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...