The Write Rhythm
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The Write Rhythm
Gilly Smith, University of Brighton, UK
In this action research, I explore how kinaesthetic learning might inspire confidence in creative
writing among young people, resulting not only in more exciting, expressive and original ideas on
the page, but coherence, clarity and persuasion in the written language of young teenagers.
This presentation looks at the journey so far and looks at what automatic writing and the
dynamics of dance can do to loosen ideas and allow children to see their own originality,
creativity and expression in a highly prescriptive curriculum.
Background
Students at UCH where I teach Broadcast Media as part of The University of Brighton’s
widening participation programme, do not always come to tertiary education with a good
understanding of grammar. Yet my responsibility is to help them turn their film, TV or radio
ideas into powerful pitches, and to develop narratives in a clear and engaging way.
It’s a difficult task; without the grasp of confident language, their ideas look unformed,
uninspiring and often incomprehensible. Punctuation is a crucial player; without the correct use
of a comma, their sentences are often badly structured, too long and lacking in the rhythm that
can give ideas their power.
I began to explore where it all went wrong and found something in the Bullock Report on
Education of 1975 which grabbed my attention; it urged teachers to ‘bring what is known’ alive.
The idea that in every person’s imagination lies a reservoir of ‘knowing’ just waiting to be
scooped up and poured onto the page resonates with me as a writer, and it is what I tell my
students as I set them a task of automatic writing at the beginning of every lecture. I quote
Nietzche to remind them, ‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a
dancing star,’ and to persuade them that as they allow a stream of consciousness to find form of
their page, they will begin The Visual and Performing Arts: An International Anthology: Volume II
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to see the extraordinary nature of their own creativity. It seems to work, even if they don’t use
any punctuation at all.
They are part of a new generation using mobile phones and social networks to develop a new
written language. It’s fast and effective, designed to organise a social life in as few words – letters
even – as possible. From texting to Tweeting, life has become too short for a comma. But there
are an increasing number of studies, including Plester et al who see this as no bad thing. They are
interested in the bilingual fluency of the instant messenger and the creativity of the language - the
use of emoticons for example to nuance even the shortest sentence. David Crystal (3) calls this
use of language ‘ludic’, ‘rich from a playful use of words.’ It is this playfulness that I wanted to
explore to see how we might use it to set ideas free.
These studies are set against a landscape of educational research (Jonathan Barnes and Ken
Robinson, for example) which suggests that creativity in cross curricular approaches to learning
is essential if we are to encourage our young people to find freedom of expression in the written
word. Ray Land (2008) warned that the 21st century academic must find new ways of
encouraging young people into a liminal space where creativity is found, continuing a debate
about this intriguing threshold between the neurological and the metaphysical which has crossed
popular cultures and academic disciplines for decades. Liminality, the conscious or unconscious
state of being on the "threshold" between two existential planes, is a concept that writers such as
Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner have used to explore the power of rituals and rites of
passage. The psychedelic work of William Burroughs and the beat poets have been endlessly
analysed within this framework, and Coleridge was said to have written his poem ‘Kubla Khan’
‘automatically’ in the liminal space of a dream, albeit inspired by opium.
How to access this rich imagination – without resorting to opium - is the holy grail for most
teachers. 2010 alone was packed with educationalists promoting the exploration of spontaneous
creative ideas, this time inspired by discussion. Ros. Wilson’s ‘Power Talk for Power Writing’,
John Smith’s ‘Speaking Up; Towards a more oracy-based classroom’ and Neil Mercer and Lyn
Dawes’s ‘Making the Most of Talk; Dialogue in the Classroom’ all examined expression through
spoken words and interaction through chat before writing. But I wanted to look more deeply at
the space in which those ideas first originated, a deeper place with less coherence but possibly
more power.
I try to tap into this liminal space each week by offering my students five minutes of ‘automatic’
or ‘free’ writing at the beginning of each lecture in which they simply put pen to paper and write
without editing, without conscious thinking. I call it the ‘bleeding of the cranial radiator’. After
three years of reflective final essays in which the students tell me how it works, I’ve concluded
that it can provide a bridge that takes us out of the mechanics of the sentence into our imagination
and abstract ideas before they find the words that land on the page. Perhaps this bridge leads to
the ‘liminal space’ of Land and Meyers, the place where anything is possible. Accessing this
space seemed to The Write Rhythm
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me to be the key not just to teaching young people how to write, but why to write. One of my
students summed up this ‘threshold concept,’ where nothing ever looks the same again.
Every week, we took part in automatic writing. For me, this was an extremely helpful exercise,
academically and emotionally. The brief pressure I was under to write continuously for five
minutes helped me write things I never would have written or spoken otherwise, and not once did
I struggle for something to write about. The continuous flow of writing I had to maintain helped
keep my mind creative, and the task allowed me to connect on a greater level to the material I
write, making it more emotive, personal and potentially more engaging. I found myself using this
exercise on several occasions out of lesson to help me engage creatively, concentrate on work
and even as an emotional outlet.
Compare this to Ken Robinson in ‘Out of our Minds’; ‘The reason why creativity often proceeds
by intuitive leaps is precisely that it draws from areas of mind and consciousness that are not
wholly regulated by rational thought. In the creative state, we can access these different areas of
our minds. This is why ideas often come to mind without our thinking about them.’
Gumbrecht calls it ‘stimmung’, which, translated from the German, means ‘ voiceness’, the
momentary grasping of dream-like thoughts which, however flighty, leave their mark on our
consciousness. Toni Morrison in her novel, Jazz, describes it as ‘being touched from inside’. So
often young people, particularly young teenagers seem to have nothing to say, but once they have
found these nuggets of gold tucked away in the liminal space of the sub-conscious, they are
touched from inside. They see their own originality, creativity, voice and know that it is theirs.
Random, free, spontaneous, it is a contradiction of everything they have been told to write at
school. No-one marks it; no-one owns it but the writer. With permission to prise open the door to
their own treasure chest of ideas, they can begin to paint pictures with their words and discover
the alchemical process of writing. With it come the ideas, the voice and the power of persuasion,
the communication of what they feel passionate about, what they really want to say. It is perhaps
this sense of ownership and purpose that starts the wheels chugging, the rhythm of writing that is
all about being heard. The fire in the belly is something we all recognise and have experienced,
and comes with a fluency that commands attention from the listener. What would it take to
capture this universal skill and put it on the page?
TV Superteacher, and The Guardian’s education columnist, Phil Beadle already uses dance and
movement to interpret poetry in schools and via Teachers.tv and You Tube, and a germ of this
collaboration between the teaching of Dance and English is almost detectable as he writes about
the need to use different disciplines to explore cross curricular learning. He quotes Webb
Young’s ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’; ‘(He) suggests that to The Visual and Performing
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create a new idea of value, you merely take two disciplines that do not appear to belong together
and force them through a blender.’ Beadle, in quoting this in his book-in-progess, ‘The Little
Book of Ideas,’ seems to be exploring a very similar idea to mine, that juxtaposition is the point
at which we leap into the void, the land of possibilities. ‘The mind’ he writes, ‘is, at its best, a
pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order onto chaos; making
links between disparate entities or ideas in order better to understand either or both. Webb Young
and Ken Robinson both argue that it is the ability to spot the potential in the product of
connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the Creative.’
Jonothan Neelands (2008) finds this can happen through the use of drama in the classroom; ‘Most
of what young people know of the world, they know through representations of it. Drama
provides students with a way of reconstructing the experience that is represented’. Drama is
something that this study will explore in its second stage next year, but for now, I wanted to see
what we could learn from dance. I was struck by the psychologist Vygotsky (1962) who saw the
complex interaction of language and the development of knowledge as ‘a tool for thinking…a
continual movement back and forth, from thought to word and from word to thought. In that
process, the relation of thought to word undergoes change...thought is not merely expressed in
words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought needs to connect something with
something else, to establish a relation between them’.
Fiona Smith is the principle lecturer in Dance at the University of Brighton and writes about the
teaching of Dance in schools; ‘it provides both intrinsic and extrinsic benefits to pupils. The
intrinsic, learning in dance, is concerned with the implicit value of learning to dance and about
dance…The extrinsic, learning through dance, is concerned with the transferable knowledge,
skills and understanding learnt whilst studying dance. In this sense, dance is the vehicle through
which learning takes place.’
Smith explained that as early as Year 7 (age 11-12), students of Dance would be taught how
‘dynamics’ can bring form and meaning to a work. She told me how dynamics are broken down
into three elements in year 7; speed (acceleration and deceleration), weight (light and heavy) and
tension (push and pull). Smith teaches quality of movement and how to refine it into something
that might be more expressive, the sudden acceleration of the dancer followed by a slow walk, the
floaty leap segueing into a leaden thud, a robotic move relaxing into a gentle sway.
I wondered if this could offer possibilities for cross curricular collaboration between Dance and
English in secondary education, if the process of adding richness through phrasing in the dance
class was something that could be taken into the English class. Even the onomatopoeic quality of
dance descriptions might encourage expression in young writers; the ‘slice’, the ‘shudder’ or the
‘swing’ of an arm would be called ‘Wow Words’ in KS2 English. In schools where Dance is
taught as part of the KS3 curriculum, I wondered if concepts like pause, speed, strength and
tension could be The Write Rhythm
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replicated in creative writing. If the task of exploring ideas such as ‘masculinity’ or ‘frustration’
were set in KS3 Dance and English classes, would the memory of how it felt in Dance fall onto
the page in the English class? And would it flow and halt, speed up and slow down as it shifted
gear, the imagination naturally using the toolkit of grammar to find form and painting vivid
pictures for the reader?
But could a generation which, according to Wood et al and Reid and Reid (2004, 2007), prefers
texting their friends to talking to them, share such vulnerability with someone they barely know?
Fiona Smith warned that most young people are risk averse and do not like the exposing nature of
improvisation. Young people, she explained, need clear boundaries in which to express
themselves. Similarly, children do not like to write if their fledgling thoughts are read out in front
of the class, or even by the teacher as part of homework. The teaching of dance could give us a
clue as to how to help young people play with their words safely. Smith gives her students small,
achievable choreographic tasks; 16 counts in which to explore speed, weight and tension, perhaps
in a jump, various arm movements and a roll on the floor. She gives them ‘starter material’ and a
framework in which to create the dance, ‘the sides to the river’ as she calls it. ‘Without sides,’ she
tells her students, ‘a river becomes a flood.
If creativity is to be the most important tool of the 21st century student (Land, 2009), teachers
need to find a way to access the liminal space of their students. Its paradoxical elements mean
that, like dance, liminality itself is about tension and release, about letting go and being lost only
to find a new part of yourself. For children exploring a new world of secondary school, greater
freedoms and wider knowledge, the key to their own liminal spaces could be in words; with
words come the pictures, and with pictures comes the context, and with the context come the
personal boundaries, the threshold concept described by Land and Meyers (2003). According to
Land, it necessarily involves the risk of failure, the exposure of weakness and instability, and
from that baptism of fire emerges a young person stepping into a 'new conceptual terrain'.
References
Bearne, E., 1998. Use of English across the Primary Curriculum. London: Routledge
Crystal, D., 1984. Who Cares About the English Language? London: Penguin
Land, R and Meyers, J., 2003. Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways
of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines. ETL Project: Universities of Edinburgh, Coventry
and Durham
Neelands, J (2008) Drama, The Subject That Dare Not Speak its Name. ITE English: Readings for
Discussion.
Robinson, K. (2001) Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative. Oxford: Capstone