After a long pause at the end of Day 1 Pauline
volunteered to provide the daily log for Day 2.
She began Day 2 with her recording of the Day 1’s activity mingled with
reflections. The daily log helps us to remember
the previous day and to situate our Day 2 efforts. Pauline’s recounting was comprehensive and
insightful. Once we have had a chance to
listen to her account of the day, we take about five minutes to write our own
journal of how we experienced it.
From our own scribblings of Day 1 we
moved into the second demo of the summer institute. James, a post-primary teacher chose the topic
of form which we explored through various pieces of texts whose form he had
manipulated or deconstructed. We began
with one piece of text where we are asked to engage in a guessing game around
its genre. Was it a memoir? Was it micro fiction? An anecdote?
It was projected on the wall, just a string of words, its form only
defined by where the page ended. We
considered the piece assisted (and equally challenged) by questions posed by
James. Low-key, quiet, questions which
leave your head spinning. James revealed
the text to be a poem by Rita Ann Higgins It
wasn’t the father’s fault and when presented as the writer intended it
seemed that everything had changed. Nothing seemed to have impacted so much on
the tone and meaning of the text as the insertion of sentence breaks; their
inclusion bringing something ominous to the text - a rattling sense of the
sinister. Where some of us had
considered the unbroken text trivial in tone, maybe even mildly amusing, with
the insertion of sentence breaks and the dividing of the text into stanzas the
effect was immediate and malicious. The impact/influence
of form is stark, masterfully revealed in a most understated manner. James continued to help us to explore form
moving from free text to poetry, from prose to poetry, allowing us to pilfer lines
and to rework them, to swipe phrases or single words. He moved from the west of Ireland writing to
works from the United States with a poem by William Carlos Williams To a Poor Old Woman and an extract from
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Of the former, the rhythm of the piece caught our attention; the repetition of
the line ‘They taste good to her’ and the way the poet breaks it, creating a
sound where you want to move to the cadence (I managed to stay seated –
just). With the latter, we shared our
concocted efforts succumbing to the temptation to tamper with evocative
sentences such as ‘Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock
naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and
sweet talcum’.
We could have been in the Deep South.
Transported from there, after the break, we
considered writing/writers’ groups and how these work, or don’t. We were reminded of John McKenna’s advice to
SWIFT 2014 to, in essence, run, very far away, from writers’ groups about a
year or two in; that there would be no point beyond that. But colleagues in the room had had different
experiences and some of those had involved groups that had been meeting
successful over years. It was remarked
that it’s usually women in these groups (in the interest of time/space, no
comment). We agreed that we would
brainstorm around how groups might operate and that we would then review the
guidelines agreed by SWIFT 2015 to see how we might wish to repurpose them for
our intentions. I will post the
consensus here tomorrow.
Following lunch, we returned to our
childhood as Annette presented Demo 3.
Annette is a primary school teacher and most recently taught 3rd
class (9 year olds mainly). She told us
about how she used writing notebooks in her class and what they mean to the
children. The notebooks are used for
first drafts, for free-writing and for capturing ideas. Sometimes, Annette asks her students to just
write spontaneously on topics that bubble up during the day, for example, an
interesting visitor. In terms of what we
can learn from across the education levels, I am always struck by how we might
capture the enthusiasm with which primary school students write; in Annette’s
class they all want to write. They just
do! Annette explained how she uses word
chunks with her classes and gave us a handout of these. From this page, she identified three chunks that
we were to work with and from which we could develop a short piece of
text. To finish her demo, she shared
finished booklets from her 3rd class writers with us. These were beautiful handwritten publications,
illustrated by the children and containing such wild, generous texts as:
I love ice-cream, it’s better than mice.
I don’t know about you
but I’ll save it for tonight.
Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and
banana.
I’ll save it for my friend Santana.
William Carlos Williams eat your heart out J
The day finished with a session from our
Maynooth University colleagues Aine Neeson (University Writing Centre and
Department of Applied Social Studies) and Carmel Lillis (Education Department
and Professional Development Service for Teachers). Aine and Carmel talked about professional
conversations (a phrase I have learned from Carmel and which I employ regularly
now) and deliberately presented to the group what they describe as a ‘dialogic
space’ between them. They consider
reflective writing, reflective practice, its purpose; they talk about what
reflective practice looks like and the use of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’. Their starting point was an improvised
conversation between them on reflective practice and its meaning and place in
their own lives and work. Among other things, Aine spoke of knowledge
generation and meaning that can be gained from critical reflection, and Carmel
spoke about possible value to the school community. After a few minutes, they
opened the conversation to a group discussion which went off in many directions
- from mindfulness and self care in professional reflection, to an imagined
world where reflection would be a normal element of professional teaching
practice. There was some reflective writing, of course, and a further
discussion around the ethics of revealing our reflections publically, and in
doing so, how we represent both ourselves and others. Food for thought then.
Deirdre closed the day with Day 3 on the
horizon … bring it on.
