Done (in)

Gina's feedback means a big redraft but also that the help doesn't stop today, deadline day. I shall publish, and with expert help, but for now, today, I'm done. I still have to grapple with the concept of methodology and finding an academic tone that is not a straitjacket but from today, I step out of the course and into the real world of academic publication. It helps that The Journal of Media Practice emailed this week to say that my first piece will be published in the October issue.

And now, the end is near..

My 4000 article is done, the film is ready to be cut, my research has found original findings and I'm really rather excited.  This summer, I shall take it to the next stage of testing whether or not the teaching of dance in secondary schools can make kids want to write, as well as give them some rhythm with their words. If six out of eight Year 9 students said that they hate writing, something's got to change. 


So while my article percolates a little before its final tweak on Friday morning, it's time to look through my tick boxes:

...your thoughts and feelings on each aspect of the module including:

• The 2 day workshop  - wonderful opportunity for sharing ideas and networking across the university.
• The negotiated plan for writing. Good idea to put dates on an email and send to a critical friend. Not that they checked up on me but hey.
• Your experiences of planning and writing your piece. Loved having the opportunity to get my teeth into something but got stuck in my head too much at first. Had to be harsh and remind myself that this is what I've been doing for 20 years.... Thinking like a journalist again helped enormously.
• The role of peer support and feedback in your writing process  This is what I put on the WAP blog:

Hi all

I thought a lot about what we learnt on Thursday and Friday and realised that the notion of the 'critical friend' is probably the answer to life, the universe and everything. The difference between getting your husband to glance over a piece of work and having someone who you know has signed up for telling you what you really need to know is really quite profound.

In fact, it was also the subject of our Saturday night author dinner party. We host these evenings on occasional weekends to encourage writers and would-be writers to share an evening with a well-known author to discuss the business and ideas of writing, and this weekend we had journalists Lucy Cavendish and Miranda Glover down to talk about their self publishing imprint, Queen Bee Press. They've just published an anthology of women's writing, but what was far more interesting than the future of publishing in the hands of the authors themselves was their critical friend approach. Calling themselves The Contemporary Women Writers' Club, they set out to encourage each other with their short stories, meeting regularly around a kitchen table in one of their homes and rigorously, but supportively getting those words out and on time.

What was fascinating about it was that nobody around the table had ever heard of such a thing before. Even the documentary producer from Sussex University didn't recognise this as the critical friend approach until I told them all about our course. There were business women and writers of all shapes and sizes around the table but the thing that we had most in common was the solitary nature of our work. We may pop in and out of where we do our thing but most of the time we're on our own. The idea of finding like-minds around a kitchen table, or as on Saturday night, around the dinner table, was really quite moving, and they all took it away as something to use in their own lives.

So thank you critical friends, not just Jane and Ming, but to all of you. I'm now facing this uphill battle of academic writing with new boots on. And they feel really rather warm and squishy..

• The role of individual guidance and feedback from the tutors     Gina's advice was solid and real which made it all feel very accessible. I liked the exercises on the stuff that stops, the mind games we play and as a regular writer, I hadn't experienced that for a long time. So it was funny when it all came up again, this time about not being rigorous or heavy weight enough. Enough; it's a funny old word. It also means 'give it a rest'. 

• What are you finding enjoyable about writing for academic publication?    The getting over the mind games and getting stuck in. Having the opportunity to think about a project that I can make real change with
• What are you finding less enjoyable?   The mind games. The things I can't do yet - like online library searches, reading dense text books, doing a literature review which I've never done before - worrying that it might not be good. Enough
• What are you finding easy? Writing, seeing it in my head. The journalistic bit. 
• What are you finding less easy? Writing in the academic 3rd person. Pretending to people I'm researching that I have a clue about what I'm doing (it was better when I told them I didn't)
• How does it feel to ask for and receive feedback? Worrying, so I haven't really. I did and then Gina didn't respond so I got paranoid. Then I did some work, submitted again and got nice feedback. Did she read the first ramblings? I hope the God of Email secreted it somewhere in Cyberspace
• How have you made space and time for your writing? How easy/difficult have you found it to make time and space? Yes - too much time. This project which I did for my PG Cert and WAP took way too much time and stopped me earning. So we have to sell the house? There are worse things in life... And yes, that's true (except we;re clinging on to the house) but I saw it as an investment in my academic career.  

Effective Communication (DfE 1995)

I do love Twitter.

Of all the thousands of words I've written on this subject now and the millions in the books and articles I've ploughed through to find out how to encourage young people to breathe out in their writing, Twitter forces me to think what it's all about. And at the end of this project (for now), with original findings and a hugely exciting urge to go and prove it in schools, I can Tweet 'Think I might just have saved the English language'.

Storybases

Just come back from a fascinating lecture by Paul Rankin of LCS, or Living Cultural Storybases, an NGO which helps indigenous tribes all over the world to record and share their stories. Rankin is an inventor and looks at the most appropriate means of collecting these increasingly endangered traditions as young people move away from the villages and their storytelling elders.

But, entranced as I was by the work he was telling us about at the University of Brighton, he made me think about the young people I'm researching and their diverse language and the culture it expresses. He was talking about indigenous tribes but when he reminded us why their culture is being eroded, I wondered if our missionary zeal to push punctuation is missing the point in the same way as those other zealots who took the written word to oral traditions. If diversity sparks the kind of creativity we all know it's so important to keep, maybe we should be looking at what this texting culture is creating.  What stories are young people telling and what's in this new melting pot of cultures that we didn't grow up sharing the playgrounds with and mixing in with what he had around our own dinner table? What are they, just like we did, keeping us elders out of?

Steiner Stories

Finding Jeff Olson, Steiner mentor and former class teacher at Brighton Steiner was easier than I thought. I hadn't been looking for him specifically, but when I saw that Paul Levy's Critical Incident event as part of the Brighton Festival included a session on storytelling, I was thrilled to find that Jeff was the man. And that it was all about Steiner.

I went to see him last week and, over a bowl of nachos and salsa and gin and tonic (at 5pm? Don't you love these alternatives?), he told me how rhythm is entrenched in Steiner teaching.

Steiner teachers take their class from Class 1 (age 6) all the way through to Year 8, and some even further. Jeff explained how in Class 1, he would tell the same Grimm's fairy tale over and over again - telling, not reading - until the children knew it by heart. Sometimes one story would take a week to tell, but the kids would be rapt, and each time it was told, it was identical, word for word. Jeff told me that sometimes he would change a conjunction (how hard must it be to remember if you'd originally used 'so' instead of 'then'?) and immediately there would be a sharp intake of breath from the children. If a wrong word or one that's out of place causes them to flinch, would they then understand the rhythm of a sentence better than a child who hadn't experienced such riches?

After a year of telling, the children would be asked to copy the story they'd been told, punctuation and all. As they inhaled the words and watched them come to life at the end of their pencils, did the placing of the comma mean more to them than it might to a child who hadn't had this experience? The problem is how can I know? No-one, as far as I know, has measured this in Steiner kids. Jeff told me that about 1/3 of the class by Year 8 were writing with perfect grammar, 1/3 so so and 1/3 were having difficulties. I bet any teacher could say that. I wonder if Jeff is still in contact with his class.

The question is; do those who do grasp it quickly now use it effortlessly (Jeff's class would now be 20), or are they just as likely to drop a capital and use a comma instead of a full stop as the school kids who I filmed in March? Does grammar reach deeper into the subconscious through Steiner -style storytelling or are traditional lessons just as good?

Or..... is language evolving so quickly that a new form is emerging which is bypassing punctuation. (I need to find Lynn Truss, hold hands and SCREAM.....)

Thinking

Ok, it's May and at some point these thoughts have to turn into an essay, a conference paper and a PGCert presentation. As a journalist, I would have written this months ago. As a film maker, it would be in the can by now. As an academic, I'm paid to ponder.  Worries: will it be rigorous enough? How am I to grapple with the possibility that my hypothesis may not even make it past the first post? Is the rest of the research throwing up any ideas that are worth spending this amount of time on? ie - will any of this make a difference? It may not matter in Uniland, but it does to me.

So, questionnaires out, request for interview with Steiner storyteller and another email sent to Paul Whittaker of Music for the Deaf whose signing work with the Ballet Rambert will send me through another worm hole, I reckon and I'm just left with questions and the words. Writing for Publication notes tell me what I tell my students: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? or, in this case, the preferred: Why? What? How? What if? So What?  Ah - that's the question that floors my students, and is my main niggle.

So, Why?
Because most of my students don’t punctuate well and because punctuation is in crisis among the younger generation.

Good writing is rare among young people

Why dance? Because of Michael Jackson – his dance seems to communicate meaning – not sentences but something more visceral. How does that visceral quality add to language to bring texture to text?

With texting and Facebook changing modern language, kids are becoming fluent in another written language but what would it take to excite them about their mother tongue? Dance? Storytelling? Breath, pause, engagement, excitement - Txt spk can't communicate this but punctuation can.

What?
What is this? It's a 4000 word article, a conference paper and a 15 minute presentation looking at the role that dance might play in exploring a more engaging way to teach punctuation in schools. 
What will it be? A teaching tool in school, a film, a paper delivered to teaching conferences.

How?
I tested an early theory - that dancers might be able to interpret creative writing through movement on year 9s and my own foundation students. It didn't work; the creative write/dance experiment showed that dance students understand rhythm in language more than the writers - possibly because of the dynamics they learn in year 7. Something there.

Story telling:  most of my students were not read to as small children. Perhaps Steiner will be able to shine a light on this; storytelling from very early on in school before they start to read engages them through natural punctuation - pause, breath etc. By the time they write, do they automatically add the correct punctuation? Or is there a bridge that needs to be built here to keep the excitement and rhythm? Teaching at this point is crucial. Wonder how they do it. Steiner mentor, Jeff Olson just rang. He's in Brighton! Interview on Tuesday.

What if?
What if I find the answer? Now that's more my style. Getting it out there is my thing. Sitting in ivory towers pontificating is so not.   What does it look like being? Something about engaging through rhythm (Phil Beadle doing this in poetry), engaging through thrills (King Fu punctuation - Ros Wilson), understanding how dance teaches (ie turning it around and teaching creative writing through some of the techniques of dance like dynamics - no-one doing that so far).

But what if it comes to nought? If it's nothing new, or if it just doesn't make a difference?  Hmm. I reckon that my drive will pull something out of the bag. And punctuation is in crisis - if someone has come up with the answer, why are schools not using it?  Jeff Olson says that even Steiner teachers need to be reminded of the need to keep it up in modern teaching - and the visceral, engaging element of language. Thrills are the key. Which leads us neatly back to MJ.

So what?
Make it work in schools. Take it out and about. Make the difference

Big Writing

I spent the day yesterday in a cinema in Covent Garden with a load of primary school teachers and Ros Wilson, the author of the Big Writing philosophy that is sweeping through education. Born from her experiences with some of the most deprived children in the country, Big Writing is about learning to talk about things before you can write them down. She says that for the 20% of us who went to university, grew up in homes where people talk around the dinner table and explore what we think by listening to our elders discuss any number of subjects, we'll have about 30,000 words at our disposal. For those at the other end of the scale, it's more like 12,000 by the time they leave school.

Trying then to get students with limited vocabulary to write what they think, let alone to put in a semi-colon to show that they're only half way through the thought is going to be a bit of a battle. Better to get them to talk about their ideas, using peer groups to raise the game, praising them all the way, and if we can use the WOW word lists that Ros uses with her primary school kids, all the better. Big Words = Big Thought = Big Writing.

But Ros doesn't ignore the punctuation debate. Far from it; she believes that if you tell people who are naturally designed to please their elders that a full stop is a level 1 while using a combination of - . ?, ... ! ' " ": ; and a () is a level 5, who really is going to opt for the lower level?  

But wanting it is not enough. Ros believes that 'patterning', the embedding of ideas by reinforcing what they've learnt over and over and over and over again is essential. Particularly at primary level. Make it visual, she says and crouches into the now famous Kung Fu pose that we saw on 'The Unteachables'. She shouts a question and then: Pow! Pow! Pow! and signs a question mark. She shouts an exclamation. Pow! Pow! Pow! she chops with her hands and then signs an exclamation mark. This is 'patterning'. Making them laugh. Understanding that the kids who jiggle their legs or tap their teeth with their pencils are kinaesthetic learners and this Kung Fu Punctuation is getting directly to the part of their brains that no-one's ever bothered with before.

Ros likes my idea of The Write Rhythm. It's been touched upon in nursery education already with little children using their whole bodies to make shapes of the letters they're learning for the first time. But this is new, and as I head home, my head is buzzing with ideas.

Eating, Shooting and Leaving with Lynne Truss

You can't really do a project on punctuation without a chat with Lynne Truss now, can you? And she lives in Brighton, so I thought I'd invite her for a cup of tea at the local museum.  Ok, so we talked more about dogs and mutual friends than semi-colons, but as she quickly told me, she 's not really an expert in this field at all, just a phenomenally successful  writer on the subject who was at the right place at the right time!

So we talked about writing and rhythm and about hearing the words we write as they pop onto the screen and knowing when something doesn't sound right. We were read to as children of course, and we've heard good writing since we were tiny.

We traded opinions about how young people have become fluent in another language; text speak has become evidence of how fast the young brain learns, and although it may make the young sloppy about their punctuation, it doesn't mean that they're thick. Far from it.

But the extended use of textspeak beyond the mobile phone itself means that the first written language has become the one without the punctuation. So, while people of Lynne's and my generation think punctuation as naturally as we breathe when we read out loud, so the speedy thumbs pour out their messages without time to pause for breath let alone a comma. When it's then applied to Facebook, notes passed under desks and birthday cards, when exactly is it the right time to use 'proper' English? Even those who, like the school kids I filmed a few weeks ago, are perfectly on top of their punctuation, won't find a place for a semi-colon on a Facebook status update.

But does that mean that no-one will write like Lynne does in 20 years time? Will language become something that flows from their finger tips, something to savour with words that melt in your mouth?  Time to talk to Ros 'Big Wilson' Writing whose goal is to make sure that they do.

The Super-Teachers: 1. Phil Beadle

And then I found myself in a cyberworld of Super-Teachers and Big Ideas (and lots of Capital Letters) which I pulled into emails to try to make them land so I could look at them more closely. And they did; Phil Beadle, Ros Wilson and Lynne Truss and I are all best friends now. Phil, the only one who I haven't actually met yet, even sent me an unedited Word document of his soon-to-be-book, The Little Book of Ideas which opens with a quote by Steve Albini, “Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.”

Falling instantly in love with the man who would then write, 'If we consider the Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona, for instance, and wonder what might be the most appropriate way to investigate it? In any sane world, surely, performing a dance about it must be one of the most sensible ways of going about such an investigation', I checked him out on Youtube. And I found the glorious http://www.teachers.tv/ with programmes made by my very own chum from GLR days, Peter Curran. Who, rather handily now lives just up the road.

As my paths crossed ever more jauntily, I felt that I had finally found where I'm heading with this project. Dance was the launchpad and may be the final frontier in a new way of teaching, but for now, it was rhythm that was the key. I'd even subconsciously answered my own question in the original title, The Write Rhythm.

Phil's inspired teaching of The Blessing on Teachers TV uses movement and rhythm to get right under the very meaning of the poem and to 'embed', as those super-teachers say, the understanding for the students. I've got more to do with Phil, but I've got to go to the Ballet Rambert next. Its use of signing to help the hard of hearing understand what's going on in the dance is, I reckon, going to be another link in the chain that will lead me to the answer...

Storytelling

After the nice secondary school in East Sussex, I realised that I'd missed the point. While there were certainly new areas to explore because of what I'd learnt there, this whole journey began with my own students at Hastings. Rather than choose to take my already rationed camera crew to anywhere new, I'd take them home.

So, as my current students piled in for my Monday lecture, they found my former students, now grown up 2nd years and clearly confident with the tools of the trade that my lot had only just discovered. As the cameras rolled, I asked them to punctuate a piece from Stephanie Meyer's The Host that I had handed out without any punctuation, and which I was now reading with extra pauses for end of paragraphs and clear rhythm. Most made mistakes such as using commas instead of full stops - the most common error I find in their essays.

It occurred to me that this was a new phenomenon for many of them. I asked them how many had been read to as a child. Of the 25 or so in the class, five put their hands up.
I made a mental note to explore the Steiner principle of oral storytelling until the age of seven and to examine whether children who have enjoyed hearing the natural rhythm of language used to its best effect before they even open their first school book can punctuate. And to read to them in class.

And then I showed them Michael Jackson doing what inspired me in the first place. They indulged me and they talked about it for the camera, but the link between the rhythm of dance and the rhythm of language still isn't there. That's ok; I'll come back to Jackson. I've got some other people to see first...

Day 2 - The School Kids and the Dancer

Today was our second day of filming, this time with the Year 9 students at a large secondary school near Brighton. As the crew set up - three cameras, two roving and one fixed - I wondered what would happen in the next hour as I asked the school's dancer in residence to 'dance' the punctuation of the students' creative writing

The 13-14 year old kids piled in, silent, apprehensive, unsmiling. I'm used to silence in the classroom and to kids, but quickly realised that a pack of silent, apprehensive kids is a hard group to work with. How to break the ice next time?

The idea of them being there, away from the normal English class, was unsettling enough, so showing them a film of Professor Liz Aggiss' Motion Control was always going to put them on the back foot. Silence, apprehension and now Liz Aggiss. Conditions to explore confidence with written form? That's something to think about for next time.

I asked them to write their thoughts, stories, interpretations, whatever came into their heads after the first four minutes in which Liz, dressed in witchy green and heavy eye make-up challenges the camera in her bedroom as it invades her boudoir and records her ablutions.  The students, confused and, I think, a little scared by the mad grown ups they had agreed to play with today, wrote their staccato prose rather than any outpouring of creativity. Captured by the crew, it was then taken away by me to read to the camera and the class, and then interpreted by the dancer in residence.

The layers of meaning she naturally put into the students' sentences obscured any clear message about the feel of a comma or full stop. It may have been memorable enough for them to learn new rules that would stay with them, but I think the more important lesson was that this is not the teaching tool in itself. Denotation, connotation and the role of the individual to imbue meaning - that's what we need to unwrap here. Is dance too subjective to ever convey something as precise as punctuation? Are we using something that is about improvisation to explain form? How can that ever work?

At this point, we were fishing in the deep, none of us knowing any more than anyone else, although everyone in the room expected me to have some kind of expertise. I remembered the advice of my PGCert tutor; research is not about proving the hypothesis. The deeper the dive, the better at this stage. Just remember to examine the fish.

Did they punctuate perfectly? Did they hell. Creative writing for them was about a 'blurt', as their deputy head told me later, although this wasn't the stream of consciousness that older, more confident people would pour onto the page at all.  If they had been told to let it all flow, they wouldn't punctuate naturally, I was told by the deputy head.

There, that's a fish to look at; for me, the natural flow of ideas in creative writing is already imbued with form. The sentences may not even follow each other, but each will be perfectly punctuated.  For me, and perhaps for my generation (another fish?), writing comes with commas, full stops and even semi colons, however random the writing.

What I want to see after we've found the tool to teach punctuation, is spontaneous writing that comes with the meaning and rhythm. I want to see what it takes to make punctuation as effortless as breathing. Breathe and the comma naturally falls onto the page. Finish the sentence and with it, the full stop drops like a stone. What is the feeling that makes the writer use a comma where a full stop should be?

Part of the problem this morning was the quality of the students. These were kids who already knew their way around a sentence. When they applied what our dancer had brought to the written word, how could I tell whether or not their perfectly formed sentences were influenced by what she had done or if they were just using their skills this time instead of lazily ignoring the rules they already knew?

Did we bring in the catch? No, not enough to provide a satisfying meal this time. But there were minnows, and sprats and perhaps enough bait to choose more specific waters next time. One of the cameramen works at a school for excluded children of all ages. Perhaps that's the choppier waters where I need to go fishing next time.

It's starting...

So I tried out the workshop with Fiona’s dance students, including the post grad we’ll be working with at the secondary school. We started with some automatic writing to mentally limber up, and then watched the Liz Aggiss film. I forget how conservative most young people are and I’m now wondering whether it was a bit too weird for them! It did produce some astonishingly good writing though… They then paired up and read each other’s work and then interpreted it in movement before regrouping to discuss the process. These are some observations

1.Although many of them didn’t punctuate their writing at all, their dance was filled with phrasing which is the mark of a good dancer. Fiona says that they learn these ‘dynamics’ quite early on and would naturally punctuate any improvised dance. It occurred to me that your Year 9 dance students may understand how phrasing can add meaning, and it may be an opportunity for them to teach non-dancers in a ‘critical friend’ way.

2. If we don’t do the critical friend approach, it would take too long for Kate to work with each piece of work. I think a smaller group would work better than a whole class anyway.

3. The automatic writing that the dancers did yesterday was, on the whole, amazing. I do this at the beginning of all my lectures and business writing seminars and it’s always the same. People are astonished when they look at the page and see a part of themselves that they didn’t know existed! It seems a missed opportunity to not make more of this and I’d like to think of a way of capturing this.

(This is exciting...)

A conference, a conference...

With punctuation in crisis among school leavers, is it time to explore a more kinaesthetic approach to teaching grammar and punctuation in schools? Can dance interpret incorrect punctuation and show how a misplaced comma or an errant semi-colon can stop the flow of creative writing? And can dance illustrate how correct punctuation can improve the flow of a sentence, giving it back its natural rhythm and setting the writer free?

A post graduate dancer in residence at Priory School in Lewes, its Year 9 English and dance students and a professional writer and lecturer in Broadcast Media at the University of Brighton join forces to explore the rhythm of the sentence through movement to see how dance can improve creative writing.

Captured by a crew from the University’s Broadcast Media course, the resulting DVD and paper will be presented at conferences, with a special cut and manual available for teaching purposes.

The Write Rhythm

Take an idea, give it a few words to make it look good, spin it around until all the world is watching and then throw it out to see who catches it. That's how The Write Rhythm first took shape. A conversation over a coffee about the use of a semi colon, a scratch of the head while marking student essays and a ponder about the future of grammar. Would David Cameron do any more for the poor old comma than the Labour Party have done, squeezing thoughts into structures and out the other side to an A* and bypassing the use of punctuation? What language do these kids want to speak? If....(leap into void) they can rap like Chipmunk... (freefall), what would happen if the language that they do understand could teach them the basics? If Michael Jackson said more about the use of a colon than any teacher ever could, perhaps dance could teach kids the rhythm of language.

Fast forward... PG Cert special study...what could I research that would benefit my students, push debates on, get me a place on posh conferences and a career in academia? What would stop me scratching my head while marking? What could set my students free?  Is anyone else researching this?  Have I chanced upon a new hypothesis?