The Lonely Writers Club - Nikolai Elkins

04 Dec 2023

Nikolai Elkins

Teacher: Slumped in the weathered rowboat, he looked out with weary eyes to the sea… no… to the tranquil… no…uhmm… that’s not right either, this is supposed to have tension – a sense of foreboding -

Noor: Murky depths –

Teacher: I love it – he looked out with weary eyes to the murky depths that –

Sam: I think we should stop there. Full stop – a short sentence to follow like… uhmm… Like, fingers of thick fog unfurl.

Teacher: perfect. Slumped in the weathered rowboat, he looked out with weary eyes to murky depths. Fingers of thick fog unfurl. Growing. Searching. Found you.

Writing was forever my favourite thing to teach in schools. Whether that was fiction, non-fiction, poetry or reports, writing always offered the opportunity for my students to meaningfully connect with the world, and produce something that allowed their voices to be a part of it. This was all back when schools seemed to be obsessed with Pie Corbett and his Talk for Writing,  a shared writing approach guiding students from demonstration, joint composition, guided writing and finally independent writing. I’d met Corbett on several training days, and always scowled with scepticism when anyone came in with a ‘scheme’ to sell.

Scheme: to make plans, especially in a devious way or with intent to do something illegal or wrong.

Scheme: a large-scale systematic plan or arrangement for attaining a particular object or putting a particular idea into effect.

I spent a while trying to figure out which one it was.

But why discuss writing for children on the Creative Education Blog when our audience is adults? The answer is simple: writing is about communication and communication, regardless of stage in education, should be social. Embedded within communication is meaning and this meaning can only be understood through inviting others to socialise within the discourse.  Yes – we are talking about the hidden curriculum. This, and making the implicit explicit through raising our students’ consciousness of academic literacies. Pie Corbett just gives us a template to do it.

Corbett’s Talk for Writing sets about defining 4 stages of independent writing construction:

• Baseline Assessment: The “Cold task” gets the students to write something without any prompts to see how well they do. You can then figure out your differentiation from there.
• Initiation: Engage students with a model text, and get them to map it out with pictures and actions. The aim here is to get students to internalise the structure and lexicon of the genre. At later stages of learning in the curriculum, this will involve ‘boxing up’ the text to identify the inherent structures. We’d have these written out on flipcharts hanging by the ceiling, looking like a crime-scene investigation. For a good example of this see Corbett’s blog here.
• Innovation: With the frame that we’ve now constructed, we can begin to create our own versions together, generating and organising new ideas in a guided writing environment. This is lively, exciting, and fun. Yes, writing can be fun.
• Independent Application: This was often referred to as the 'Hot' Task, where the students then apply what they’ve learned to their own story, report, poem and so on.

What I always loved about this structure was just how social the process was. It got students eager to share their ideas, desperate to have their phrase or word in our co-constructed guided text. At the end of this cycle, our room was a rich source of vocabulary, grammar, and directions on how to write the genre we were all collectively aiming toward.  Get to Higher Education and writing is quite lonely. Yes, we may have teams to support the academic literacies of our students but when it comes to that textual artifact – the writing of it – it’s pretty lonely. While Corbett’s Talk for Writing can be limiting, there is one principle I’ve always loved, and that’s the fact it acknowledges the intertextuality and interdiscursivity of writing, which Corbett describes as acting like a magpie. Or as the teachers would call it, magpieing: the act of appropriating words, syntax and concepts from other texts and re-citing these through our own lens. In creative education, we do this incredibly well within the technical components of our programmes, but not as well in our theoretical components.

In technical demonstrations, we show examples to students of a finished piece. Perhaps deploy discovery or experiential approaches to get students to deconstruct their understanding of the artifact. We then carry out demonstrations of how its components are made, giving room for mistakes, identifying and solving misconceptions. We then get the students to plot themselves into the creative process, iteratively experimenting with their own creativity through the limits of the brief, all while receiving feedback on it within the crit. Finally, the final product is made and assessed with the journal. A very typical signature pedagogy of Creative Arts HE. In many ways, this follows the initiation, innovation, and independent application processes of Corbett’s Talk for Writing. However, when it comes to the writing process, we talk collectively about theories and notable works in seminars, and then expect students to go away by themselves and produce textual artifacts - perhaps giving the odd tutorial here and there. For many HE classrooms, we are still sending the message that writing is a lonely place.

I often think back to the days when I would talk through my thinking as I clunkily fumbled upon sentences that didn’t quite sound right. Students shouting phrases and rambling through a thesaurus, eager to find a better word than the one I wasn’t keen on. It demystified the artifact of the polished text, and highlighted the beauty in the ugly, messy, cringing aspects of text construction. In HE, our focus on the textual artifact seems still to be weighted on a banking of knowledge acquisition, even in well-meaning dialogic classrooms which still do not support students in moving along the mode continuum from talk to text.

Now we’re moving toward a new era of generative AI, the textual artifact in HE is becoming increasingly questioned. Discussions among colleagues regarding tools like ChatGPT have always come back to a central word: humanness. The machine can’t empathise, it isn’t human. So how do we bring humanness to our students’ writing? We talk our way to the text together. We need to consider moving toward open-book writing assessments which assess students on iterative development of all text-based assessments -  be that essays, blogs, articles or dissertations. Bring the social back into writing. Create scaffolds allowing students to move along the continuum of talking about concepts to writing about concepts. We need confidence to expose our own writing mistakes with authenticity, showing humanness in errors, spelling mistakes and clunky sentences. Humanness is the ability to refine, critique, analyse and improve. These are the aspects we need to be assessing in our students’ writing, not the final composition produced in the Lonely Writers Club.  

Finally, in the spirit of Corbett, I have produced a box up of blogging for you. I look forward to talking to you about your ideas:

 

Title:	A compelling and descriptive headline that captures the essence of the article and encourages readers to engage.
Introduction:	A brief section that introduces the topic, sets the tone, and often includes a hook to keep the reader interested. -        Grab attention with an anecdote -        Repeat a motif -        Share a secret -        Get personal -        Explain why it matters
Main Content:
Set some broad context	-        Discuss the main idea -        Provide evidence, examples or explanations to explain what you are saying.
Narrow in	-        Focus in on one very specific circumstance, this could be a case study. -        Get a bit emotive, passionate even.
Return back to the “why it matters”	-        Restate the why it matters thesis, connect the points together that you’ve made and restate this.
Conclusion	-        Encourages the reader to take action, such as commenting, sharing the article, subscribing to a newsletter, or checking out a product or service.
Other Features	-        Visual elements that complement the text, make the article more engaging, and sometimes explain concepts that are hard to convey in words alone. -        Hyperlinks to other blog posts, references, or external sources for additional information or credibility. -        May use creative education terminology but relatively jargon free -        Clear and straightforward, avoid overly complex sentences. -        Break things down into simpler concepts. -        Be engaging and lively. -        Use anecdotes, metaphors or analogies