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

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.

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.