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