Creativity in the classroom
This article, about UK children’s and YA writers arguing that the way writing and language is taught in primary schools actually has a negative impact on their creative writing skills, has been circulating around Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve been ‘liking’ and retweeting and commenting and doing all kinds of things, so I might as well blog and gather all these thoughts together.
I’ve touched on the idea that creative writing breaks a lot of the rules that English teachers love before, and it’s something I talk about a fair bit. I’m lucky enough to be able to work with trainee teachers next year about ways of using creative writing and children’s books in the classroom. I’ve done workshops in and out of schools for many years now, and you do start to see the mismatch between good writing For Assessment Purposes and writing that is deemed ‘good’ by other people (reviewers, critics, readers). The ‘rules’ that teachers often have – e.g. don’t use this word (and that anecdote in the article about ‘banned words’ in the classroom because they’re not sufficiently unusual is very familiar to me), put in tons of descriptive words (rather than carefully selecting which words will have the most impact), etc – often probably don’t match up with their own reading experiences.
None of this is to say that teachers are at fault. We absolutely cannot complain about teachers ‘teaching to’ a particular system when that is essentially the job they have been hired to do, and how their own work is often assessed (which is bonkers). This is especially the case for secondary school, where the majority of students will be assessed for college entry (if staying in Ireland) on just their Leaving Cert results, not anything else. In that situation, I really don’t think ‘a good teacher’ is someone who goes ‘well, screw the exam’ and spends all of their classroom time nurturing each student’s creativity – it’s a lovely idea but is ignoring the reality of how the world will value that experience. And there’s limited classroom time, and teachers are already under an enormous amount of pressure – anyone who thinks teaching kids or teens is an easy gig is an idiot. It’s one of those jobs we feel qualified to comment on because we’ve been on the other side of the desk in a classroom situation, but we need to remember we only saw a sliver of what those teachers actually did.
I think we need to think carefully about what role creative writing serves in the classroom. We don’t teach editing – we teach ‘tidying up’, or ‘rewrite without spelling mistakes/in neater handwriting’ – we don’t get kids to pull out something from six months ago and ask them to rewrite it. Most teachers will have not done this. Most adults haven’t. For the later years of school, we teach how to produce a decent draft under exam pressure – when anyone writing creatively for publication purposes would redraft and rework over and over again. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think we’re teaching creative writing because we want kids to be writers. We’re teaching it because it ticks two boxes at once – it’s creative (yay, we want to encourage this!) and it’s writing. So short stories et al are called upon to teach kids about structuring sentences, and about expanding their vocabulary, and punctuation, and other technical writing things, because it seems (and undoubtedly is) more fun than covering these topics in a dry and tedious fill-in-the-blanks-in-your-workbooks way.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Part of what educators do is to try to make the things on the curriculum that need to be covered as engaging and relevant as possible. But perhaps we need to be clear about what’s actually being taught. Because I don’t think it’s creative writing, really. And maybe that’s okay – once we don’t try to pretend that it is.
