But to be quite honest I would tend to emphasise more how important it is to get kids writing, where they realise that writing links to experience and gives them a control over that experience.
KMcD Do you put an emphasis on the student teachers becoming writers? JC I encourage them to write. I don t talk about them becoming writers in the sense of producing finished pieces, but I do emphasise that writing is something which helps you to understand things, as distinct from an act of communication. I encourage the trainee teachers to give time to writing for exploratory purposes, to take five minutes at the beginning of a class, where the class writes and where the teacher writes.
I m always giving out about imaginative writing. The metaphor I use is of a flower which has to have its roots in the muck. And likewise I m convinced that imagination has to have its roots in the lived reality, the lived experience. There isn t a writer born whose work, no matter how far removed from personal experience, hasn t got its roots in that experience. You have to start with that and kids have no problem in developing on from there through an imaginative stage. But if you start with the so-called imaginative and ignore the lived experience, you get the most appalling drivel. So I push very hard the idea that writing comes out of lived experience and that writing, even in unfinished form, gives you control and helps you understand better.
When I taught in Canada, I encouraged my students to keep a writing journal and I gave marks to the students for filling two pages every week. In the beginning some kids would write their name over and over, but they soon tired of that and began to write about their lives. And they discovered that writing had meaning for them. I certainly encourage this kind of writing but not, necessarily, writing for a wider audience. One of the activities we do is looking at different genre and looking at the classical structure of a short story, or a narrative of any kind: orientation, complication, crisis, resolution and coda. Working in groups of four or five, I ask all the students on the course to write the orientation of a story and then this is passed to another group who write the complication, and so on. It s something they all enjoy doing. They re quite alert to the different genre but they re not as familiar or they haven t consciously looked at the shape of a story. When they do, they re very responsive.
I think the problem is that we sometimes go straight to the genre, straight to the narrative structure, straight to types of nonfiction and make the kids practice in those forms. I don t think this works without convincing them first that writing makes sense, and letting them discover for themselves, the thrill of putting words on experience. If they get that conviction, then everything else is so much easier. I think the student teachers are receptive to this view. I tell them 12