachers need more than knowledge of curriculum requirements; they need pedagogical knowledge and subject knowledge, encompassing an understanding of both principles and concepts in teaching English. More significantly perhaps, they need to recognise the potential of creativity and be able to develop it in young learners, as OfSTED observe in Expecting the Unexpected, a recent report on creativity in schools.

Teachers who inspire creativity have a clear understanding of what it means to be creative…even though they are not always able to put this into words.

(OfSTED, 2003:8)

Greater creative assurance will place teachers in a stronger position to offer scaffolds and spaces for growth in writing. In this chapter we focus on the nature of creativity and its importance in developing young writers, especially their ability to write with voice and verve. In arguing for a better balance between developing children’s knowledge about written language and their creative language use, we highlight the importance of the imaginative involvement and motivation of young writers. We explore the creative act of writing, and the importance of purpose, relevance, control and innovation, and outline creative and playful approaches, arguing for recognition of the extended process of composition. These issues are all developed further in later chapters, as is the emergence of voice through children’s cognitive and affective involvement in artistic learning encounters.

Redressing an imbalance in the teaching of writing

In recent years the dual pressures of prescription and accountability have tended to lead teachers towards a more standardised approach to teaching writing, at least in England, where the main pedagogies of shared, guided and independent writing have become institutionalised in the context of the literacy hour. The NLS Framework (DfEE, 1998a) has profiled the teaching of different genres of writing, both fiction and non-fiction and introduced the profession to writing frames developed from the work of Wray and Lewis (1997). The features of each genre have been explicated in publishers’ materials, assessed in national tests and assiduously taught to young writers, creating a somewhat formulaic approach to teaching writing (Frater, 2000), since ‘under the guise of developing writer’s linguistic awareness’, as Myhill (2001:19) observes, ‘it is all too easy to reduce writing to a set of formulae taught through a series of exercises’. A better balance needs to be struck between teaching the important skills of form, grammar and spelling for example, and providing opportunities for children to undertake purposeful writing which satisfies their need to communicate and harnesses their individuality and creativity. As Boden has argued, knowledge is a necessary precondition for creativity, but, she warns, it can be taught in such a way that it ends up ‘killing the creativity’ (Boden, 2001:102). Helping children find a voice involves supporting them in developing their ideas, opinions and possibilities and being concerned with what they are saying, not merely with how they are communicating. As the original National Curriculum for England and Wales, back in 1989, stated:

The best writing is vigorous, committed, honest and interesting. We have not included these qualities in our statements of attainment because they cannot be mapped onto levels. Even so all good classroom practice will be geared to encouraging and fostering these vital qualities.

(DES, 1989:17.31)

There are at least three paradigms of teaching writing which are evident to differing degrees in current practice, including the genre paradigm, the skills paradigm and the process writing paradigm, developed by Britton et al. (1975) and Graves (1983). The first sees literacy as social practice and highlights the importance of teaching certain forms as a way of empowering children, the second focuses on a range of discrete language skills which populist perspectives view as common sense, and the third ‘positions the writer as an individual author and theorises writing as a recursive, cognitive process’ (Robinson and Ellis, 2000:73). The genre movement and the skills based approach are clearly enshrined in the NLS, but, as Robinson and Ellis observe, the process writing approach is short-changed and an emphasis on form and feature dominates. We believe that teachers need to work towards a more appropriate balance between teaching knowledge about the linguistic features of different forms and exploring and supporting the content and meaning of children’s writing. It is more than possible to teach such knowledge in a manner that encourages flexibility, judgement and imagination and simultaneously fosters the development of voice and verve, since it is not only what we teach that counts, but how we teach it that shapes the abilities and attitudes of our young learners. In adopting a sociocultural perspective, we focus on context and text and highlight meaningful communication, thus linking writing closely with speech, with reading and practical open-ended activities of all kinds. There is no formula for developing voice in writing, but when we exploit the potential of creativity and enhance children’s knowledge about language in engaging collaborative contexts, providing opportunities for them to communicate purposefully about topics that have salience for them, their voices emerge with an energy, vitality and authenticity which reflect their creative engagement. As creative professionals we too are part of this inspiring and involving journey.

Creativity

The place and purpose of creativity in the broader curriculum needs to be understood against the background of competing conceptions of schooling and literacy. Bell (2001) describes functional literacy as the mastering of basic skills and contrasts this with cultural or critical literacy. He suggests this goes beyond the basic competences and includes visual, aural and tactile skills which ‘liberate and enable individuals to transform their modes of thinking, acting and expressing themselves in ways that would otherwise be impoverished and limit their lives’ (Bell, 2001:87). Others have also argued that there is more to intelligence than academic ability and suggest that in order to develop lifelong learners, who can cope with the uncertainty and speed of technological and economic change, we need to turn our attention to the potential of creativity (Robinson, 2001; Gardener, 1999). Yet there is a danger, as OfSTED (2003) acknowledge, that the development of creativity is not seen as an essential element in education, but is viewed merely as a modish concept or yet another thing to add to schools’ lists of priorities.

The concept of creativity is widely recognised as challenging and complex and is a term so variously employed that it is often used and abused by the media, politicians and policy makers (Prentice, 2000). As the government’s committee on creative and cultural education made clear, misconceptions about creativity abound; these include: the misguided perception that creativity is the province of the few, the view that it is associated with particular people, and the perception that it is synonymous with the arts (NACCCE, 1999). In addition, a further misunderstanding aligns creativity with childlike play that is intuitive and undisciplined, a quality of childhood that must not be intruded upon. Yet research evidence suggests that creativity is possible ‘whenever human intelligence is engaged’ (Robinson, 2001:7) and that it is a human capacity which can be both developed and enriched in each individual. Furthermore, creative play is unusually serious, thoughtful and demanding, arising out of our interactions with others, with ideas and with experience. Bronowski (1978) sees the creative mind as one which looks for unexpected likenesses and connections between disparate domains and highlights creativity as a way of thinking. If children erroneously perceive writing as the domain of a lucky few, a gift possessed by others, and experience real difficulty or failure, they are likely to be less confident which will influence their attitude to writing. This was the case in the We’re Writers’ project, in which many of the KS2 children perceived themselves to be weak writers and some of them showed the early stages of a potentially long-term negative disposition towards writing (Grainger et al., 2003).

Developing creativity in writing is not a fanciful extra in learning to write, but is central to children’s growth as writers and to their self-esteem. To develop their creativity in and through writing, children need skills and knowledge of the form they wish to compose in, a growing assurance of themselves as writers, and the space and opportunity to develop their voices with support and encouragement. Craft (2000) posits the process of ‘possibility thinking’ at the core of creativity and highlights the role of problem finding and problem solving as well as having novel and valuable ideas. Certainly composition involves a willingness to take risks, to try alternatives and impose some form of order on our thoughts, as well as accepting a degree of uncertainty as our words and meanings emerge. It involves the process of raising questions about our intended meaning, about the audience, form and purpose of our writing as well as the production of possible ways to respond. The creative process of writing involves us in making choices about our stance, content, structure and language, and creating combinations and connections between ideas and images. Creativity as a social and cultural process also involves the production of outcomes. In seeking to find a balance between the process and the product and between the individual and the wider value system, the authors of All Our Futures adopted a definition of creativity as ‘imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value’ (NACCCE, 1999:29). We have chosen this definition to lean upon in examining creativity in writing as it suggests creativity is a multifaceted capacity of human intelligence, which is relevant to everyone and encompasses both individual and collaborative activities. It highlights five key concepts which we need to understand: using imagination, the creative process, originality, the pursuit of purpose and judging value.

Using imagination in the creative process of writing

Imaginative activity takes many forms, drawing on a more varied range of human functioning than linear, logical and rational patterns of behaviour (Claxton, 1997). It is essentially generative and may include physical, musical, aural or visual thinking, involving children in activities which produce new and unusual connections between ideas, domains, processes and materials. Physical engagement and learning through our minds and bodies, eyes and ears provides a balance to the sedentary and often abstract nature of much modern education and enables children and their teachers to step outside predictably bound and previously rehearsed supports for writing. In less conventional contexts, new insights and connections can be generated, perhaps through analogy and metaphor, and alternative understandings and positions adopted which feed into writing. Children also need help to understand the nature of communication conventions so that they can deliberately play with these and produce novel and original outcomes in their own terms.

There is a close relationship between imaginative activity and a playful attitude of mind; conjuring up possibilities and selecting from amongst these is a theme running through the book. Playful approaches support active and experiential learning and build upon children’s curious and exploratory nature. Yet play is not necessarily creative. The kinds of play relevant to literacy are those concerned with the imagination, play with language, and sounds, multimodal explorations, visual and bodily play: the development of creativity in handling words, ideas and feelings. Play constitutes a significant part of the compositional process. In the transition from playful improvisation to composition children begin to play with ideas, structures, patterns and combinations of words and sounds. In examining the serious play of writing, Gurevitch (2000) distinguishes between disciplinary seriousness, taking on the responsibilities of an adult expert, and poetic seriousness, revealed from the point of view of the child whose play has been exposed. He describes writing as originating from moments of broken play and following Derrida (1991), argues that ‘poetry (vs. science) is not only emotion and selfhood; it is ritual, magic, voice, dance, tongue, the rhythm of heartbeat’ (Gurevitch, 2000:6). Poetic speech, he suggests, is neither talk—ethnography, narrative, theory—nor dance—magic, trance, play—but is between them. In his terms both talk and dance combine to help writers find their voices as they engage imaginatively in the serious play of writing. This creative process involves the writer in seeking solutions or a different perspective and involves them in actively fashioning, shaping, moulding and refining the ideas generated.

Purpose, outcomes, originality and value in writing

Creative activity is goal oriented and the creative act of writing self-evidently involves making; making connections, making meaning, composing and communicating. The outcomes produced may fall anywhere on the ‘private-public’ spectrum (Craft, 2000) and may be expressed internally, verbally within the peer group or publicly in written form. A child who has developed an idea or insight about a character in drama, but has not yet shared this with others, will have produced an outcome on the private end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum, the public end, the same child may have had an original poem published in the school anthology. Creativity usually encompasses some kind of ‘performance’ which demonstrates the degree of understanding and mastery achieved through the creative process (Perkins, 1998) and writing is no different in this regard. The nature of the final piece will not, however, always be known at the outset, and the mental and practical activities through which the writing evolves need to remain open to the unexpected and be perceived as part of the creative process. Writing is shaped through the generative and reflective processes of production, as writers create and critique their compositions, both consciously and unconsciously, as they write. This involves the two modes of creative thinking: the ‘imaginative-generative’ mode which produces outcomes and the ‘critical-evaluative’ mode which involves consideration of originality and value (NACCCE, 1999:30). These operate in close interrelationship and need to be consciously developed to ensure children can both generate and evaluate their writing. This ability to give and receive criticism is an essential part of creativity in writing and needs careful modelling and nurturing in the classroom; it is explored further in Chapter 3 on the role of talk in writing.

Whilst writing relies upon the ideas, language and literary styles of others, to be creative it must also be original for the individual, in the context of the peer group or within its particular field. Young writers can strike up new and unexpected connections and images, which sing off the page with authenticity and originality, and although as Craft (2000) acknowledges, the spectrum of originality is vast, children should be encouraged to improve on their own previous work and come up with new and original ideas, moving beyond their existing understanding or use of language. The aesthetic dimension of value forms a criterion for evaluating the quality of writing and demands the fluent use of a critical language to reflect upon it. It also requires confidence and the persistence to see a piece through to completion, and a sense of fair mindedness and a respect for others’ opinions, views and ideas (Nichersen, 1999). In relation to writing at the poetic end of the continuum (Britton, 1993), this issue of value was viewed as challenging by the teachers in the We’re Writers project, since it involved their subjective responses and drew upon their aesthetic sensibilities. In contrast, they reflected more confidence with the labelled features of writing examined in the national tests in England, but such assessment tests do not encompass the criterion of originality or even attend seriously to the issue of imaginative content. However, as teachers we must reward experimentation, allow failure, and be prepared to be involved and surprised as we work creatively with young authors.

Teachers’ own creativity

Since creativity is not an event, but a process, it follows that teachers can adopt a creative disposition and choose a creative path in any given situation, since it is less a matter of their ability to do so and ‘more a mind set or attitude’, as Craft calls ‘little c creativity’ (Craft, 2000:9). Teachers, in working to foster children’s creativity in writing will want to build creative teaching contexts, use imaginative approaches, expand their children’s knowledge about language and celebrate their creative development. As the government’s strategy for primary schools, Excellence and Enjoyment (DfES, 2003) acknowledges, making learning vivid and real and developing understanding through enquiry and creativity are critical pr...