ESTUDIOS DE LA FUERZA DE ADHESIÓN CON LA TEMPERATURA

Bizarro and McLanahan suggest that creative writing is ‘a way of not only expressing, but discovering the self’ (Ritter and Vanderslice, 2007: p.80). The suggested personal nature of creative writing is intensified when it comes to poetry. Dymoke finds that ‘a belief in the personal, emotional and experiential nature of poetry’ is common among teachers, and can limit their capacity to engage with pupils in a meaningful dialogue about the ‘the cognitive and affective processes used by the developing writer’ (Dymoke, 2001: p.34). Such a view was evident in the case study, exemplified by participants’ comments on their sense of personal intrusion when attempting to assess their pupils’ poetic writing:

Poetry is…a special case…and needs to be treated differently to other forms. For example, in a recent lesson, I suggested to a child that she change one simple word in a poem so that it made more sense to the reader. The pupil was obviously disappointed until I pointed out that this was just my opinion and that she could leave it if she really wanted to. To which she adamantly replied that the word must stay. If this had been a story or piece of non-fiction there would have been no such debate.(T11, Essay)

It does make me think how do the children feel when I go up to them and say ‘well that could be more powerful’ or ‘that could be better’ or ‘I like this but I’m not sure about that’. They might be really sure about it and actually I might be hurting their feelings more than I think. (T3, Focus Group 2)

The issue for participants here is not that the content may be personally revealing or intimate, but that writing poetry is itself perceived as a personal act. The prominence of the self, then, disables meaningful dialogue in an assessment context, since discussion of the writing seems to be inevitably associated with the personal dimension.

It can be argued that all forms of writing, all artistic expression, indeed all utterance may in some way and perhaps to varying degrees, be seen as expressions of the self. However, the particular emphasis on the personal in poetry may be connected to understandings of why people write poetry:

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...it was just something I did to let out my feelings…it didn’t matter whether it was any good and it didn’t matter that anybody was going to read it...it’s about what’s on the inside coming out. (T4, Interview 4)

The focus on writing poetry entirely and solely as a means of expressing inner emotion is one which some participants identify in the classroom:

The writing that this boy produced, seemed, to me, to be the outpouring of the ‘creative voice’ that I had been searching for. (T6, Essay, my italics)

The ‘outpouring’ of emotion described here seems to be identified as positive because the form is poetry: it is perhaps less likely that the description ‘outpouring’ would be used in such a positive way about a narrative piece. The focus on the ‘inner self’ raises a further question: beyond traditional ‘romantic’ conceptions of ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’ (Wordworth, cited in Gill, 2003: p.109), why do participants identify poetry as so intensely personal, so deeply connected to the inner self?

Furman, in exploring the particular relevance of writing poetry (as opposed to other forms of writing) to psychotherapeutic practice asserts that ‘poetry is the giving of voice to human experience’ and that the act of writing poetry requires the writer ‘to identify his or her emotions, and come to understand how these feelings relate to the natural and human worlds around them’ (Furman, 2003: p.197). The link between poetry and the personal is at the heart of Wadeson’s suggestion that poetry writing is more effective than prose in psychotherapy since its ‘reliance on metaphor, imagery, sound, rhythm and economy of presentation’ makes it ‘a mode of exploration, expression, concretization and integration of…feelings’ (Wadeson, 1981: p.225). The personal aspect of poetry, then, seems to be connected to the individual’s attempt to make sense of the world and their place in it.

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Poetry’s particular relevance to this task lies in its dependence on imagery, sound, rhythm and economy of language to make abstract concepts, feelings and ideas concrete.

However, not all participants in the case study pursued the notion of poetry as lyrical self- expression. Indeed, some actively rejected this concept:

The process of writing and refining my poetry…has led my writing away from the personal and into using techniques such as found poetry which I had had only theoretical experience of before…Taking myself out of my poetry has, oddly, led me to feel more personally attached to my poems than I have before. (T1, Essay) I purposefully stayed away from anything too personal in my writing and, if I did stray into this area while making notes, I would choose to leave it out when reading aloud. (T11, Essay)

For these participants, conceptions of writing poetry move away from self-expression, avoiding profiling the ‘self’ in the writing. This is reflected too in their aspirations for

creative writing in the classroom, as when this participant describes an exercise based on the Fibonacci sequence developed with her poet mentor12_:

Interestingly, this was an activity full of ‘restraints’: the Fibonacci sequence cannot be altered to suit your poem! Hughes writes of the ‘few restraints’ which are desirable in producing creative writing and also of the ‘self-knowledge’ that such writing might bring or express. The Fibonacci activity was far from this picture, taking pupils away from themselves, often into strange places! They felt fulfilled because they had produced the unexpected. The writing was exceptionally creative but in a ‘confessional’ sense did not come from within themselves. (T1, Essay)

12 _{In mathematics, the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each}

subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. Thus, when using the sequence to construct poetry, each of the first two lines contains one syllable; the third line has two syllables; the fourth line has three syllables, and so on. The challenge in construction quickly advances; by the eighth line, the sequence requires a line of 21 syllables.

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Here, fulfilment comes not from inner exploration but from creating ‘unexpected’ poetry that confounds perceptions of what poetry is and what it can be. Internal, introspective conceptions are displaced here by a sharp focus on poetry as a cognitive activity, and a social constructivist view of the ‘self’ that is present in the perception of poetry as a product of the socially and culturally constructed world. Theoretically, issues about poetry being ‘too personal’ for teachers to make assessments should subside when this lyrical focus is displaced. Yet T1, who has welcomed an approach that rejects the lyrical and self-expressive, remains concerned about the assessment of pupils’ poetry: ‘with poetry I always feel like it’s so personal even when it isn’t about a personal thing’ (T2, Focus Group 2).

Difficulties in responding to pupils’ writing, then, may not only be connected to the sense that poetry is an expression of the self, but to teachers’ concerns about their own levels of knowledge and understanding. Participants in this case study reflected that their own understanding and knowledge of poetry tended to rely heavily on narrow conceptions in the NLS, and that it was the form that they were least likely to use in the classroom (see 6.2 above). Hence, teachers may be reluctant to make what could be perceived of as value judgements in an area where they feel that their own knowledge is insecure.

It is interesting to note that engagement in writing poetry influenced some participants’ conceptions of its value in the curriculum, reflecting that their experience of practice had encouraged them to approach poetry differently. As noted above, T3 had reflected that prior to the course she ‘didn’t spend a lot of time teaching poetry’ because she perceived that it would not ‘improve the children’s writing levels (and subsequently our league table position)’. This participant also revealed that she had initially had reservations about the

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potential of the course to impact on her classroom practice, before going on to consider how her approach had changed:

As the course was based on poetry I wasn’t sure it would impact on my everyday teaching of writing as much as it has done. I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve been able to get from the appreciation of poetry in its own right but also how much it can impact on my enjoyment of writing and teaching other genres too. I now see how much can be learnt through writing poetry and also by using poetry as a stimulus for other types of writing. I think that I had categorised ‘poetry’ into a couple of two week units of work. I would have taught a structured form of poetry – perhaps haiku or rhyming couplets as this presented an easier way to teach poetry to children. By practising my own poetry, I now rely on formal structures less and feel I would be in a better position to help the children to discover their writer’s ‘voice’. (T3, Essay)

This participant connects a deepened understanding of the potential of poetry in the classroom to her own experience of creative writing, and recognises that her ability to experiment and explore outside of formal structures is also connected to this practical experience. The next section of this chapter considers how such engagement in practice enables participants to construct knowledge about creative writing.